23THE BOTTOM LINE Silicon Valley recruiters are telling
prospective hires they can work from home even after the
pandemic ends—widening the talent pool and threatening tradition.guy,” he says. But about a year after his company
went fully remote during the pandemic, he has no
regrets. He credits Streamlit’s flexible approach
with snatching Roes from the jaws of Google.
“We wouldn’t have found him otherwise, if we’d
limited the search geographically,” Treuille says.
“Remote is a killer perk. It’s not going to go back
to normal. It works too well, and there’s too much
good talent out there.”
In addition to the hiring benefits of being
digital-first, Treuille says it’s made Streamlit more
efficient. “The whole company is a computer pro-
gram now,” he says. For example, before Covid,
employees would get coffee with colleagues in the
office to share ideas, but it happened randomly.
Now, Treuille says, Streamlit has a software bot that
regularly suggests staff reach out to co-workers.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the end of
the office. Michael Morell, co-founder of Riviera
Partners, a top recruiter of engineering leaders
in the Valley, expects executives to once again
coalesce around their companies’ “center of influ-
ence” when vaccinations are widespread and CEOs
return to headquarters regularly.
Having an engineering manager on the East
Coast of the U.S. when the rest of the team is
in another time zone presents real challenges,
according to Morell, who thinks product devel-
opment teams do better brainstorming in person.
“When everyone is Zooming, that’s fine,” he says.
But “when everyone on the West Coast is having
in- person meetings around the water cooler and
the head of the team is on the East Coast, I expect
that won’t last. The leaders need to be where the
people are, and vice versa.”
Bosses like Treuille and Polinsky are trying
to address these challenges. Treuille has prom-
ised executives and other employees they will
get the same face time with the startup’s leaders
whether they’re at the office in San Francisco or in
Kentucky. And when he sets up meetings, he asks
himself if the time favors the Bay Area, where he
lives, over other locations, and adjusts accordingly.
Polinsky says she was concerned about the dis-
tance before joining Shopify. But she saw other
executives at the company thriving from far beyond
Ottawa, including a VP for product in New York
City and a managing director in Vancouver. “That’s
the evidence I needed,” she says. Plus, such tools
as GitHub, Slack, and Zoom have made software
engineering from home easier in recent years.
GitHub provides a central place online where col-
leagues thousands of miles apart can share code
and suggest changes in real time, as if they were
standing around the same desk, Polinsky says.
If the remote-work trend holds, it could under-
mine a storied part of Valley culture. Before the
pandemic, the assumption was that to make it
in tech you had to be in the Bay Area, living and
working near everyone else who knew how to run
a technology company. “That’s just not true any-
more,” Treuille says. “There’s no going back at this
point. It just works.” �Alistair Barr▲ Streamlit offered
Roes the option to work
from home indefinitely