6 ms·

It'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 exi

It'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)

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> 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 seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if they decide to open an office in some rural backwater.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I don't know man? You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people that Google would be interested in.) Much better to be in that NYC-Boston-DC corridor where high powered opportunities abound in multiple sectors. Or SF. Or Chicago. Etc. But trying to move a lot of these types of couples to, say, Lincoln Nebraska, is just asking for trouble. The spouses or partners are definitely not going to go for that.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    And also for those with kids you have to think about them i.e. what opportunities will they have living in this area when they leave school.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Why would a kid stay in the same area after leaving school? That was categorically out of the question for my graduating classes.
      - ionised 8y ago
        Why?
        jswizzy 8y ago
        Because people are attached to their family and friends and also most don't realize that any able body person with an IQ of 100 and a decent work ethic could easily make six digits if they relocated to the right area.
        ben_w 8y ago
        Where could any randomly selected person from the upper 50% of the population by IQ move and earn >$100,000? Even with your caveats, though at that pay I do wonder why “able bodied” is important.
        closeparen 8y ago
        You go to the best college you can get into, wherever it is, and then to the best job you can get, wherever that is. Our city was okay, but our school system and community values were not calibrated to produce contentment with mediocrity. You might pass on opportunities for social stability reasons in middle age, but as a 22-year-old you jump without hesitation. People sometimes migrate back when their own kids are school-aged.
      - 8y ago
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  No there aren't. It's the kind of move that sounds highly desirable until you actually start considering it seriously. Notably: what happens when you get tired of your current work, or you get laid off, or something else comes in between you and your current company? If there are no comparable companies around the area, you're stuck accepting shittier work, or uprooting your life.
- neil_s 8y ago
  I relocated from the UK to California and then Zurich to work at Google. I wouldn't have taken the offer if they said - "you can only work at Google if you agree to work in Alabama". Once you're in Google, it's pretty easy to move around between offices, and yet people aren't tripping over themselves to move to small offices in small cities with a small range of projects to work in. Don't underestimate the power of network effects and critical mass. The people good enough to get into FAANG also have the abundance of options to specify where they'd like to live and work.
nostrademons 8y ago
"Things that can happen that could break this cycle include" Also: universities, new natural resource discoveries, natural disasters, different regulatory environments, developments in transportation. I have a hunch that the North Coast of Canada is going to become a huge boom town within my lifetime, but it's likely to take a couple decades, and I don't yet know where the major cities will be. Am tempted to take a Northwest Passage cruise to find out, though.
- chupasaurus 8y ago
  I live at 55°N for 25 years and counting, as well as some time in a comparable climate (St. Petersburg), the wombo combo of very low temperatures in winter and constantly high humidity (temperatures are feeling way colder than with <50% humidity) with addition of low sunshine hours is not attractive one.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    I'm just assuming that global warming is going to be as bad or worse than current predictions and that the effect will be felt even more severely at high latitudes. If the arctic sea ice all melts the Arctic Circle may be the new Northern Europe. 20,000 years ago New England was all under glaciers, while now it's a pretty reasonable place to live.
kamaal 8y ago
>>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. Bangalore had this problem in the 80's and 90's. The way you beat is, surprising simple. You just start building colleges and other institutions and make it cheap and easy to study there. All of a sudden you have a massive pool of young, and hungry people. Then you do things like tax subsidies, and land grants.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  I hate to be that guy, but if it’s this simple why hasn’t it been done? And anticipating a specific class of answer: is it always political deadlock in America, or is there something more fundamental that would prevent this from working?
  - redblacktree 8y ago
    To some extent, it has been done. There are a lot of great public institutions of higher education throughout the country. I live in Indianapolis. It's not exactly an economic wasteland.
mac01021 8y ago
What would have to happen for one of these giant companies to start hiring remote employees?
- dsr_ 8y ago
  It's not that they don't hire remote employees. Most of them do. It's that a high-level remote employee at a physical-first company is at a major political disadvantage compared to their onsite peers.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but I've never seen an opening for a remote SWE job for any of FAANG. If they did, they could pay 75% of what I'm told they do and still be far and away the most appealing employer for talented engineers in most places.
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      I recently received an offer from Apple for a remote software engineering role. Amazon will also hire remote employees for certain teams in AWS. And I’m aware of both Facebook and Google hiring remote employees (or allowing employees to become fully remote) if they’re excellent and the alternative is losing them. It’s not an explicit policy and they don’t actively encourage it. But they’ll make it work for the right person - I agree though, don’t go into it thinking you’ll be remote. If you want to work remotely for very high compensation (close to FAANG but not exactly competitive), comsider working at a second tier public tech company like Salesforce or a strong unicorn like Stripe (both of which explicitly support it).
- givinguflac 8y ago
  Older people with outdated visions of “butts in seats” need to stop running things.
  - gxigzigxigxi 8y ago
amyjess 8y ago
> 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) I wish more companies would do what TI did. TI set up their headquarters in Richardson, TX, where there were very few people with any engineering background. So they opened their own university in order to farm talent, and once it got large enough, they had the state take it over from them. It became the University of Texas at Dallas, and it's now probably the most important university in the southwest for engineering and CS (I've heard the phrase "MIT of the southwest" before, but I don't want to call it that because I went to UTD and that's a bit of an exaggeration).

