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    The Furniture Hustlers of Silicon Valley

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    As tech companies cut costs and move to remote work, their left-behind office furniture has become part of a booming trade.Brandi Susewitz touched the curved stitching on a pair of bright red Arne Jacobsen Egg Chairs and announced they were worth around $5,000 each. The chairs were in pristine condition, perched in the reception area of the software company Sitecore’s office in downtown San Francisco.Trisha Murcia, Sitecore’s workplace manager, said she was likely the only person who ever sat on them. “It’s really sad,” she said. “They opened this office in 2018 and then Covid happened.”Ms. Murcia led Ms. Susewitz around Sitecore’s office, pointing out bar stools that had never been used, 90-inch flat screens, shiny conference room tables and accent chairs from the retailer Blu Dot. The whiteboard walls, outfitted with markers and erasers, were spotless. And rows upon rows of 30-by-60 inch, height-adjustable Knoll desks with Herman Miller Aeron chairs sat collecting dust.Ms. Susewitz measured and snapped photos, identifying designer brands and models. Her office furniture resale business, Reseat, would take all of it, she declared. “We can find a home for this,” she said. “We have time.”Brandi Susewitz looked at two red Arne Jacobsen Egg Chairs during a visit to the Sitecore office in San Francisco last month.Jason Henry for The New York TimesSitecore was reducing its office space because the pandemic meant more employees worked remotely.Jason Henry for The New York TimesMs. Susewitz, who started Reseat in 2020, is one of an increasing number of behind-the-scenes specialists in the Bay Area who are carving out a piece of the great office furniture reshuffling. There are professional liquidators, Craigslist flippers and start-ups spouting buzzwords like “circular economy.” And a few guys with warehouses full of really nice chairs.All of them are capitalizing on a wave of tech companies that are drastically shrinking their physical footprints in the wake of the pandemic-induced shift to remote work and the recent economic slowdown.Nowhere is the furniture glut stronger than in San Francisco. Tech workers have been slowest to return to the office in the city, where commercial vacancy rates jumped to 28 percent last year, up from 4 percent in 2019, according to the real estate firm CBRE. Occupancy in San Francisco in late January was 4 percent below the average of the top 10 U.S. cities, according to the building security firm Kastle. And companies of all sizes, including PayPal, Block and Yelp, are giving up their expensive downtown headquarters or downsizing their office space.Add to that the tech industry’s recent U-turn from optimistic hypergrowth to fear and penny pinching. That has led tech giants such as Google and Salesforce, along with smaller companies like DoorDash and Wish, to carry out widespread layoffs, cutting more than 88,000 workers in the Bay Area over the last year, according to Layoffs.fyi.Some start-ups have abruptly gone under, including the flying car company Kittyhawk, the autonomous vehicle start-up Argo AI and the interior design start-up Modsy. Others have slashed spending, starting with their dusty, rarely-used offices full of designer furniture.Ms. Susewitz checked out an Aeron chair during her visit to Sitecore. She toured the office with Trisha Murcia, Sitecore’s workplace managerJason Henry for The New York TimesMs. Susewitz measured office furniture at Sitecore’s office in downtown San Francisco.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLast month, Twitter held a public auction for some of its furniture, hawking dry erase boards, conference tables and a three-foot blue statue of its bird logo. The social media company, which is owned by Elon Musk, at one point stopped paying the rent on some of its office leases.Layoffs in Big TechAfter a pandemic hiring spree, several tech companies are now pulling back.A Growing List: Alphabet, Microsoft and Zoom are among the latest tech giants to cut jobs amid concerns about an economic slowdown.Salesforce: The company said it would lay off 10 percent of its staff, a decision that seemed to go against the professed commitment of its co-founder and chief executive, Marc Benioff, to its workers.New Parents Hit Hard: At tech companies that spent recent years expanding paid parental leave, parents have felt the whiplash of mass layoffs in an especially visceral way.Tech’s Generational Divide: The recent cuts have been eye-opening to young workers. But to older employees who experienced the dot-com bust, it has hardly been a shock.Martin Pichinson, a founder of Sherwood Partners, an advisory firm that helps restructure failing start-ups, said he was staffing up to handle increased demand. Today’s reckoning was not as severe as that of the dot-com bust in the early 2000s when dozens of tech companies collapsed, he said, but “everyone is acting as if businesses are falling apart.”That’s led to a lot of expendable furniture, much of it hewing to a specific youthful aesthetic of Instagrammable bright colors and midcentury modern shapes. That look, complemented by plant walls of succulents and kombucha on tap, was a hallmark of the tech talent wars over the past two decades, telegraphing a company’s success and sophistication.Then there’s the Aeron chairs. The $1,805 black roller-wheel desk chairs are a closely-watched barometer of tech excesses. Their sleek design makes them a work of art, according to the Museum of Modern Art. And in the tech industry, where workers are used to being pampered while chained to their desks, they are ubiquitous.When internet companies imploded in 2000, liquidators filled their warehouses with the “dot-com thrones.” Now any whiff of empty Aerons piling up conjures memories of that slump and sets off fears that another is imminent.The Bay Area’s Craigslist currently has gobs of the chairs for sale, photographed in warehouses, lined up in corners of conference rooms and wrapped in plastic outside a storage unit. Some are selling for as cheap as a few hundred bucks.The listings are a reminder: Silicon Valley is a place of booms and busts, with enterprising hustlers who see nothing but opportunity, even in the rubble.Mr. Norbu’s furniture reselling business, called Enliven, has expanded to include a van, three employees and a warehouse.Jason Henry for The New York TimesA trail of Dropbox furnitureFor furniture specialists, it all starts with supplies from tech companies like Dropbox.In 2019, the file storage company moved into its 735,000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco. Its 15-year lease was the largest in the city’s history at the time. Dropbox’s old office was rented to other companies, and last year, a cache of furniture — futuristic-chic chairs, couches and tables — from that office made its way to a liquidator.The inventory included several emerald green velvet Jean Royère-style Polar Bear chairs that cost roughly $10,000 to custom make in 2016, according to their maker, Classic Design LA.Three of those chairs sold to Tenzin Norbu, a furniture reseller in Richmond, Calif., who paid around $1,000 for each. Mr. Norbu, 25, started buying and selling high-end furniture on online marketplaces early in the pandemic, when people were eager to redecorate the homes they were stuck inside and stymied by supply chain delays on furniture.Since then, his business, called Enliven, has expanded to include a van, three employees, a 4,000-square-foot warehouse and annual revenue in the mid-six figures.The tech talent wars, with companies competing to out-perk one another with the fanciest offices, were good for designer furniture. The retreat from that battle has been just as good for resellers.Last year, Mr. Norbu scored some lounge chairs and couches from Fast, a payments start-up that collapsed in the spring. He also paid “tens of thousands” of dollars, he said, to fill a 20-foot truck of still-in-the-box furniture that WeWork, whose valuation had plummeted, had kept in storage since 2019. The trove included dining chairs, lamps, couches and a chunky red Bollo armchair by the Swedish designer Fogia.Mr. Norbu’s inventory included three green Polar Bear chairs that were custom made for Dropbox.Jason Henry for The New York TimesMr. Norbu said he planned to buy furniture from more tech start-ups as his business grows.Jason Henry for The New York TimesOn a recent tour of his warehouse, Mr. Norbu pointed out a pair of never-used felt poufs from a start-up, two glass coffee tables from Delta Air Lines, some gray lounge chairs that were “probably from Google” and plants from a venture capital firm.Mr. Norbu aims to target more tech start-ups as his business expands. The companies are always acquiring or shedding furniture, since they tend to grow quickly and shut down abruptly. Many of his buyers also work in tech, he said, which means they could find themselves eating dinner at the very conference table they once gathered around for meetings.Last year, Mr. Norbu sold one of the Polar Bear chairs that had been owned by Dropbox to a fellow furniture flipper, Nate Morgan, for $1,400. Mr. Morgan started trading furniture in the fall after he was laid off from a business development job at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. He said he quickly discovered the Bay Area contains “crazy pockets of massive amounts of furniture.”Mr. Morgan’s business, Reclamation, recently worked with a wealthy tech entrepreneur who had bought a second San Francisco home to live in while his main home was being renovated. The entrepreneur furnished the 4,000-square-foot second home with new goods from Restoration Hardware. Nine months later, when the entrepreneur moved into his main home, Mr. Morgan bought all of the second home’s furniture for 10 percent of its retail price.Mr. Morgan, 44, said the furniture business was a welcome shift from the 15 years he spent working in tech. “It feels really good to be building a local community business that’s tied to this geographic area,” he said.Outside Mr. Norbu’s 4,000-square-foot furniture warehouse.Jason Henry for The New York TimesMr. Morgan later sold the Polar Bear chair that had been at Dropbox for a profit to an interior designer in Los Angeles, who then sold it to a client in the Hollywood Hills. From the liquidator, to Mr. Norbu, to Mr. Morgan, to the interior designer, each person in the chain made a little money.Dropbox declined to comment. During the pandemic, the company shifted to remote work and made plans to sublet 80 percent of its headquarters. Takers have been slow; the company recently lowered its expected rate, pushed out its target for finding tenants by two years and recorded a $175 million charge on its real estate holdings in 2022.Dropbox’s remaining space has been converted into what the company calls a “studio” instead of an “office,” designed for meetings and “touchdown spots,” or cafes and libraries for people to sit, chat and work briefly. There are no more desks.