Silicon Valley may look very different after the pandemic

After four months of working from home during the pandemic, Reeba Akram decided to change where home was.

Akram, who works for Google, moved with her husband and two young children from Los Altos — a 15-minute drive from the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters — to Dallas, Texas. The biggest reason for the move, she said, was cost of living.

“We were paying three times the mortgage of our house that we have here in Texas, but we had one-third of the space,” she said. Her choice of where to live is now “the question of the year,” she says, with Google’s September deadline approaching for employees to decide between moving offices, coming back or staying remote.

Akram is part of a sizable tech exodus from the San Francisco Bay Area, with the tech hub’s biggest companies, including Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple, among the first to shift to remote work last year during the pandemic. Some employees have moved to totally different corners of the country, while others have simply moved elsewhere in the state or to suburbs a few hours away.

Some of those relocations are more permanent than others, as companies and workers start to reckon with the kind of offices they want after more than a year of working from home. The tech industry and its biggest companies are emerging as pacesetters on that front, having pioneered several aspects of modern office culture for years before setting the tone for a shift to remote work when the pandemic began.

Just as the tech industry led the way in transitioning to remote work, its top companies are providing early templates for bringing workers back to the office (or not).