Workplace

Ask a tech worker: How’d you get to work today?

How are tech workers’ commutes changing in San Francisco? We went outside and asked around.

An illustration of two speech bubbles in front of a building

Transit ridership in San Francisco hasn’t rebounded from the pandemic, but these tech workers say they feel fine taking the train.

Illustration: Christopher T. Fong/Protocol

How is office life changing in tech? What’s the future of hybrid work? How will tech companies build culture and retain talent in 2022? These are some of the questions we think about every day on the Workplace beat at Protocol. We talk to plenty of experts and executives, but who better to ask than the people on the ground?

Enter our new series, Ask a Tech Worker.

I’ve been going out at lunchtime to chat with tech company employees I run into in San Francisco’s (still fairly empty) Financial District about how work is changing for them. For our first edition, I wanted to learn how commutes have shifted during the pandemic, so I started with a simple question: How’d you get to work today?

As I build out this series, I’d love to hear from you! Email me at alevitsky@protocol.com with any questions you have for San Francisco’s tech workers. And if you see me out at lunchtime, don’t be shy.

Remote workers may scoff: “What commute?” But tech employees choosing to head to the office despite the omicron variant of COVID-19 are once again braving shuttles, highways and — yes — public transportation.

In downtown San Francisco, which is better served by public transit than most of the Bay Area — certainly more so than car-centric Silicon Valley — several tech workers told me between mid-December and early January that they’re taking BART trains and Muni buses to get to their semi-open offices. The idea that riding transit could expose them to COVID-19 wasn’t a big concern for these workers.

“Everyone’s pretty much wearing their masks on the BART, so it doesn’t really change my commute too much,” said Sai Muktevi, who joined Salesforce in a support role during the pandemic.

More than one-third of U.S. adults are uncomfortable with the idea of returning to the office, according to a January survey by Morning Consult. But for those who are ready, private tech shuttles have been up and running for months. Facebook (now Meta) started running some of its shuttles in June, when it reopened its offices at half capacity. The shuttles still operate at limited capacity for health reasons, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told Protocol.

Remote work remains common, and public transit seems to be a sticking point for many Bay Area employers. Weekday BART ridership to downtown San Francisco is still at 22% to 26% of pre-pandemic levels, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month.

“Pretty consistently, about 45% to 50% of people are ‘somewhat concerned’ about COVID safety on transit,” said Gwen Litvak, senior vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council. Since April, the business association has been surveying hundreds of local employers across sectors about whether their employees are taking transit during the pandemic. (Tech companies have only made up 3% to 5% of the survey respondents.)

Tech, of course, is a sector where many workers — including Muktevi — still have the option to work from home full time. Despite this flexibility, Muktevi chooses to make the 49-minute trek from the East Bay suburbs to Salesforce’s San Francisco office about twice a week.

For Muktevi, the office is important for networking as he looks for opportunities to transfer into a different department at Salesforce. The office has a special draw for early-career tech workers eager to set boundaries between work and home or to find mentorship and camaraderie. A big draw of heading to the office is having a critical mass of colleagues at the office, either to collaborate or for an event.

“You make plans to go out on the weekend with your friends, and if a lot of people are going, then you’re going to go out,” Muktevi said Tuesday. “That’s kind of how commuting to work has become.”

Joe Fernandes, a quality program manager at Fitbit, also took BART to work before he moved to San Francisco during the pandemic. Now he walks to the office, where he goes in two or three times a week, he said last month. Still, like many offices, it’s a bit of a ghost town.

“I see a couple people here and there,” Fernandes said. “I think some come in a couple days.”

Rochell Lopez has been taking BART every day and said she’s never had “any issues” taking the train from West Oakland during the pandemic. Lopez comes in by necessity: As an office manager at Flickr, she can’t work from home. When I met her in mid-December, she said she’d been hired to get the office ready to reopen by clearing 18-month-old items out of the kitchen, setting back-to-office safety guidelines, reorganizing the office layout and testing IT and conference room equipment.

Unlike many downtown offices, Flickr has a parking lot, so some employees drive, she said. Others take Caltrain. “This company has always promoted remote work,” Lopez said. Two-thirds of Lopez’s colleagues said in a recent survey that they wanted to come back to the office, she added.

Nick Shiya, a director in WeWork’s real estate group, also said in mid-December that he’d continued taking a 15-minute Muni bus ride to the office three or four days a week.

“I think if you’re comfortable taking public transit, [COVID] doesn’t rise to your level of concern,” Shiya said.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins