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Google Plans Large New York City Expansion
- mathattack 8y agoThis should be good for engineering salaries in general in NYC.
- vonmoltke 8y agoGiven Google's penchant for lowballing people without FANG experience or competing offers, probably not.
- hnmcQIOoQUDv 8y agoAnd forget even applying if you've ever had a negative relationship with a coworker who now works for Google…you'll get greylisted and ghosted midway during the interview process.
- stuxnet79 8y agoOuch, does this really happen?? I feel like Google's hiring process makes it very difficult for someone with a personal animus to train-wreck the whole hiring process.
- hnmcQIOoQUDv 8y agoA manager who fired me from a previous job before he was at Google (well, he now disputes that I was fired, just that my role was eliminated) bragged to a now–fellow Googler that he had blocked me from getting a role at Google NYC twice now, not knowing the Googler's prior friendship with me.
- hnmcQIOoQUDv 8y agoI don't know what the precise internal process is but have been told by multiple former coworkers, now at Google, that any time I've applied for a role and gotten they've been asked to comment on their experience with me at whatever previous roles we overlapped in. I eventually asked Google recruiting to put me on a do not contact list after going through the process multiple times.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoIs this backed up by data?
- saganus 8y agoDo you have any references for this? It definitely seems plausible and matches my (very limited) experience with a few friends that have joined Google, but I was wondering if you have any links. I guess you would have to accept joining with a lower salary, and then try to switch to another FANG company to get a fair salary?
- vonmoltke 8y agoWell, there's me. I passed their interview gauntlet, but their initial offer was well under what I currently make, and their second barely matched it. They also badly down-leveled me (which is partially my fault for not insisting on an L5 interview loop). From my direct experience, and talking to other people who have negotiated with Google, the only ways to get a good offer out of them is to either come from a FAANG or get a competing offer from one.
- trhway 8y agoin SV, got an L5 offer couple years back, barely matching my relatively low for SV total with the base lower. They pretty much refused to negotiate. The same experience as couple acquaintances - one even took such an offer and not surprisingly ran away a year later. On the other hand - some other acquaintances make $400K-$500K as L5/L6 there.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vonmoltke 8y ago> one even took such an offer and not surprisingly ran away a year later I thought about that, but I'd rather not put myself through the job change gauntlet so often, and the role was such a step down in responsibility that I would be better off with a year in my current role.
- timeseries2018 8y agoDoesn't a fintech programmer already make ~$450k (all in)
- claydavisss 8y agoZero chance that is typical
- CydeWeys 8y agoIt's typical for fintech programmers at top-tier firms. Not typical across SWE jobs in general in NYC, of course. The thing about fintech though is they get worked really hard. It's very much a "You eat what you kill" mentality. On an hourly basis you might be better off "only" making $300K at a FAANG and working normal 40 hour work-weeks.
- necubi 8y agoPretty typical for a mid-level engineer at a top quant fund. More senior salaries get into the low 7 figures. Source: recently interviewed with a few top quant funds in NY
- akhilcacharya 8y agoEngineering salaries are already good in NYC...equivalent to Bay and Seattle
- Bucephalus355 8y agoI wonder how much goodwill Google could have generated by locating this hub in say Orlando or Des Moines. Even if they spent 150k per engineer in relocation costs (1 time fee), it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t make that up in terms of cheaper real estate and lower salaries. There were obviously some benefits in choosing New York City (and I realize it’s an expansion technically), but still, it’s so......unimaginative. Would have been a great contrast to Amazon’s bait and switch yesterday.
- vikinghckr 8y agoWell, problem with Orlando etc., as opposed to NYC is it would be harder to attract elite talent there. In fact, it will be hard enough to attract talent at NYC when most tech companies are still in SV.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Even if they spent 150k per engineer in relocation costs (1 time fee), it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t make that up in terms of cheaper real estate and lower salaries. Are you suggest that elite talent wants lower salaries in the Midwest or Florida as long as they can get a one time relocation payout? Google might save support staff salaries, but I don't think they'll save engineer salaries with your plan, they might even have to boost them.