‘It was a ghost town’Ms. Susewitz, 49, has worked in office furniture since 1997, when she became a customer service representative at Lindsay-Ferrari, a Bay Area furniture dealer now known as One Workplace.The furniture industry’s wastefulness always bugged her, she said, with companies discarding durable, commercial-grade items that were built to last decades every time they moved. Companies waited until the last minute to deal with the furniture, she said, increasing the odds it wound up in the trash.In the late 1990s dot-com boom, Ms. Susewitz created a business plan to build an online marketplace for used office furniture. She abandoned it when eBay took off, thinking the company would eventually solve the problem. “But that never happened,” she said.Over the next two decades, she worked in sales and business development, outfitting Bay Area businesses with goods from “the big five” of workplace furniture — Steelcase, MillerKnoll, Haworth, Allsteel and Teknion.Before the pandemic, Sitecore was expanding its space so rapidly that it had leased another half of a floor in its office tower.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhen the pandemic hit, Ms. Susewitz’s livelihood of new office furniture screeched to a halt. She watched with disgust as companies tossed out barely-used desks and chairs.“Perfectly good, brand-new furniture is just being carted off to landfills,” she said. So she created Reseat to help businesses liquidate furniture. The company uses an inventory management system that tracks the items’ “life cycles” so it can quickly share the specifications for the furniture, making the goods easier to sell. Given enough time, sellers can expect 20 cents on the dollar for their furniture, she said. Reseat, which has 14 employees, has worked with more than 100 companies and sold more than eight million pounds of furniture.“Our goal is to sell it standing,” Ms. Susewitz said. “Once it ends up in a warehouse, it loses value and ends up collecting dust.”In December, Reseat was hired to liquidate more than 900 work stations, 96 office chairs, 40 work benches, 24 sofas and 84 file cabinets at an office in Santa Clara, Calif. Analog Devices, the semiconductor company that had moved out, hardly used the space during the pandemic. But Pure Storage, the data storage company moving in, didn’t want those pieces. Reseat had just four weeks to sell the items.“It just ate me up inside,” Ms. Susewitz said. That she found buyers in time was “a miracle,” she added.Pure Storage said it was reusing a “substantial” amount of Analog Devices’s furniture, including desk chairs and conference room items, but it planned to install its existing desks “to better suit how Pure employees work in a more open office environment.” An Analog Devices representative declined to comment.Ms. Susewitz was excited about the furniture at Sitecore because the company had contacted Reseat months ahead of its move, setting it up to easily find a home for its goods. At Sitecore’s office, she showed off how to identify the size of an Aeron chair. Each one has a set of plastic bumps hidden on its back. Two bumps indicate the most common size, a “B.”There were 16 size Bs around a wooden conference table that Sitecore had built using wood from a houseboat that was in Sausalito, Calif. In the center, a basin filled with Legos was flanked by the universal emblems of the pandemic: a bottle of Purell and a package of Clorox wipes.Ms. Susewitz said she would take everything from Sitecore’s kitchen area, except for the plates and silverware.Jason Henry for The New York TimesBefore the pandemic, Sitecore was expanding its space so rapidly that it had leased another half of a floor in its office tower. But “once the pandemic hit, it was a ghost town,” said Brad Hamilton, the company’s head of real estate and facilities.Sitecore plans to downgrade to 30 desks from 170. “We’re paying an outrageous amount of money for a floor that nobody uses,” he said.Toward the end of the office tour, Ms. Susewitz surveyed Sitecore’s empty kitchen area, outfitted with a Ping-Pong table, a Ms. Pac-Man machine and two curved, six-foot privacy coves. Ms. Susewitz said she would take everything, except for the plates and silverware.Chair influencersOne result of the furniture trading is a lot more people logging into Zoom meetings from very nice chairs — and not only in the Bay Area.In January, Gilad Rom, a software engineer in Los Angeles, decided to upgrade his work station at home. He searched Craigslist and found a seller with 500 Aeron chairs — apparently acquired from a SiriusXM office that had shifted to remote work — in Culver City, Calif.When he posted a picture of the chairs gathered in a room, their black foam arms intertwined, the reaction was explosive. Some people wanted to score their own cheap Aeron. Many more wanted to reminisce about what the empty chairs represented — corporate excess gone awry.“I think it brought back a lot of memories,” Mr. Rom, 43, said. “Flashbacks from 2008 and 2000.”The seller, a secondhand furniture shop called Wannasofa, was so overwhelmed with calls after Mr. Rom’s tweet that the store gave him a 25 percent discount. “Apparently I’m a chair influencer now,” he said.The reaction also gave him an idea.“Maybe I should build an app that helps people find cheap luxury furniture,” he said. “Maybe there’s something there.” More

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    Wave of Job-Switching Has Employers on a Training Treadmill

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    The rise in turnover since the pandemic started has a cost in productivity: “It’s taking longer to get stuff out the door.”One after another, employees at the New Hampshire manufacturer W.H. Bagshaw said goodbye.One went to a robotics company in nearby Boston. Another became an electrician’s apprentice. In all, 22 workers have left W.H. Bagshaw in the past two years — no small matter for a company that has a work force of fewer than 50. That level of departures was also far from normal: In 2019, the company lost just one or two employees; the turnover rate in 2022 was over 30 percent.W.H. Bagshaw, which makes precision machined parts for the aerospace and medical industries, was mostly able to replace the workers who left — but at a cost. Hiring employees and bringing them up to speed could include teaching them how to operate complex, multi-axis turning machines. That took time and energy, preventing the company from running at full capacity.Production slowed. The number of on-time deliveries to customers slipped.“It’s taking longer to get stuff out the door,” said Adria Bagshaw, the company’s vice president.A hallmark of the pandemic era has been the surge in employee turnover. Since 2021, an extraordinary number of Americans have been quitting their jobs — some flexing their power in a white-hot labor market, others re-evaluating their priorities amid a destabilizing pandemic.In November 2021, more than 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs, according to government data, the most in the two decades that the government has been keeping track. That number has slowly been declining in recent months, but it is still far higher than before the pandemic. The churn has been particularly high in low-wage sectors such as leisure and hospitality, where intense competition for labor led workers to pursue better-paying opportunities.All that turnover has taken a toll on productivity — for individual companies, and perhaps for the economy as well.Economists say the wave of job-switching could be one factor in the weak productivity growth that the U.S. economy has experienced in recent years. Early on, some experts expected the pandemic to unleash productivity by forcing companies to embrace new technologies and ways of working. Instead, productivity has fallen slightly over the past two years.“All that turnover, all that hiring, all that training you have to do — that takes away from your day job,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “So it’s essentially less output at the end of the day.”At W.H. Bagshaw, the perpetual need to train employees has been a central reason for the production slowdown.“Anytime we bring in a new hire, they’re not productive on Day 1 — usually they’re shadowing someone for a few weeks or months,” Ms. Bagshaw said. “You’re investing in someone for the future. Whoever is doing the training, they’re slowed down from their normal productivity.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Retirees: About 3.5 million people are missing from the U.S. labor force. A large number of them, roughly two million, have simply retired.Delivery Workers: Food app services are warning that a proposed wage increase for New York City workers could mean higher delivery costs.A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?: Employees seeking wage increases to cover their costs of living amid rising prices could set off a cycle in which fast inflation today begets fast inflation tomorrow.Disabled Workers: With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.Productivity — in its simplest form, the value of the goods and services that a typical employee can produce in an hour of work — is notoriously difficult to measure accurately. But it is one of the most important measures of the health of an economy, particularly during a period of rapid inflation. Productivity is what allows the economic pie to grow: If workers can produce more in the same amount of time, then their employers can afford to pay them more per hour without either raising prices or cutting into profits.When productivity stagnates, however, pay becomes a zero-sum game: If workers want to make more money, then the money has to come from somewhere else.