4 ms·
Facebook opening an engineering office in Seattle
- jseliger 16y agoI wonder why is there so much talent in Seattle that Facebook can't afford not to go? Or do some of its California people want to move north? Or does it want to raid Microsoft? Or something else altogether?
- tybris 16y agoAmazon, Microsoft, and Boeing engineers looking for a change and UW grads looking for a job.
- awa 16y agoThere is Google too
- mikebo 16y ago* Lower cost of living => smaller salaries * Less competition for talent than bay area * amazon/microsoft/google/adobe/myspace engineers * fairly vibrant startup community
- seiji 16y agoNice byline: "Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at Facebook, is moving to Seattle because he couldn't bear to be 800 miles away from Michael Arrington."
- mitchellhislop 16y agoI spit my latte when I read that, especially because of the HN comments on that story yesterday/Monday
- dlevine 16y agoCould be that some veteran Facebook employees want to move to Washington state to avoid paying taxes on their stock. Shortly after Google went public, a lot of old-time Googlers moved to Washington so that they could avoid paying CA taxes
- jseliger 16y agoDo you have any data / links on this phenomenon? It has the ring of an urban legend, but I could be wrong.
- jbeda 16y agoThe number of Googlers moving to Seattle post IPO was very very small. Most growth in our office came from local hiring. I believe the company tried to filter this out. That isn't to say there aren't one or two though...
- sosuke 16y agoThey just opened an Austin office too, I was excited until it ended up just being a sales hub.
- mikebo 16y agoThis is awesome for Seattle engineers. Even if you don't work at Facebook it should give a nice compensation bump for all good engineers in the area.
- potatolicious 16y agoI'm glad they're staying downtown - I wish more tech companies here had the balls to do the same, instead of setting up campuses out in the boonies and forcing everyone to drive and live in disconnected suburbs (MS, Google, looking right at you guys).
- frognibble 16y agoIn addition to the Kirkland office in the boonies, Google has an engineering office in Fremont to serve the city folk.
- codexon 16y agoKirkland isn't a small town and I think most people prefer to live 30 minutes away from the city to avoid being stuck in traffic for an hour.
- potatolicious 16y ago> "I think most people prefer to live 30 minutes away from the city" I doubt this. A lot of my peers who work at MS loved living in the city, but had to move out to the suburbs (that they don't really like) to save on commute. Which is the point - if MS was downtown it would be reasonably commutable by just about everyone (including suburbanites in Bellevue). The reverse (putting the office in the 'burbs) makes commuting slightly simpler for suburbanites at the cost of making it nigh impossible for urban dwellers. Personally, having grown up in a sleepy suburb not at all unlike Kirkland, I'd loathe to go back - and I know a lot of my younger peers feel the same. This is on top of all of the requisite issues with suburban lifestyles (e.g., over-reliance on cars, health concerns due to driving everywhere, sprawl, walkability in general, social homogeneity, etc). I currently live 20 minutes away from work by bus (plus side: I get to walk home on a good day, try doing that in the suburbs), and luckily my employer is reasonably close to downtown. That's less commute than most suburban office parks demand, and all of it is "free time" (i.e., I can be doing other things than watching the road).
- xpaulbettsx 16y agoI'm glad they announced this after all of the privacy nonsense came out, so that I now know to avoid them on moral grounds. It's a pity too, because they're doing some pretty awesome stuff from a technical perspective.
- brown9-2 16y agoI wonder if/when they plan to do something similar on the east coast.