- lordCarbonFiber 8y agoYou'd definitely have to boost them. I feel like it's always grossly understated in these sorts of threads just how much better quality of life is in a dense city like NYC. Access to culture, to food, to public transportation, to other job opportunities is hard to put a dollar amount on. There's a reason so many people moves to places like NYC and not isolated towns in the midwest.
- latencyloser 8y agoPersonally, I have the opposite opinion. I took a pay cut to leave Seattle ( I lived in Chicago before that, I've lived in dense metro areas for many, many years now) so I could go live in a smaller town. I can actually afford a house. My dog has a yard to play in. I haven't been mugged since I left! No one uses my doorstep as a bathroom. My neighbors actually come say hi to me and are invested in forming relationships knowing I won't just up in move in the next year due to housing costs. We have decent enough restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, pool halls, movie theater, mall, etc, and if I really want to, I am within driving distance of the city (edit: for a day trip, no way in hell would it work for me as a commute). Yet, I haven't been back since I left. I think it's more nuanced than your comment indicates. You might be surprised how many people might take up an offer from Google to move to the boonies (I'm at least one).
- vikinghckr 8y agoIf it's going to make NYC a major engineering hub, on a similar scale as Mountain View, then it's a huge deal. If it's going to be mainly non-technical roles, then meh.
- yesforwhat 8y agoIf NYC becomes a monoculture like SV than it truly is a big deal.
- jen20 8y agoNYC will not become a tech monoculture simply because of all the finance, fashion, (traditional) advertising etc already there.
- mrmcd 8y agoThere's 8.6 million people in the NYC legal limits, over 20 million in it's greater metro, and a way more diverse economy. You'd need waaaaay more tech to get anywhere close to SV, which just isn't that big population wise.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoNYC is not going to become a monoculture because of an expansion of a company that already has a large presence in the city. Furthermore, the bizarre obsession with city “culture” is completely beyond me and has lead to some pretty regressive housing policies.
- zjaffee 8y agoNYC is arguably the largest global center for the entire services sector/post industrial economy. It can become a tech hub far larger what exists today in the bay area, and still not become a monoculture. The only monocultural aspect that happens to exist in NYC is that it's an incredibly expensive place full of very ambitious and financially successful people (400,000 millionaires live in manhattan alone).
- CydeWeys 8y agoNYC is the largest city in the nation and is the main hub of many industries including finance, fashion, network TV, publishing, and advertising. The population of the overall NYC metropolitan area is 24 million. The only way to change it into as much of a monoculture as Silicon Valley would be to add tens of millions of tech workers, without adding any attendant employees to service industries. Not gonna happen.
- taurath 8y agoThis coupled with the Amazon news is starting to get distressing. With the amount of companies that copycat them it’s like the rich are getting richer and the economic benefits are still going to be concentrated only in the most affluent cities. The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan. We’re truly heading for Elysium.
- jdavis703 8y agoThere's another option: just build new housing in the cities that have a proven track-record of economic dynamism. There are several factors that I believe these "winner take all" cities have that many smaller cities either can't or refuse to implement. This includes not just a tolerating, but welcoming immigrants; robust public transit investment; and a great education system.
- umeshunni 8y ago> This includes not just a tolerating, but welcoming immigrants; robust public transit investment; and a great education system. Well 2/3 of these don't apply to the Bay Area / SF
- umeshunni 8y agoIt's a classic chicken and egg problem. Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent. This limits large new offices to large metro areas (5M+ people) People don't want to relocate to cities where there aren't multiple job possibilities - you lose your job/hate it and don't want to have to relocate to find a new job or you want to move but your spouse can't find a job there because their industry isn't well represented there. This leads to a reinforcement cycle where new jobs are created in a city, people flock there, found the next generation of companies, new jobs, more people fleeing less attractive cities and so on... Things that can happen that could break this cycle include - new industries emerging (like tech in the 90s), poor governance, infrastructure in an area forcing companies to find alternatives (like bay area right now), new skills coming into demand and companies establishing offices to take advantage of that (e.g. Pittsburg emerging as an AI hub, Seattle for 'cloud' skills etc)
- ArtWomb 8y agoIt's exciting. Google has been talking about expanding its presence forever. At least since purchasing the Chelsea Market complex. The Youtube studio is an amazing space. As is the AWS Loft downtown. Cornell Tech will have a new campus on Roosevelt Island. And Brooklyn has its New Lab / Navy Yards that is almost a tech city unto itself. It feels like there's community. And a multitude of events every day and night. With rents stabilizing, and burgeoning FinTech and AI momentum, I just think everyone at some point in their lives should consider a stint in the city ;)
- CydeWeys 8y agoThe nice thing about NYC in comparison to the Bay Area is that we're not afraid of building more housing here, so supply increases every year and has a dampening effect on rent increases. Also, mass transit is much better, so if you live even 30 minutes away on a subway line the rents will be much lower. If you're willing to commute an hour each way (which is still less than a lot of people who drive every day on I-101 put up with) then rents are a fraction of what they are in nice areas of Manhattan, or the Bay Area for that matter. Though personally I don't like relying on the subway (which increasingly has problems these days), hence I live in biking distance.