“Really the issue at the heart of everything — from inflation to growth to companies and head count — it’s about productivity, and that turnover concern is huge,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist for ADP, a payroll processing firm.Sobeyda Rodriguez, a machine operator at W.H. Bagshaw in Nashua, N.H.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesW.H. Bagshaw makes parts for the aerospace and medical industries.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesIn the past two years, 22 workers have left W.H. Bagshaw, which has a work force of fewer than 50.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesOrdinarily, economists consider turnover good for productivity. A healthy amount of job-switching allows workers to find the most suitable jobs, and employers to find the employees who will be the best fit. Over time, the most productive firms — which can afford to pay the most — will tend to attract the most productive workers, lifting the economy as a whole. In the years before the pandemic, many economists fretted about the declining rate of turnover, which they worried was a sign of an increasingly stagnant, even ossifying labor market.But the impact of the Great Resignation is complicated: Too much turnover all at once can create its own problems.For nearly two years, companies have complained that they are caught in an unending cycle of hiring and training workers, only to see them leave in a matter of weeks or months. Constant recruiting and training drains management resources, and new hires often do not stick around long enough for that investment to pay off. Veteran employees are often asked to pick up the slack, leading to burnout.These challenges have been on vivid display in the hospitality industry, which experienced much-higher-than-normal turnover rates in this period.“A lot of restaurants are in survival mode, and survival mode creates a vicious circle,” said Dominic Benvenuti, an owner of Boston Pie, which owns more than two dozen Domino’s locations in New England.Store managers can’t hire enough workers, Mr. Benvenuti said, so they demand too much from new employees too quickly, sending them out on deliveries or putting them to work in the kitchen without sufficient training. When those workers inevitably fail, they quit, compounding the labor shortage and continuing the cycle.“They are thrown into such chaos and stress that it overwhelms them, and they leave,” he said. “It is never-ending if someone doesn’t end it.”The solution, Mr. Benvenuti said, is to focus on training and to recognize that new hires won’t be as productive as 10-year veterans right away. But that is easier said than done when customers are calling to ask why their pizzas are late.There may be some relief in sight for businesses. The turnover rate has declined somewhat since its peak at the end of 2021, and many employers, both public and private, expect that trend to continue this year. That could give companies a chance to focus on tasks neglected during the pandemic chaos, like training employees and updating business processes.But some workplace experts say higher-than-normal turnover rates are likely to persist, particularly in white-collar industries where remote work has become more common. For employees who work from home some or all of the time, job hunting no longer requires manufacturing an excuse to be out of the office or worrying about a boss finding a résumé on the office printer.“It’s just easier to switch jobs now,” Ms. Richardson said. “Back in the old days, you had to meet at a Starbucks, and if you ran into another employee who was at that same Starbucks that was five blocks away from the closer Starbucks, you knew they were on a job interview.”Now, she said, “if you’re working from home, you can do a whole day’s interview from the comfort of your living room and no one’s the wiser.”Many economists say it is still possible that the pandemic-era increase in turnover will be beneficial for productivity, even if that isn’t the case yet. People who thrive working from home will gravitate toward companies that embrace remote work; people who do better in person will be snapped up by companies that require employees to come into the office. Industries that remade themselves to survive the pandemic — like restaurants, retailers and hotels — will figure out which changes will work in the long term, and which employees are well-suited to the new way of doing business.“You’re investing in someone for the future,” said Adria Bagshaw, W.H. Bagshaw’s vice president.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesThe pandemic’s disruption contributed to a surge in entrepreneurial activity, a key driver of the kind of innovation that could lead to a more productive economy. The dynamics have also spurred many companies to re-evaluate or adapt long-held practices to increase efficiency.“There’s an enormous amount of experimentation going on right now, and it’s showing up in so many different ways,” said John Haltiwanger, a University of Maryland economist who studies job turnover.“I think it will be healthy, but not immediately,” he added. “There’s a long-term payoff to this, but it could literally take years, not months, for this to kick in.”When Rahkeem Morris started the company HourWork several years ago, his goal was to help fast-food companies and other businesses hire more efficiently. But last year, the company pivoted to a new focus: retention.A fast-food worker typically takes six months to reach full productivity, Mr. Morris said, but at many companies, the typical employee in the industry leaves after just 75 days. HourWork now offers a service to help store owners keep in touch with staff members by text message and to analyze their responses to identify issues that could be causing employees to quit — an approach the company says can reduce turnover, particularly among new hires.Mr. Morris, who worked in fast food as a teenager before getting degrees from Cornell and Harvard Business School, said companies had long tried to deal with staffing shortages by focusing on recruitment. He likened that approach to trying to fill a leaky bucket — if companies do not also try to keep their workers, no amount of recruiting will solve their problem.The Great Resignation, however, may finally have led companies to rethink that approach.“We’re starting to see the tide shift and the sentiment around that change,” Mr. Morris said. “Fixing the leaky-bucket problem will get these restaurants to full productivity.” More

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    Google Employees Brace for a Cost-Cutting Drive as Anxiety Mounts

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    The tech giant has so far taken steps to streamline without mass layoffs, but employees are girding for deeper cuts.Google workers in Switzerland sent a letter this month to the company’s vice president of human resources, outlining their worries that a new employee evaluation system could be used to cull the work force.“The number and spread of reports that reached us indicates that at least some managers were aggressively pressured to apply a quota” on a process that could lead to employees getting negative ratings and potentially losing their jobs, five workers and employee representatives wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.The letter signaled how some Google employees are increasingly interpreting recent management decisions as warnings that the company may be angling to conduct broader layoffs. From the impending closure of a small office and the cancellation of a content-moderation project to various efforts to ease budgets during 2023 planning meetings, the Silicon Valley behemoth has become a tinderbox of anxiety, according to interviews with 14 current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.In some cases, Google employees have reacted to a program that the company began in July to simplify operations, cut red tape and make itself more productive. In other instances, they have had budget conversations, with some teams unable to hire more next year, the people said. And workers have also fretted over decisions made months ago that, to some, have taken on new meaning, they said.The worries have grown as Google’s tech industry peers have handed out pink slips amid a souring global economy. Last month, Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, purged its ranks by 11,000, or about 13 percent of its work force. Amazon also began laying off about 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, or about 3 percent of its corporate employees.Even Google, which is on track to make tens of billions of dollars in profits this year, has had to come to terms with a slowdown. In October, as the digital advertising market slumped, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported that profit dropped 27 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, to $13.9 billion.Google did not comment on employee anxiety in a response to a request from The Times. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, said in October that the company would “focus on a clear set of product and business priorities.” He also said it would slow hiring and “moderate” the growth of its expenses.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Delivery Workers: Food app services are warning that a proposed wage increase for delivery workers in New York City could mean higher delivery costs.A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?: Employees seeking wage increases to cover their costs of living amid rising prices could set off a cycle in which fast inflation today begets fast inflation tomorrow.Disabled Workers: With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.A Feast or Famine Career: America’s port truck drivers are a nearly-invisible yet crucial part of the global supply chain. And they are sinking into desperation.Unlike other big tech companies, Google has so far avoided large-scale job cuts. Still, investors have pushed the company to become more aggressive about “defending” its huge profits, said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Evercore ISI.“One of the most obvious ways to do that is to cut costs and reduce your employee head count,” he said. He added that it was “kind of odd” that Google’s parent had hired 30,000 employees in the last three quarters, given the economic trends. At the end of September, Alphabet had 186,779 workers.In recent months, Google has appeared to pay more attention to costs. In July, it started the program to streamline operations. Soon after, it canceled some projects, including the Pixelbook laptop and Stadia, its streaming platform for video games. It has also reduced funding for Area 120, an in-house product incubator.At one recent meeting, a Google human resources representative told a worker that the company would revisit the possibility of broader layoffs in the new year, and that it was a decision for Mr. Pichai, according to an audio recording obtained by The Times.Google has told other employees that it would put a priority on trimming real estate expenditures, travel costs and perks before it pursued layoffs, said a person familiar with the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversations were private. The company plans to close a small office in Farmington Hills, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, next month.Google said in October that it would slow hiring and “moderate” the growth of its expenses.Jason Henry for The New York TimesProject cancellations and reorganizations have stoked nervousness. In September, Google’s YouTube shut down a project based in the Farmington Hills office with nearly 80 workers, laying off some staff members who did not find new roles at the company, four people familiar with the decision said. YouTube had hired them as contract workers to moderate content on the video platform. Google said 14 workers had lost their jobs..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Google said that through these types of reorganizations, it was not looking to reduce the size of its overall work force, but that some teams might eliminate roles as the company reassessed its priorities.Some teams that consistently grew in the past will be unable to hire more people next year, four people familiar with the situation said. There are also higher demands for 2023 planning, such as a manager’s being asked to draft plans on how to handle 10 different budget scenarios instead of three or four, one person said. In planning discussions, leaders have pressed managers to justify their expenses, asking if there are workarounds or team reorganizations that could save money, two people said.One of the biggest concerns for some employees has been whether Google could use its new performance-evaluation system to accelerate job cuts. In May, the company installed the new system, called Googler Reviews and Development.Under the system, managers expect the bottom 2 percent of employees to be categorized as having “not enough impact,” according to two people familiar with the matter. Another 4 percent should be judged as providing “moderate impact.”Concerns have intensified that the bottom 6 percent, or roughly 11,000 people, could be targeted for dismissal, according to four people, and as earlier reported by the tech news site The Information.The GRAD system means Google now has two categories for employees who are considered low performing, compared with one under the old program, potentially leading to a bigger pool of workers at the bottom. The system has also had a bumpy rollout, with managers and employees confused about how it should work, according to the letter and four employees.Google said it expected workers would become more comfortable with the system over time. It added that it had a no-surprises policy, meaning employees would know well in advance if their performance was falling short.Before handing out the two lowest ratings, managers are also supposed to notify employees in “support check-in” meetings. Google said not every such meeting would lead to a lower rating, with support check-ins also held for those who need extra help to meet their obligations.Employees would also have indications if their manager wanted to put them on a “performance improvement” plan, the company said, a process that compels workers to improve their work within 60 days to keep their jobs. Google has given workers the choice of staying on a performance-improvement plan or resigning with a buyout package.Google said that it had not made changes to increase the number of performance plans, and that it had offered these types of severance options for years.This month’s letter from some of Google’s workers in Switzerland to Fiona Cicconi, the vice president of human resources, was led by members of a 15-person employee representation committee, ER-CH.One of their primary concerns was that contrary to what some Google executives have said, the company may have a quota for the number of employees who were supposed to have support check-ins, and whose jobs might therefore be vulnerable.Google said it had not imposed a quota on support check-ins. But when almost no one used these meetings after the GRAD system was put in place, it said, it asked leaders to convey the importance of the meetings to managers.The memo signatories in Switzerland also said there was confusion, among managers and workers alike, about who qualified for a support check-in. They urged Ms. Cicconi to put guardrails in place so that the system did not lead to mass firings.“It’s normal that new processes don’t run smoothly in the beginning, but this should not happen at the expense of Googlers’ well-being, careers and compensation,” they wrote. More

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    What Comes Next for the Most Empty Downtown in America

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    The coffee rush. The lunch rush. The columns of headphone-equipped tech workers rushing in and out of train stations. The lanyard-wearing visitors who crowded the sidewalks when a big conference was in town.There was a time three years ago when a walk through downtown San Francisco was a picture of what it meant for a city to be economically successful. Take the five-minute jaunt from the office building at 140 New Montgomery Street to a line-out-the-door salad shop nearby.The 26-story building, an Art Deco landmark that was once the tallest in the city, began its life as the headquarters for the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company. Decades later, it served as the home of the local search company Yelp. The nearby salad store was part of a fast-growing chain called Mixt.Yelp and Mixt had little more than proximity in common, which at that time was enough. Yelp was an idea that became billions of dollars in value on the internet. Mixt was a booming business serving lunchtime salads to the workers who traveled on electrified trains and skateboards to their jobs in downtown cubicles.Their virtuous cycle of nearness, of new ideas becoming new companies, feeding other ideas that become other companies, was the template for urban growth.Businesses like Yelp took root in the high-energy, high-density city; chains like Mixt flourished alongside them as their workers ventured out for lunch. As downtowns have emptied out, their once-symbiotic relationship is coming undone.“This area was always packed with people,” recalled Maria Cerros-Mercado, a Mixt manager who built her career in food service downtown. “People would get off the BART, buy coffee, buy this, buy that. There was always just so much walking.”Today San Francisco has what is perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America. On any given week, office buildings are at about 40 percent of their prepandemic occupancy, while the vacancy rate has jumped to 24 percent from 5 percent since 2019. Occupancy of the city’s offices is roughly 7 percentage points below that of those in the average major American city, according to Kastle, the building security firm.Yelp had its offices in this 26-story building at 140 New Montgomery Street in San Francisco but left after the pandemic began.More ominous for the city is that its downtown business district — the bedrock of its economy and tax base — revolves around a technology industry that is uniquely equipped and enthusiastic about letting workers stay home indefinitely. In the space of a few months, Jeremy Stoppelman, the chief executive of Yelp, went from running a company that was rooted in the city to vacating Yelp’s longtime headquarters and allowing its roughly 4,400 employees to work from anywhere in their country.“I feel like I’ve seen the future,” he said.Decisions like that, played out across thousands of remote and hybrid work arrangements, have forced office owners and the businesses that rely on them to figure out what’s next. This has made the San Francisco area something of a test case in the multibillion-dollar question of what the nation’s central business districts will look like when an increased amount of business is done at home.