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

> 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 seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if they decide to open an office in some rural backwater.

bilbo0s 8y ago
I don't know man? You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people that Google would be interested in.) Much better to be in that NYC-Boston-DC corridor where high powered opportunities abound in multiple sectors. Or SF. Or Chicago. Etc. But trying to move a lot of these types of couples to, say, Lincoln Nebraska, is just asking for trouble. The spouses or partners are definitely not going to go for that.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  And also for those with kids you have to think about them i.e. what opportunities will they have living in this area when they leave school.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Why would a kid stay in the same area after leaving school? That was categorically out of the question for my graduating classes.
    - ionised 8y ago
      Why?
      - jswizzy 8y ago
        Because people are attached to their family and friends and also most don't realize that any able body person with an IQ of 100 and a decent work ethic could easily make six digits if they relocated to the right area.
        ben_w 8y ago
        Where could any randomly selected person from the upper 50% of the population by IQ move and earn >$100,000? Even with your caveats, though at that pay I do wonder why “able bodied” is important.
      - closeparen 8y ago
        You go to the best college you can get into, wherever it is, and then to the best job you can get, wherever that is. Our city was okay, but our school system and community values were not calibrated to produce contentment with mediocrity. You might pass on opportunities for social stability reasons in middle age, but as a 22-year-old you jump without hesitation. People sometimes migrate back when their own kids are school-aged.
    - 8y ago
TulliusCicero 8y ago
No there aren't. It's the kind of move that sounds highly desirable until you actually start considering it seriously. Notably: what happens when you get tired of your current work, or you get laid off, or something else comes in between you and your current company? If there are no comparable companies around the area, you're stuck accepting shittier work, or uprooting your life.
neil_s 8y ago
I relocated from the UK to California and then Zurich to work at Google. I wouldn't have taken the offer if they said - "you can only work at Google if you agree to work in Alabama". Once you're in Google, it's pretty easy to move around between offices, and yet people aren't tripping over themselves to move to small offices in small cities with a small range of projects to work in. Don't underestimate the power of network effects and critical mass. The people good enough to get into FAANG also have the abundance of options to specify where they'd like to live and work.

nostrademons 8y ago

"Things that can happen that could break this cycle include" Also: universities, new natural resource discoveries, natural disasters, different regulatory environments, developments in transportation. I have a hunch that the North Coast of Canada is going to become a huge boom town within my lifetime, but it's likely to take a couple decades, and I don't yet know where the major cities will be. Am tempted to take a Northwest Passage cruise to find out, though.

chupasaurus 8y ago
I live at 55°N for 25 years and counting, as well as some time in a comparable climate (St. Petersburg), the wombo combo of very low temperatures in winter and constantly high humidity (temperatures are feeling way colder than with <50% humidity) with addition of low sunshine hours is not attractive one.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  I'm just assuming that global warming is going to be as bad or worse than current predictions and that the effect will be felt even more severely at high latitudes. If the arctic sea ice all melts the Arctic Circle may be the new Northern Europe. 20,000 years ago New England was all under glaciers, while now it's a pretty reasonable place to live.

kamaal 8y ago

>>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. Bangalore had this problem in the 80's and 90's. The way you beat is, surprising simple. You just start building colleges and other institutions and make it cheap and easy to study there. All of a sudden you have a massive pool of young, and hungry people. Then you do things like tax subsidies, and land grants.

throwawaymath 8y ago
I hate to be that guy, but if it’s this simple why hasn’t it been done? And anticipating a specific class of answer: is it always political deadlock in America, or is there something more fundamental that would prevent this from working?
- redblacktree 8y ago
  To some extent, it has been done. There are a lot of great public institutions of higher education throughout the country. I live in Indianapolis. It's not exactly an economic wasteland.

mac01021 8y ago

What would have to happen for one of these giant companies to start hiring remote employees?

dsr_ 8y ago
It's not that they don't hire remote employees. Most of them do. It's that a high-level remote employee at a physical-first company is at a major political disadvantage compared to their onsite peers.
- mac01021 8y ago
  Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but I've never seen an opening for a remote SWE job for any of FAANG. If they did, they could pay 75% of what I'm told they do and still be far and away the most appealing employer for talented engineers in most places.
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    I recently received an offer from Apple for a remote software engineering role. Amazon will also hire remote employees for certain teams in AWS. And I’m aware of both Facebook and Google hiring remote employees (or allowing employees to become fully remote) if they’re excellent and the alternative is losing them. It’s not an explicit policy and they don’t actively encourage it. But they’ll make it work for the right person - I agree though, don’t go into it thinking you’ll be remote. If you want to work remotely for very high compensation (close to FAANG but not exactly competitive), comsider working at a second tier public tech company like Salesforce or a strong unicorn like Stripe (both of which explicitly support it).
givinguflac 8y ago
Older people with outdated visions of “butts in seats” need to stop running things.
- gxigzigxigxi 8y ago

amyjess 8y ago

> 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) I wish more companies would do what TI did. TI set up their headquarters in Richardson, TX, where there were very few people with any engineering background. So they opened their own university in order to farm talent, and once it got large enough, they had the state take it over from them. It became the University of Texas at Dallas, and it's now probably the most important university in the southwest for engineering and CS (I've heard the phrase "MIT of the southwest" before, but I don't want to call it that because I went to UTD and that's a bit of an exaggeration).