- tokyodude 8y ago> and has a dampening effect on rent increase Is that really true? I don't know if this data is accurate but googling "average rent new york city" vs "average rent san francisco" brings up these 2 results as the first hits. They look almost identical. The site claims average rent for NYC is $3634 vs SF at $3735. It also claims prices increased in NYC by 9.46% over last year vs SF at 0.62% https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren... https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-tre...
- dmoy 8y agoThe difference is a reasonable transit ride puts you in the radius of a staggeringly large amount of housing stock comparatively in NYC. But, go to the SF burbs and try to find high rises... :/
- claydavisss 8y agoCounterpoint: these jobs are increasingly meh and will not be impactful on the local economy. Lifetime comp (salary + retirement benefits) for Amazonians in Crystal City will probably be less than for comparable Federal workers. Google is like any other white collar business now - a small cadre of well paid execs surrounded by an army of people just doing ok. 80% of Googlers in NYC will probably have lower lifetime earnings than firefighters or cops once you factor in pensions These companies are just factories with desks
- akhilcacharya 8y agoHow much do you think Google NYC or even Amazon engineers make?
- claydavisss 8y agoHow much do you think a firefighter pulls in AFTER retiring? Most public employees with pensions will probably pull in well over a million after they retire and before they die. Tech workers are still young as a group so pension envy is still not a thing....but will be Run the numbers...tech jobs in a tier 1 real estate market isn't that great of a deal. Most likely a nice rental and a slightly underfunded 401k And don't forget tech is like Logan's Run...have fun looking for work at 50 (when most public employees have started their retirement countdown)
- toephu2 8y agoA young googler in his 20s easily pulls in over a million every 4 years...
- claydavisss 8y agothey also pay taxes and rent my point was....how much will they "pull in" for the thirty+ years of their retirement? public employees also don't have to worry about obsessively sharpening their skills every four years or foreign labor or being made irrelevant by cloud services, and they don't care about recessions for the most part techie Ragnarok is coming within ten years, HN will turn into a giant therapy board
- tgb29 8y agoGoogle doesn’t want AWS to take over NYC
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- choot 8y agoOne of the reason is that, people who are incharge of these decisions are invested in these cities. They've real estate in these cities. So, using public money of the company to invest in these cities increase the value of their personal investments :) It won't be changing anytime sooner. Shareholders aren't bothered. I wouldn't be surprized if majority of shareholders by value live in these cities too.
- shard972 8y agoThat and before they even move in they will be lobbying for foreign work visas because they "just can't find any local talent".
- Arnt 8y agoThe names of senior management and board members are public, so you can name the ones you have in mind.
- oblio 8y agoI don't remember the actual source, so it might just be a funny anecdote. But I remember reading that after WW2 a lot of US companies were expanding and looking for new headquarters. They'd commission huge research teams to find the best location for the new headquarters, spend a lot of time and effort to find a good place. A book written about 10 or 15 years after many of these companies found that almost invariably the result of the research placed the best location within a short distance of where the CEO was from/currently lived. So what you're saying doesn't really surprise me :)
- mooreds 8y agoI was curious so I hunted the anecdote down. Via https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/28/20030328/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/28/20030328/ I found this HBR article: https://hbr.org/1989/03/corporate-architecture-from-the-outside-in https://hbr.org/1989/03/corporate-architecture-from-the-outs... Which has this quote: > A dozen years ago, William Whyte, author of the classic book The Organization Man, tried to do just that. The sociologist took his map and phone book and set out to chart which corporate headquarters had gone where and why. Contrary to official rationales, which emphasized corporate enhancement or a disinterested pursuit of the great outdoors, Whyte found that most of the new campus compounds were sited within eight or nine miles of the CEO’s home—a chilling and widely broadcast statistic that jarred with corporate claims about humane treatment for those uprooted in the move.
