What the ‘Tech Exodus’ Could Mean for Silicon Valley
Creative clustering has been the Bay Area’s secret sauce for innovation. What happens when technology workers go remote, permanently?
Like many tech giants, Apple invested heavily in building a Silicon Valley headquarters to keep its employees close at hand. But there may be benefits to spreading then out.
Photographer: Michael Short/Bloomberg
Long before the pandemic, pundits predicted that remote work would reshape Silicon Valley. Newspaper stories about California tech workers setting up home offices in more affordable West Coast locales date back to the 1990s. In the most recent explosion of Bay Area housing prices, some startups made a splash for their remote-only policies, and at least one offered a “de-location package” to incentivize moves anywhere with lower housing costs.
Yet remote work has by no means been the industry’s default. Apple and Alphabet have long been deeply office-oriented; Yahoo, Best Buy and Reddit ended up reversing course on their flexible work arrangements in the past decade. Indeed, until the coronavirus rewrote the terms of telecommuting, Silicon Valley stood as the 21st century’s prime illustration of the virtues of industrial clustering — the idea that creativity, innovation and economic output will thrive in places where people with similar knowledge sets are close together. Golden Age Hollywood and Detroit during its mid-century Motor City boom are two earlier examples of the creativity that comes from expertise coupled with spatial proximity. With its deep bench of engineers, designers, scientists and investors, the Bay Area produced nearly 20% of all patents in the United States in 2015 (up from 4% in 1970); its GDP of $838 billion in 2017 ranked it behind just 17 other global nations. The tech industry’s current extreme clustering has been credited with boosting productivity, too. Little wonder that the major players have designed ornate, amenity-laden campuses to keep workers on site for as many hours as possible.