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...we've been having these kinds of headlines from local media outlets pretty much everywhere where FAANG have created/expanded presences. -- But it seems to m

by gyulai 7y ago

...we've been having these kinds of headlines from local media outlets pretty much everywhere where FAANG have created/expanded presences. -- But it seems to me that these companies are extremely centralized and only decentralize to the extent that it is unavoidable (e.g. distributed data centers for reasons of latency) or that it captures special opportunities (e.g. Apple expanding in Munich right now, but doing only hardware and chip design work in what seems to me like a play to pick up talent from competitors like Infineon) Also: I'd quite like to see what the distribution of carreer-levels is, when comparing Silicon Valley to non-Silicon Valley locations for these companies. I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley.

qeqeqeqe 7y ago
How is opening 5000 new jobs in Canada a sign that Google is "extremely centralized"? In regards to your Munich example, what exactly is the issue with that? If there's a large amount of talent in some area why wouldn't you want to try and compete for it? Anyway, I have a good feeling that office will grow soon, there's plenty of non-hardware and chip design talent in that area :) You do have to start somewhere though. I will also make an educated guess that Google isn't hiring just junior people, and even if they were, they would grow into more senior roles anyway.
- unicornmama 7y ago
  There’s no transparency on what the roles will be. Engineering? Accounting? Datacenter operations? Fly fishing?
  - qeqeqeqe 7y ago
    It's obviously going to be mostly engineering, it's Google.
    - ulfw 7y ago
      So fly fishing basically :)
    - OJFord 7y ago
      Many 'mostly engineering' companies, including Google, have had and do have entire offices for specific non-engineering roles, such as marketing or whatever, anything which isn't seen to be needed to be in the same location, or perhaps there's a better 'hot spot' for, say marketing in NYC and engineering in SF.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      The only mention I've been able to find online suggest that only about 1/3 of Google's workforce are in R&D: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Google-employees-are-programmers https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Google-employees-ar... "This information is most likely buried in Google’s annual report — the last one I could dig up is their 2015 fiscal year end report. According to the paper published by Google Inc and Alphabet Inc, there are 61,814 full-time employees with 23,336 in research and development." Bear in mind R&D isn't pure developers. It also includes QA and project/program management roles.
      - qeqeqeqe 7y ago
        That source you cite literally says that "45% of Google employees are programmers."
        ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        He cites numbers from Google's previous financial reports (likely to be valid) and then adds a guess of 45% at the end (less likely to be valid). If you want to believe the guess, well, that's up to you.
- gyulai 7y ago
  5000 new jobs is not what the article is saying, but capacity to grow to 5000. I don't know how many they have now, and creating capacity to do something is not the same as actually doing it. Also, to put the number in perspective: 5000 would be only 4.3% of their global workforce, and my guess would be that Canada must actually be one of their biggest non-U.S. presences. (London also has a strong one for Google). I'm also not saying that there's anything wrong with these companies expanding their presences outside the valley. (I would very much welcome it), only that we're not seeing enough of it right now to contradict the notion that these companies are still very much centralized. Maybe real estate prices and competition for tech talent will eventually force them to properly decentralize. But I could also see a scenario where those companies could put their might into play to overcome that resistance-level and allow them to continue growing while remaining centralized. It's simply too early to tell which way this thing is playing out.
  - drivebycomment 7y ago
    > we're not seeing enough of it right now to contradict the notion that these companies are still very much centralized. What are you basing this on, and what would be enough ? 4.3%, if indeed happens that way, would be a substantial portion. They already have significant presence in NYC, Seattle/Kirkland, London, Zurich, LA, Hyderabad, Dublin, Tokyo, Austin, etc. A few thousand here and a few thousand there add up quickly. EDIT: Added a few more that I remembered.
    - gyulai 7y ago
      The numbers in the article are country-level, and you're responding by saying things about cities. NYC, Seattle and LA are all in the U.S. They're centralized inside the U.S. at the city-level to Mountain View. They're centralized within the English-speaking world at the country-level to the U.S. They're centralized globally w.r.t. language communities to the English-speaking world.
      - vladsbf777 7y ago
        dis is wrong about google. They is kirkland 100% not mountain view in any way whatsoever.
echelon 7y ago
> Also: I'd quite like to see what the distribution of carreer-levels is, when comparing Silicon Valley to non-Silicon Valley locations for these companies. I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley. As a tech worker in Atlanta, I find that quite the opposite is true. People tend to career-(s)hop out in the valley and don't stay at the same company for long. In Atlanta people tend to stay with the same company for years and grow their role and influence. As such, the SF headquarters tends to put its most important pieces in its remote offices. I also think SF sees a lot of products spun up as promotion vehicles, whereas remote offices tend to think long term with long time horizons.