“Imagine a forest where an entire species suddenly disappears,” said Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies urban real estate. “It disrupts the whole ecosystem and produces a lot of chaos. The same thing is happening in downtowns.”The city’s chief economist, Ted Egan, has warned about a looming loss of tax revenue as vacancies pile up. Brokers have tried to counter that narrative by talking up a “flight to quality” in which companies upgrade to higher-end space. Business groups and city leaders hope to recast the urban core as a more residential neighborhood built around people as well as businesses but leave out that office rents would probably have to plunge for those plans to be viable.Below the surface of spin is a downtown that is trying to adapt to what amounts to a three-day workweek. During a recent lunch at a Mixt location in the financial district, the company’s chief executive, Leslie Silverglide, pointed to the line of badge-holding workers and competition for outdoor tables. It was also, she noted, a Wednesday — what passes for rush hour. On Wednesdays, offices in San Francisco are at roughly 50 percent of their prepandemic levels; on Fridays, they’re not even at 30 percent.A park in downtown San Francisco. On any given week, office buildings are at about 40 percent of their prepandemic occupancy.The lunchtime business downtown is not, and may never, be what it used to be. But if workers aren’t going to return to buying their $17 salads downtown, Mixt will follow them home.Which is why on a recent Wednesday morning, one of Mixt’s managers, Ms. Cerros-Mercado, 35, stood on a mostly empty sidewalk waiting for an Uber (another company that told most of its employees they can work half their time from home).More on CaliforniaBan on Flavored Tobacco: The Supreme Court refused to block a California law banning flavored tobacco, clearing the way for the ban to take effect.L.A.’s New Mayor: Vice President Kamala Harris swore in Karen Bass as the first female mayor of the nation’s second-largest city in a ceremony that celebrated her historic win but also underscored the obstacles ahead.Employee Strike: Postdoctoral students and academic researchers at the University of California said that they would return to work, partly ending a weekslong strike to demand higher pay. Some 36,000 workers remain on strike.A Piece of Black History Destroyed: Lincoln Heights — a historically Black community in a predominantly white, rural county in Northern California — endured for decades. Then came the Mill fire.Ms. Cerros-Mercado lives in San Francisco and used to walk downtown for work but now manages a Mixt branch in Mill Valley, a Marin County suburb that has 14,000 people and $2 million starter homes.Many of the former office workers who live there have yet to return downtown en masse, but their purchases over the past three years have shown that they still want downtown perks and services like a freshly prepared lunch. Mixt opened the Mill Valley location this year as part of a push to generate more business in residential neighborhoods and suburbs.Just before 7:30 a.m. on that recent Wednesday, Ms. Cerros-Mercado watched her Uber pull up outside a downtown Whole Foods so she could start her commute to the suburbs. It proceeded along the sleepy streets where she used to work — past coffee-shops and dim sum restaurants, past the glass towers and the boarded-up storefronts — and sped across the Golden Gate Bridge toward Marin.The Creative ClassAs it happens, Yelp was inspired by a flu.Mr. Stoppelman, 45, contracted the virus shortly after returning to the Bay Area from business school. This was in 2004, back when the internet had enough information that you could find something about anything, yet was also still new enough that the information was rarely more detailed than what you could find in the Yellow Pages. When Mr. Stoppelman went online to find a doctor and was confronted by a bunch of phone and suite numbers but little about the actual physicians, it gave him an idea.Jeremy Stoppelman, chief executive of Yelp, decided to allow its 4,400 employees to work from anywhere in the country.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesYelp began as a word-of-mouth email service before morphing into the local review and directory site that is now worth about $2 billion. That he had a good idea was less important to the company’s success than the Bay Area’s tech ecosystem — the experience and social connections Mr. Stoppelman gained from his previous job at PayPal helped him procure $1 million in start-up funding.Another factor, Mr. Stoppelman said, was a crucial decision, unusual at the time, to locate the company in a San Francisco office building instead of a Silicon Valley office park.“I’m not sure that Yelp would have succeeded if we weren’t in the city,” he said. “When you’re in a city, there’s lots of places you might go, and an efficient way to sort through the possibilities is important. Yelp was a killer app for the city.”San Francisco is about 40 miles from the heart of Silicon Valley, which for the most part consists of low-slung suburban cities that sit along U.S. 101 and have sprawling office campuses surrounded by acres of parking. Until fairly recently, however, the city was considered a subpar place for start-ups.The downtown business district had historically revolved around banks and insurance companies. And the wave of tech companies that sprouted up in San Francisco during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s became symbols of that period’s delusions when they went out of business during the dot-com bust. Mr. Stoppelman said the surplus of fly-by-night companies gave credence to a joke that circulated around PayPal: Start-ups do better in the suburbs because their workers have less to do outside the office.But the bust provided an opportunity in the form of cheap office space that proliferated through the city’s South of Market neighborhood, which sits next to the financial district. Besides, for a new generation of start-up founders like Mr. Stoppelman, who was in his 20s and single when Yelp started, the city just seemed more fun.In San Francisco, and around the country, a growing preference for urban living was showing up in surveys, condo prices and pour-over coffee shops. Economists like Edward Glaeser at Harvard and Richard Florida at the University of Toronto distilled this movement into a sort of new urban theory that said cities were benefiting from several converging trends, including a more tech-driven economy, plunging crime rates and the bubble of young millennials entering the work force.Downtown San Francisco in December. Until 2020, the area was packed with people.In his 2002 book, “Rise of the Creative Class,” Mr. Florida posited that instead of seeking lower taxes and operating costs or locating near suburban enclaves with good schools, companies like Yelp were sprouting in cities rich with the design and engineering workers their businesses needed to grow. He parlayed the book’s success into a consulting firm, the Creative Class Group, which advises cities on strategies for attracting young workers.The advice — find educated workers, create dense fun neighborhoods and embrace social liberalism — could be reduced, effectively, to “become more like San Francisco.”An irony of San Francisco’s emerging status as an economic bellwether was that until the Great Recession, when a plunge in tax revenue prompted the local government to go scrambling for ways to stimulate growth, the city had made no special effort to attract tech companies. In the wake of the downturn, however, the city altered its tax code to be more welcoming to start-ups, while office owners started offering the shorter leases start-ups desire and open floor plans that allow companies to cram more people together.Less than a decade later, a city that was never more than a Silicon Valley satellite was the epicenter of a new boom, with companies like Twitter, Lyft, Uber, Dropbox, Reddit and Airbnb all setting up inside the city limits. And the employees who worked there needed lunch.Ms. Cerros-Mercado, who grew up in the city, watched this unfold while building her career at Specialty’s, a local cafe and sandwich chain known for its giant cookies. She started working there for about $10 an hour and regarded it as a stopping off point that would help support her children as she went through college, with the hopes that she would later go to nursing school.But she came to like it and rose from being a cashier to a kitchen manager and then general manager who made $80,000 with time off, along with dental and health benefits. The main location where she worked was downtown, next to a Mixt restaurant whose lines spilled onto the street.The Creative Class and Its DiscontentsEmpty seats at a restaurant in downtown San Francisco, perhaps the most deserted business district in America.For the optimized office worker looking for the trifecta of fast, healthy and filling, few meals are more efficient than a pile of veggies and some dressing swirled with tofu or grilled chicken. Unfortunately, the aspirations of a salad are often dashed by the difficulty of making one that is actually good. The ingredients come from every corner of the supermarket, and if they aren’t combined in the right proportions, or if they are made too far in advance, every bite is a drag.Ms. Silverglide, 42, the chief executive of Mixt, tried to solve this problem with a setup in which customers proceeded down a counter and called out ingredients like grilled chicken and roasted brussels sprouts while stipulating exactly how much dressing they wanted. She said the naysayers of the time told her that there weren’t enough salad eaters to sustain her company, or that only women would eat there.Instead, lines extended down the block, and Yelp’s users gave the business three and a half stars. People like Mike Ghaffary discovered a healthier kind of lunch in a restaurant where customization was encouraged.Mr. Ghaffary is a former Yelp executive and serial optimizer who went to Mixt in search of a vegan meal that was high in protein and low in sugar. The salad he came up with paired lentils, chickpeas and quinoa with greens and a cilantro jalapeño vinaigrette.Over the next several years, as Yelp grew and went public, Mixt thrived alongside it, adding a dozen locations through downtown and other city neighborhoods. Mr. Ghaffary became something of a Mixt evangelist (“He was very proud of the beany salad he came up with,” Mr. Stoppelman said) and ordered his vegetal concoction so frequently that the salad was added to the permanent menu and still sits on the board under the name “Be Well.”In the city, however, well-being was taking a hit.The tech companies that San Francisco had tried so hard to attract were now the target of regular protests, including some by demonstrators who at the end of 2013 began blocking commuter buses from Google and other companies to show their rage at rents that now sit at a median of $3,600. This was an opening gesture in what would become an ongoing debate about gentrification and the effect of tech companies on the city — a debate that played out in arguments over homeless camps, votes to stop development and countless more protests.All of this was rooted in the cost of housing, which had been expensive for decades but had morphed into a disaster. A local government that had all but begged tech companies to set up shop there was now pushing a raft of new taxes to deal with its spiraling affordable housing and homelessness problems. In 2017, the year the Salesforce Tower eclipsed the Transamerica Pyramid as the city’s tallest skyscraper, Mr. Florida published another book. It was called “The New Urban Crisis.”Ramps to the Salesforce Transit center in San Francisco. The vacancy rate for downtown offices has risen to 24 percent from 5 percent since 2019.An axiom of the post-Covid economy is that the pandemic didn’t create new trends so much as it accelerated trends already in place. Such is the case with Yelp, which long ago started moving employees in response to San Francisco’s rising cost of living, opening sales offices around the country and new engineering hubs in London and Toronto.Still, it was hard to see how that might pose any kind of threat to the city, whose greatest challenge seemed to be dealing with the too many jobs it already had.Expansions aside, Yelp was still ensconced in its headquarters at 140 New Montgomery, and by early 2020, it had every intention of signing a new lease. The company’s ties to San Francisco, the hold of the creative class and all that, were too strong to imagine anything in its place.Headquartered in the Cloud“Have you heard about Covid?”Ms. Cerros-Mercado remembers asking a regional manager at Specialty’s that question sometime in February or early March of 2020. The virus had been in the news for weeks, but it didn’t seem like more than a seasonal bug until her 19-year-old daughter’s school trip to Spain was canceled. The manager she asked wasn’t so sure.