For years, they weren’t much to look at. The Silicon Valley tech companies famously started in garages eventually upgraded to low, beige office parks that bloated outward as more employees were hired. Bland on the outside, lucrative and increasingly crammed with college-like perks on the inside, they were the standard tech headquarters for years.
Over the past decade, however, tech giants have invested in real estate and proper headquarters. The kind of buildings and campuses that draw attention and lure thousands of employees to commute five days a week to work inside their open floor plans. Generous on-site benefits give those workers little reason to leave for a meal, a trip to the bank or even to get dry cleaning.
Forty five miles south of San Francisco, Apple has its still-new $5 billion, 175-acre, circular “spaceship” campus in Cupertino. Amazon placed giant, glass-dome greenhouses at the base of its main tower in downtown Seattle, part of a $4 billion city campus. Enterprise software company Salesforce changed the San Francisco skyline with its massive billion-dollar skyscraper, topped with moving animations like dancing silhouettes and the Eye of Sauron. Also in Silicon Valley, the stretch of land between San Jose and San Francisco, Google is building the circus-tentlike 595,000-square-foot Charleston East building in Mountain View, which is expected to be completed next year. And by a marsh on the bay in Menlo Park, Facebook erected boxy Frank Gehry buildings topped with trees at around $300 million each, according to Build Zoom.
In March, the commutes stopped. Many tech company offices in the United States have been fully or partially closed since the coronavirus pandemic took hold here, and some of the largest like Google and Facebook have told employees they can continue to work remotely until at least summer 2021. A handful, including Twitter and Slack, have gone so far as to say working from home, even in another part of the country, will be an option for some or all employees indefinitely.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was looking at more flexible hybrid models of in-person and remote work in a recent interview with Time magazine, after an internal survey found that 62 percent of employees wanted to come back to work in the office just “some days.” Even Apple seems to be embracing the shift, although still unofficially. CEO Tim Cook said that 10 to 15 percent of employees have come back to the office but that things won’t entirely return to the way they were. A recent video presentation of its latest gadgets showed a largely empty campus.
When the pandemic winds down and offices are a safe option again, white-collar workplaces could be changed forever. The corporate headquarters that serve as both branding and workspace could change too, with ripple effects on their surrounding communities.
It is too early to know what trends will stick. It could all depend on what makes the next generation of employees happy.
“Amazon and other tech companies are competing for, not average talent, but the best of the best talent. The talent that is going to be producing patents or intellectual property that is going to be the next iPhone or next Alexa or next Netflix,” said Mike Grella, founder of Grella Partnership Strategies and a former Amazon executive who works in economic development.
While perks like YouTube’s giant indoor slide, Google’s college-like campus complete with bikes and Facebook’s free food were appealing in the past, covid-19 has changed what may employees expect.
Housing costs in Silicon Valley and Seattle are still some of the highest in the country, and strict zoning laws — plus surrounding bodies of water — have made it nearly impossible to build enough new homes to keep up with the demand exhausted by tech companies. To compensate, tech employees receive high salaries on top of the generous perks, and sometimes even get help from the companies finding housing.