skybrian 7y ago
Google has large engineering offices in major cities all over the world. Seattle, New York, Dublin, London, Zurich, Tokyo... There are advantages to being at headquarters but it's not practical to move everyone to the SF Bay Area.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  Here the engineering office is in Waterloo while Toronto is sales/marketing/administrative. Toronto certainly counts as a major city (3rd or 4th largest in North America depending on how you count).
tanilama 7y ago
> I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley This doesn't sound right TBH. Most junior people are actually in HQ, because HQ has head counts and can offer to train them, while satellite office won't have so many HCs and usually there to snatch up experienced developers. As to promotions to higher level, yes HQ are definitely better, but that is only because it is HQ, so critical decision is made there naturally.
- aygthrwy 7y ago
  Yeah, I've noticed a recent exodus of mid-level and senior people out of the Bay Area and to the major satellite offices in the US and abroad. The traditional wisdom is that you should work from HQ to maximize your career advancement, but I think many people are weighing this against the untenable housing situation and realizing it's not worth it. Also, San Francisco was considered a fun alternative to living in Cupertino or Menlo Park or Mountain View, but the city just keeps going further downhill. Junior employees likely have a higher tolerance than senior employees for the quality-of-life issues you deal with in San Francisco.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Google has been decentralized for a long time. Seattle, NYC, Zurich, and London are all big offices that are at least comparable to Mountain View, not to mention a bunch of other smaller but very serious offices. Facebook, Google, and Apple all have large or rapidly growing presences in Seattle. It does the real estate market and traffic no good, but it is what it is.
- allhacks 7y ago
  Yeah but at Seattle is building housing. Unlike SF and most of the Bay Area...
- username90 7y ago
  > Seattle, NYC, Zurich, and London are all big offices that are at least comparable to Mountain View No they aren't, Mountain View much bigger than all of those combined.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted. I've been to the seattle office. Its a few buildings. The mtn view office is dozens
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      You can’t just include Seattle (Fremont), you also have to consider Kirkland, which is much bigger than Fremont. They are building (or have built?) a new larger office in South Lake Union (5 buildings), I’m not sure if they will be consolidating Fremont but I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to consolidate Kirkland. Altogether Google employs 4500 in the Seattle area, and that number will increase substantially when south lake union comes online. And of course, Google will just be a small presence compared to the other craziness in South Lake Union (Amazon being the biggest, but also Apple and Facebook having large presences). Now, 4500 in Seattle, 4000 in Zurich, 3,500 in London, 7,000 in NYC...that easily approaches the 23,000 in Mountain View.
ulfw 7y ago
Competitors like Infineon? They bought Infineon (through intels purchase of Infineons mobile chip assets years ago)
- gyulai 7y ago
  Infineon is a publicly-traded company. A part of Infineon was sold to Intel, who in turn sold a part of that to Apple. Anyway: The long-standing presence of Infineon and a whole ecosystem around it (business partners, educational opportunity, etc.) means that Munich has hardware talent, and despite Munich being the most expensive and high-paying city in Germany (next to Frankfurt), salaries are still low, and real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley. That's what I mean by "special opportunity" if you look at it from Apple's point of view.
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
    >real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley Everything in the world is cheap compared to the Valley, that any comparison is pretty much a meme at this point. You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that Munich real estate is cheap even when you account for local salaries. Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany when accounting for living costs, except without the high paying jobs. I have multiple friends who moved there to work in engineering after graduating and they're starting to move elsewhere once they enter their 30s because they got tired of living in shared apartments(WGs) and realized they could never afford to buy anything worthy of having a family unless you're lucky enough to get into an executive position at a top company since ICs there aren't valued as much as they are in the valley so their salaries stay low and job hopping for better pay is frowned upon.
    - thecleaner 7y ago
      Why is job hopping frowned upon ? I mean this seems to be some ploy to prevent workers from increasing their market value. It seems weird that salaries are shit in Germany when in fact the country touts itself as one of engineers.

by gyulai 7y ago

qeqeqeqe 7y ago

How is opening 5000 new jobs in Canada a sign that Google is "extremely centralized"? In regards to your Munich example, what exactly is the issue with that? If there's a large amount of talent in some area why wouldn't you want to try and compete for it? Anyway, I have a good feeling that office will grow soon, there's plenty of non-hardware and chip design talent in that area :) You do have to start somewhere though. I will also make an educated guess that Google isn't hiring just junior people, and even if they were, they would grow into more senior roles anyway.