“He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just a flulike virus; it will go away,” she said. “And I’m looking at him and telling him, ‘No, this is actually really serious.’”Ms. Cerros-Mercado described the following weeks as a blur of plunging sales and eerie moments like standing in a coffee shop with no customers or hearing from a janitor that the offices above them were clearing out. By May, Specialty’s had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after a conference call in which she and other managers were thanked for their service and told they would be employed for three more days, during which they would deliver the news they had just received to the people who worked for them.“One of the hardest conversations was having to talk to my team,” she said. “I had some team members that were crying because they weren’t sure where their income was going to come from.”In that moment, the question was when life would return to how it was. But as Mr. Stoppelman discovered that he could run a publicly traded company from his home with no loss of business, he decided that for his company, anyway, the new normal was better. Yelp abandoned its headquarters when the lease at 140 New Montgomery lapsed, joining a growing list of tech companies that had replaced free cafeterias and Ping-Pong breakrooms — which for more than a decade had been rationalized by a belief that a social company was a more innovative company — with slogans like “headquartered in the cloud.”Yelp ended up adding back about 50,000 feet for employees who want an occasional desk, but for the city that figure is even smaller than it seems. The new offices are one-third of its former footprint; Yelp subleased the space from Salesforce — the city’s largest private employer, which is also cutting back on local offices.The emptying of American downtowns after Covid was followed by a boom in exurban housing and in cities like Austin and Spokane, trends reflected in where Yelp’s work force has landed. Cortney Ward, 41, a Yelp product designer, bought a home in Austin after leaving her one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Nob Hill. Yelp workers also invented new habits and left holes in the businesses that relied on them. When Diego Waxemberg, 30, a software engineer, left the Bay Area for Charlotte, N.C., he started lunching on leftovers instead of sometimes buying a $17 Mixt salad with tri-tip steak. Mackenzie Bise, 30, who works in user operations, moved to the Sacramento area, and during a recent online search discovered that her favorite San Francisco lunch spot had gone out of business.Maria Cerros-Mercado preparing the Mixt salad shop in Mill Valley to open for the day.During the height of the pandemic, Ms. Cerros-Mercado went through a spell of unemployment before landing at another restaurant chain and later at Mixt. But downtown business was still somewhere between lagging and nonexistent. Mixt laid off hundreds of workers, closed most downtown stores for more than a year and subsisted on business from neighborhood and suburban stores.“If we didn’t have the neighborhood restaurants, we wouldn’t have survived — point blank,” Ms. Silverglide said.But for all the daily rhythms that were upended by home offices, the desire for a specially prepared lunch seems to have endured. Consider Mr. Ghaffary, creator of the Be Well salad, who used the pandemic as a challenge to recreate Mixt’s setup in the kitchen of his Marin County home. He started with fresh ingredients but got tired of his frequent trips to the grocery store and shifted to preparing them in bulk.“I’d make like four or five days of Tupperware,” he said. “First I tried making the whole salad, and then it would get soggy. Then I made half the salad and would finish the rest at the end.”“I was very proud of my streamlined production methods,” he continued. “And then I was kind of like, ‘I don’t want to be making these salads.’”Mr. Ghaffary told this story over salad at Mixt’s Mill Valley store, the one Ms. Cerros-Mercado manages, which opened in July and had lines of customers in athleisure. Operations are slightly more difficult because some employees commute an hour or more to get there, most relying on buses and one sometimes trying to catch a ride in Ms. Cerros-Mercado’s Uber. When a worker misses the bus, Ms. Cerros-Mercado spends her morning trying to cover for holes in the setup line.But the business was steady, and according to Ms. Silverglide it extends until 9 at night, catering to families and a growing salad-for-dinner segment that pairs plates of greens with the various wines and craft beers recently added to the menu. She is fairly confident that Mixt’s “neighborhood locations,” like the Mill Valley one, will drive the business’s expansion. Business in downtown San Francisco has been picking up — but it’s unclear how long that will last, or how close to prepandemic traffic it will ever reach. The offices, after all, haven’t even hit 50 percent.Better TogetherThe building at 140 New Montgomery Street is empty but still an Art Deco landmark.A wood reception desk that used to greet Yelp’s visitors sits empty in its former office. The mounted iPad where visitors once checked in is gone, along with the bright jars of candy and the rows of desks that sat beyond them. But there are still views.“You can see that you get good natural light all around,” said Stacey Spurr, a regional director for Pembroke, which owns 140 New Montgomery, during a recent tour of the quiet and empty but still quite gorgeous building.Ms. Spurr began the tour by pointing out the gold ceilings in the lobby before proceeding to the basement, where there are showers and bike racks. The empty floors upstairs are layered with boastful stickers like the one about the building’s A-plus air filtration system.The nearly 160,000 square feet that Yelp left empty is about half of the building’s space, and about half of that has been re-leased. The good news for Pembroke seems less good for the city. Some of the new tenants are finance and venture capital firms that have clung to the gravitas of a physical office for client meetings and the occasional conference but are unlikely to contribute regular foot traffic, according to building owners across the city.In a typical downturn, the turnaround is a fairly simple equation of rents falling far enough to attract new tenants and the economy improving fast enough to stimulate new demand. But now there’s a more existential question of what the point of a city’s downtown even is.Downtown San Francisco is trying to adapt to what amounts to a three-day workweek. On Wednesdays, offices are at 50 percent of their prepandemic levels; on Fridays, they’re not even at 30 percent.The city, and business groups like Advance SF, are trying to reframe the urban core as a more residential and entertainment district that draws from throughout the region and may in the future involve the conversion of office buildings to residential use. The motto is “Better Together,” and Advance SF recently hosted a forum with a guest economist to discuss new ideas for downtown. The guest was Richard Florida.“When I started with the creative class, places didn’t care about young people, they were only trying to attract a family with children to the lovely suburbs, and I’m saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no,’” Mr. Florida said in an interview. “Twenty years later, people forgot about the families. And now here’s a whole generation leaving cities again, for metropolitan or virtual suburbs.”The more businesses invest with that new reality in mind, the more likely that reality becomes self-fulfilling.A year after being consumed by bankruptcy, Specialty’s, the cafe chain where Ms. Cerros-Mercado began her career, was reincarnated. The first new store sits in the Silicon Valley town of Mountain View, and as the company plots its next expansion it is eschewing the office-adjacent locations on which the original company was built for a more delivery-centric business that has a world of half-empty buildings in mind.Back at 140 New Montgomery, the owners are experimenting with new ideas to get office workers to come in. The building has been hosting gatherings like an Oktoberfest celebration that included a raffle to win a beer stein with the building’s logo.On the afternoon of the Oktoberfest party, a cluster of workers from a software company stood around eating sausages and soft pretzels.“We hear a lot of buzz about this building,” said Veronica Arvizu, a senior property manager at the real estate company CBRE. “We hear it’s the busiest in the city.”A few feet away from her, another group of young workers was playing Jenga. One by one, they took blocks away from the structure, making way for the inevitable collapse. More

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    If There Is a ‘Male Malaise’ With Work, Could One Answer Be at Sea?