- dblock 8y agoNew York, especially Manhattan and nice parts of Brooklyn also have a great public school system. It’s very, very big with dozens of schools. This is critical for any parent obviously. My kids go to PS11, which is excellent, just a few blocks from Google HQ (I don’t work at Goog) with some real diversity in the classroom, literally kids of all possible colors from around the world. Interestingly, none of the other parents I know work at Google. I wouldn’t mind if that number ... doubled. Right now we’re looking at middle schools and I am pleased to say the options in district 2 are fantastic, again.
- netheril96 8y ago> I wouldn’t mind if that number ... doubled. Pardon me if I misunderstand, but isn't double "none" still none?
- redblacktree 8y agoI wondered the same thing and assumed it was a joke. Then I wondered why they didn't say "halved." Oh well. I probably thought about this too much already.
- kyrieeschaton 8y agoMeanwhile, the executive team openly laughed at the idea of investing in offices any distance from the coast.
- kyrra 8y agoThey bought their new building in Boulder for $131 million, which about doubled the available seating. They also expanded their Pittsburgh office in the last few years. http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-business/ci_31319589/google-buys-land-buildings-at-boulder-campus-131m http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-business/ci_31319589/goog... https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2014/02/03/google-confirms-expansion-to-bakery.html https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2014/02/03/googl...
- aluminussoma 8y agoGoogle was known to have many remote offices during it's earlier years. It is rumored that they came to regret doing that so early on.
- tantalor 8y agoI work at Google in Pittsburgh and we are hiring & expanding. Here's a story published earlier this year, https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-early-pioneer-pittsburgh-looks-continue-growth-tech-rivals-arrive/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-early-pioneer-pittsburg...
- TulliusCicero 8y agoMunich and Zurich are both quite far from the coast. Of course, they're also expensive cities: Zurich is one of the most expensive in Europe, and Munich is the most expensive city in Germany. Now, maybe this is because the Google executive team loves throwing away money on the most expensive cities for no reason. But I think a more likely explanation is that the same desirability that drives up prices also makes it more attractive for talent and employers.
- bagacrap 8y agoLet's be real, what non coastal city has the current talent pool or the cultural draw for the highly educated, politically progressive workforce Google is after? Spoken as someone born, raised, and currently living in the interior of the US. Google invests in proportion to the talent pool, with decently sized and growing offices in Waterloo, Pittsburgh, and Boulder. If tens of thousands of qualifed tech workers were clamoring to work in these locations, I'm sure Google would invest accordingly. But it would be ridiculous to think of Pittsburgh and NY as equals.
- dfxm12 8y agoEvery time I see a company setting up shop in the Mid-Atlantic, I just assume it's to set up shop a quick Amtrak ride to DC.
- ttobbaybbob 8y agoI wonder if the banks, who are increasingly branding themselves as "tech companies"[1], are worried about Google and Amazon encroaching on their territory. My understanding is that at least part of the appeal of NY to Google and Amazon is the quality and quantity of systems engineers at banks and hedge funds. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-15/lloyd-blankfein-wants-goldman-sachs-to-push-technology https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-15/lloyd-... (among many other such articles)
- kevstev 8y agoThey definitely are. I left the finance industry in late 2013 after getting an offer in tech for 50% more. My bosses demanded to see the offer letter- they didn't believe me. I eventually acquiesced- and showed the entire team- to make them realize that they can't just keep screwing people out of bonuses, forcing them to work late nights and weekends and expect people to put up with it. About 6 months later, two others also left for tech. I talked with a friend still at GS, and banks are at least making token moves now to be more attractive- "casual fridays", ping pong table on the floor, etc. Not real change, but it at least shows they are somewhat concerned.