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    Before dawn on a recent day in the port of Seattle, dense autumn fog hugged Puget Sound and ship-to-shore container cranes hovered over the docks like industrial sentinels. Under the dim glimmer of orange floodlights, the crew of the tugboat Millennium Falcon fired up her engines for a long day of towing oil barges and refueling a variety of large vessels, like container ships.The first thing to know about barges is that they don’t move themselves. They are propelled and guided by tugs like the Falcon, which is owned by Centerline Logistics, one of the largest U.S. transporters of marine petroleum. Such companies may not be household names, but the nation’s energy supply chain would have broken under the pandemic’s pressure without the steady presence of their fleets — and their crews.“We’re a floating gas station,” said Bowman Harvey, a director of operations at Centerline, as he stood aboard the Falcon, his neck tattoo of the Statue of Liberty pivoting from the base of his flannel whenever he gestured at a machine or busy colleague nearby. Demand is solid, he said, and the enterprise is profitable. The company’s client list, which includes Exxon Mobil and Maersk, the global shipping giant, is robust. But manning the fleet has become a struggle.Multiyear charter contracts for key lines of business — refueling ships, transporting fuel for refineries and general towing jobs — are locked in across all three coasts, plus Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico, Mr. Harvey said. Yet as pandemic-related staffing shortages have eased in other industries, Centerline is still short on staff. “Hands down,” Mr. Harvey said, “our biggest challenge right now is finding crew.”Safely moving, loading and unloading oil at sea requires both simple and high-skill jobs that cannot be automated. And the labor supply issues in merchant marine transportation are emblematic of the conundrum seen in a variety of decently paying, male-heavy jobs in the trades.Overall Labor Force Participation Has Fallen Among Men

    Note: The overall labor force, as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, includes all Americans age 16 and older who are classified as either working or actively looking for work.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics By The New York TimesOver the past 50 years, male labor force participation, the share of men working or actively looking for work, has steadily fallen as female participation has climbed.Some scholars have a grim explanation for the trend. Nicholas Eberstadt, the conservative-leaning author of “Men Without Work,” argues that there has been a swell in men who are “inert, written off or discounted by society and, perhaps, all too often, even by themselves.” Others, like the Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard V. Reeves, put less emphasis on potential social pathologies but say a “male malaise” is hampering households and the economy.“Hands down, our biggest challenge right now is finding crew,” said Bowman Harvey, a director of operations at Centerline.Members of the Millennium Falcon crew.Centerline employees are among about 75,000 categorized by the Department of Labor as water transportation workers, a group in which men outnumber women five to one.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.October Jobs Report: U.S. employers continued to hire at a fast clip, adding 261,000 jobs in the 10th month of the year despite the Fed’s push to cool the economy.A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?: Employees seeking wage increases to cover their costs of living amid rising prices could set off a cycle in which fast inflation today begets fast inflation tomorrow.Disabled Workers: With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.A Feast or Famine Career: America’s port truck drivers are a nearly-invisible yet crucial part of the global supply chain. And they are sinking into desperation.Though the gender split in the industry is more even for onshore office roles, workers and applicants for jobs on the water are predominantly male. Centerline says it has roughly 220 offshore crew members and about 35 openings. Captains and company managers agree that changing attitudes toward work among young men play a part in the labor shortage. But the strongest consensus opinion is that structural demographic shifts are against them. “We’re seeing a gray wave of retirement,” said Mr. Harvey, who is 38.Even though replacements are needed and, on the whole, lacking, there are new young recruits who are thriving, such as Noah Herrera Johnson, 19, who has joined Centerline as a cadet deckhand, an entry-level role.On a Thursday morning out in the harbor, Mr. Herrera Johnson deftly unknotted, flipped and refastened a series of sailing knots as the crew unmoored from a sister boat that was aiding the refueling of a Norwegian Cruise Line ship. A small crowd of curious cruise passengers peeked down as he bopped through the sequences and the sun’s glare began to pierce the fog, bouncing off the undulating waves.“I enjoy it a lot,” Mr. Herrera Johnson said of his work, as he sliced some meat in the galley later on. (Some kitchen work and cleaning are part of the gig and the fraternal ritual of paying dues.) “I get along with everyone — everyone has stories to tell,” he said. “And I was never good at school.”Mr. Herrera Johnson, who is Mexican American and whose mother is from Seattle, spent most of his life in Cabo San Lucas, in Baja California, until he moved back to the United States shortly after turning 18.Though entry-level roles aboard don’t require college credentials, new regulations have made at least briefly attending a vocational maritime academy a necessity for those who want to rise quickly up the crew ladder. Because he is interested in becoming a captain by his late 20s, he began a two-year program at the nearby Pacific Maritime Institute in March, and he earns course credits for work at Centerline between classes.Noah Herrera Johnson, left, preparing to throw a line to Andrew Nelson, right, as the Millennium Falcon docked in Seattle.Mr. Herrera Johnson, right, joined the Falcon crew as a cadet deckhand, an entry-level role.He got his “first tug” in May: an escapade from New Orleans through the Panama Canal to San Francisco, patched with some bad weather. “Two months, two long months — it was fun,” he said. “We had a few things going on. We lost steering a few times. But it was cool.”In short, the industry needs far more Noahs. Many Centerline employees have informally become part-time recruiters — handing out cards, encouraging seemingly capable young men who may be between jobs, undecided about college or disillusioned with the standard 9-to-5 existence to consider being a mariner instead.“When I’m trying to get friends or family members to come into the business,” Mr. Harvey said, “I make sure to remind them: Don’t think of this as a job, think of it as a lifestyle.”Internet connections aboard are common these days, and there is plenty of downtime for movies, TV, reading, cooking and joking around with sea mates. (On slow days, captains will sometimes do doughnuts in the water like victorious racecar drivers, turning the whole vessel into a Tilt-a-Whirl ride for the crew: sea legs required.)Of course, those leisurely moments punctuate days and nights of heaving lines, tying knots, making repairs, executing multiple refueling jobs and helping to navigate the tugboat: rain or shine, heat or heavy seas.It’s “an adventurous life,” Mr. Harvey said, one that he and others acknowledge has its pros and cons. Mariners in this sector — whether they are entry-level deckhands, midtier mates and engineers, or crew-leading tankermen and captains — are usually on duty at sea in tight quarters and bunk beds for a month or more.On the bright side, however, because of an “equal time” policy, full-time crew members are given roughly just as much time off for the same annual pay.“When I go home, you know, I’m taking essentially 35 days off,” said Capt. Ryan Buckhalter, 48, who’s been a mariner for 20 years. For many, it’s a refreshing work-life balance, he said: None of the nettlesome emails or nagging office politics in between shifts often faced by the average modern office worker trying to get ahead.Still, Captain Buckhalter, who has a wife and a young daughter, echoed other crew members when he admitted that the setup could also be “tough at times” for families, including his own.Capt. Ryan Buckhalter piloted the Millennium Falcon on Elliott Bay.A checklist in the wheelhouse of the tugboat.Crew members say they value knowing that their work, unlike more abstract service jobs, is essential to world trade. And average starting salaries for deckhand jobs are $55,000 a year (or about $26 an hour) and as high as $75,000 in places like the San Francisco area, with higher living costs.The company also offers low-cost health, vision and dental care for employees, and a 401(k) plan with a company match. So the chief executive, Matt Godden, said in an interview that he didn’t feel that wages or benefits were a central reason that his company and competitors with similar offerings had struggled to hire.“Right now a lot of companies are really hurting,” Captain Buckhalter said. “You kind of got a little gap here with the younger generation not really showing up.”If the labor market, like any other, operates by supply and demand, managers within the maritime industry say the supply side of the nation’s education and training system is also at fault: It has given priority to the digital over the physical economy, putting what are often called “the jobs of the future” over those society still needs.Mr. Harvey adds that his industry is also grappling with increased Coast Guard licensing requirements for skilled roles, like boat engineers or tankermen, who lead the loading and discharging of oil barges. The regulations help ensure physical and environmental safety standards, Mr. Harvey said, but reduce the already limited pool of adequately credentialed candidates.Women remain a rare sight aboard. Some captains make the case that this stems from hesitance toward a life of bunking and sharing a bathroom with a crop of guys at sea — a self-reinforcing dynamic that company officials say they are working to alleviate.“We actually do have women that work on the vessels!” said Kimberly Cartagena, the senior manager for marketing and public relations at Centerline. “Definitely not as much as men, but we do have a handful.”Several economists and industry analysts suggested in interviews that another way for companies like Centerline to add crew members would be to expand their digital presence and do social media outreach. Mr. Godden, Centerline’s chief executive, said he remained wary.“If you did something very simple, like you set up a TikTok account, and you sent somebody out every day to create varied little snippets, and you get viral videos of strong men pulling lines and big waves and big pieces of machinery,” Mr. Godden said, then a company would risk introducing an inefficient churn of young recruits who would “like the idea of being on a boat” but not be a fan of the unsexy “calluses” that come with the job.Crew members say they value knowing their work is essential to world trade. But in the long term, he said, there is reason for optimism. He pointed to the recent establishment of the Maritime High School, which opened a year ago just south of the Seattle-Tacoma airport with its first ninth-grade class.“I think their first class is looking to graduate a hundred people, and then they got goals of getting up to 300, 400 graduates a year,” Mr. Godden said. He has been meeting with the school’s leaders this fall and is convinced they will help create the next pipeline in the profession.“Yes, labor shortages may increase or decrease depending upon how the market works — but I always have this sense that there’s always going to be this sort of built-in group of folks who cannot — just cannot — stand seeing themselves sitting at a desk for 30, 40, 50 years,” he said. “It’s this hands-on business almost like, you know, when you’re a kid and you’re playing with trucks or toys, and then you get to do it in the life-size version.” More

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    Most NYC Job Postings Must Include Salaries Starting in November

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    A new city law going into effect on Tuesday will require companies with at least four employees to post salary ranges for openings, even if the jobs involve remote or hybrid work.For years, companies of all sizes have closely guarded the potential pay for their job openings, keeping applicants in the dark about possible compensation and preventing employees from discovering that their colleagues make more than they do.But that dynamic, which has long benefited corporations in salary negotiations and has been blamed for exacerbating gender and racial pay gaps, will soon end in New York City, one of the largest job markets in the world.Under a new city law that goes into effect on Tuesday, nearly every company will be required to include salary ranges for job postings, both those shared on public sites and on internal bulletin boards, and even for those jobs that offer a hybrid schedule or can be performed fully remote.Here’s what the law will mean for employers and workers in New York City.What information will companies have to divulge?The sweeping New York City rules will apply to almost all companies except for the smallest firms. Any business with at least four workers, assuming at least one of them is based in the city, must include the lowest and highest salaries for any job it posts — a requirement that will force some of the biggest companies in the world with offices in New York City, from Google to Pfizer to Verizon, to divulge pay information.The salary ranges must be provided in “good faith,” the city says, which means that they must accurately reflect what the company would be ready to give a new employee. The ranges are for base salary, excluding the cost of other benefits like overtime, paid vacation and health insurance.Is this new salary transparency a requirement in other parts of the country?The new requirements put New York City among a growing number of places in the United States that require salary transparency from private employers. The trend has taken hold during the pandemic as leverage in the American workplace has increasingly shifted toward workers.Colorado implemented salary requirements for job openings earlier this year, and California and Washington State will mandate similar rules in 2023. The New York State Senate passed a salary transparency law in June that is similar to the one in New York City, but it has yet to be signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul.Some of the biggest employers in New York City are complying with the new pay disclosure requirements for all of their jobs openings nationwide, not just their postings in the city.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesIn the city, the salary requirements were passed nearly a year ago by the City Council during the last days of the administration of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. Company executives and business groups were caught off guard, complaining that they were not consulted on the legislation and were unaware of it until just before it was approved.That criticism led the city to delay the start date to November from May and to make some tweaks, including removing the fine for a first-time offense; subsequent offenses, however, can cost up to $250,000. The new law will be enforced by the city’s Commission on Human Rights.Will companies comply?Several large companies in the financial and tech industries have already updated their job postings to be in compliance. Some corporations have gone further, such as Citigroup, which added salary information this month to all of its openings in the United States, not just those in New York City, where the bank is one of the city’s largest private employers.The changes have been reflected in active job openings. At Citigroup, a senior associate at the bank’s New York City offices can earn more than $125,000 annually. A director at American Express will make at least $130,000. And a software engineer at Amazon can earn a salary as high as $213,800.Earlier this year, the real estate company Zillow, as well as its New York City listings site StreetEasy, started to include salary information on openings in the city, the company said. One recent listing, for a strategic communications manager at StreetEasy, offered a salary of at least $99,300.A spokeswoman at Citigroup said that the bank added salary ranges not just for jobs in New York City but throughout the country as part of a company initiative focused on pay fairness and employee retention.“This initiative supports our pay equity goals and reinforces many key principles such as being more transparent as an organization and simplifying our processes,” the spokeswoman said.Glenn Grindlinger, an employment lawyer at the firm Fox Rothschild, said that many large corporations may follow the path of Citigroup and add salary ranges on all jobs in the country. Doing so would ensure compliance with New York City law, which also covers remote jobs that could be performed in the city, he said.But Mr. Grindlinger said he was concerned about small- and medium-size companies in the city, especially those outside Manhattan, that may be unaware of the new law, as well as firms in other parts of the country that do not know that their remote jobs, if they can be performed in New York City, will also have to comply.“It’s a pretty big deal,” Mr. Grindlinger said. “And the outreach, it has not been where it is needed, which is in the other boroughs.”How could this change affect job seekers?Stephanie Lewin, 39, works as a sales associate at a clothing and home goods store in Lower Manhattan and has been looking for a new job. She has noticed an increase in compensation disclosures on Indeed’s online job listings, but some of the salary bands are too far apart to be helpful, she said, like listings that propose a range of $17 to $50 an hour.But overall, she said the disclosures have been helpful in weeding out jobs for which the upper salary range falls below her expectation of earning at least $25 an hour. “It definitely at least takes away one element of surprise or decision-making upfront,” said Ms. Lewin, who has worked in the retail industry for 16 years.Mr. Grindlinger said he believed the new salary ranges would lead applicants to negotiate for a salary at the higher end of the scale. “The economy and inflation has swung the pendulum toward the employee,” he said.A spokeswoman at Indeed said that an increasing number of openings on its site across the country now included possible salaries provided by employers. (The company did not have data for New York City-based jobs.) About 37 percent of jobs posted in the third quarter of 2022 included pay information from the employer, the spokeswoman said.New York’s new pay transparency law will force some of the biggest companies in the world with offices in the city, from Google to Pfizer to Verizon, to divulge salary information. John Smith/VIEWpress, via Getty ImagesJoe Stando said if the salary transparency law had been in effect earlier in the pandemic, it would have saved him time and disappointment during his job search. Mr. Stando said he had at least three job opportunities over the past year that fell apart over salary negotiations. Each time, the companies’ offers were below what he had requested.“I would much rather have it coming out early on so that I can know before applying or early on in the conversation that we are maybe not aligned,” said Mr. Stando, 33, who lives in Queens and has worked in office administrative roles. “You can’t really negotiate unless they have all their cards on the table.”Instead of disclosing salaries for New York City jobs, some companies might exclude workers in the city from applying for positions. When Colorado’s salary transparency law went into effect in January, some major employers, including the real estate firm CBRE and the drug distributor McKeeson, stated that Colorado residents would not be considered for remote jobs. (McKeeson now posts salary ranges for remote openings in Colorado.)Mr. Grindlinger said he had talked to company executives outside New York City who might avoid having to comply with the city’s law by barring new employees from working there.“Clients that are not based in New York, they just don’t know what they are going to do, or some say if that’s the requirements, we are not going to consider anyone working in New York City,” he said.How could this help address long-lingering inequities in compensation such as the gender pay gap?Tae-Youn Park, an associate professor of human resource studies at Cornell University, said that research into salary disclosure laws that have been implemented elsewhere, including in Denmark, has shown that they help narrow the pay gap between men and women.In the United States, women made about 82 cents for every $1 men earned in 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that pay inequity is constant across almost all occupations. The gap is larger for women of color.Mr. Park said that the salary disclosures in New York City would likely force managers to compare their salaries to those offered at other companies and make adjustments. Also, employees might feel empowered to confront their bosses if the ranges showed they were underpaid.“It will give them an opportunity to raise their voice with objective data,” Mr. Park said.Nicole Hong More