unicornmama 7y ago
There’s no transparency on what the roles will be. Engineering? Accounting? Datacenter operations? Fly fishing?
- qeqeqeqe 7y ago
  It's obviously going to be mostly engineering, it's Google.
  - ulfw 7y ago
    So fly fishing basically :)
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Many 'mostly engineering' companies, including Google, have had and do have entire offices for specific non-engineering roles, such as marketing or whatever, anything which isn't seen to be needed to be in the same location, or perhaps there's a better 'hot spot' for, say marketing in NYC and engineering in SF.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    The only mention I've been able to find online suggest that only about 1/3 of Google's workforce are in R&D: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Google-employees-are-programmers https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Google-employees-ar... "This information is most likely buried in Google’s annual report — the last one I could dig up is their 2015 fiscal year end report. According to the paper published by Google Inc and Alphabet Inc, there are 61,814 full-time employees with 23,336 in research and development." Bear in mind R&D isn't pure developers. It also includes QA and project/program management roles.
    - qeqeqeqe 7y ago
      That source you cite literally says that "45% of Google employees are programmers."
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        He cites numbers from Google's previous financial reports (likely to be valid) and then adds a guess of 45% at the end (less likely to be valid). If you want to believe the guess, well, that's up to you.
gyulai 7y ago
5000 new jobs is not what the article is saying, but capacity to grow to 5000. I don't know how many they have now, and creating capacity to do something is not the same as actually doing it. Also, to put the number in perspective: 5000 would be only 4.3% of their global workforce, and my guess would be that Canada must actually be one of their biggest non-U.S. presences. (London also has a strong one for Google). I'm also not saying that there's anything wrong with these companies expanding their presences outside the valley. (I would very much welcome it), only that we're not seeing enough of it right now to contradict the notion that these companies are still very much centralized. Maybe real estate prices and competition for tech talent will eventually force them to properly decentralize. But I could also see a scenario where those companies could put their might into play to overcome that resistance-level and allow them to continue growing while remaining centralized. It's simply too early to tell which way this thing is playing out.
- drivebycomment 7y ago
  > we're not seeing enough of it right now to contradict the notion that these companies are still very much centralized. What are you basing this on, and what would be enough ? 4.3%, if indeed happens that way, would be a substantial portion. They already have significant presence in NYC, Seattle/Kirkland, London, Zurich, LA, Hyderabad, Dublin, Tokyo, Austin, etc. A few thousand here and a few thousand there add up quickly. EDIT: Added a few more that I remembered.
  - gyulai 7y ago
    The numbers in the article are country-level, and you're responding by saying things about cities. NYC, Seattle and LA are all in the U.S. They're centralized inside the U.S. at the city-level to Mountain View. They're centralized within the English-speaking world at the country-level to the U.S. They're centralized globally w.r.t. language communities to the English-speaking world.
    - vladsbf777 7y ago
      dis is wrong about google. They is kirkland 100% not mountain view in any way whatsoever.

echelon 7y ago

> Also: I'd quite like to see what the distribution of carreer-levels is, when comparing Silicon Valley to non-Silicon Valley locations for these companies. I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley. As a tech worker in Atlanta, I find that quite the opposite is true. People tend to career-(s)hop out in the valley and don't stay at the same company for long. In Atlanta people tend to stay with the same company for years and grow their role and influence. As such, the SF headquarters tends to put its most important pieces in its remote offices. I also think SF sees a lot of products spun up as promotion vehicles, whereas remote offices tend to think long term with long time horizons.

skybrian 7y ago

Google has large engineering offices in major cities all over the world. Seattle, New York, Dublin, London, Zurich, Tokyo... There are advantages to being at headquarters but it's not practical to move everyone to the SF Bay Area.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Here the engineering office is in Waterloo while Toronto is sales/marketing/administrative. Toronto certainly counts as a major city (3rd or 4th largest in North America depending on how you count).

tanilama 7y ago

> I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley This doesn't sound right TBH. Most junior people are actually in HQ, because HQ has head counts and can offer to train them, while satellite office won't have so many HCs and usually there to snatch up experienced developers. As to promotions to higher level, yes HQ are definitely better, but that is only because it is HQ, so critical decision is made there naturally.

aygthrwy 7y ago
Yeah, I've noticed a recent exodus of mid-level and senior people out of the Bay Area and to the major satellite offices in the US and abroad. The traditional wisdom is that you should work from HQ to maximize your career advancement, but I think many people are weighing this against the untenable housing situation and realizing it's not worth it. Also, San Francisco was considered a fun alternative to living in Cupertino or Menlo Park or Mountain View, but the city just keeps going further downhill. Junior employees likely have a higher tolerance than senior employees for the quality-of-life issues you deal with in San Francisco.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Google has been decentralized for a long time. Seattle, NYC, Zurich, and London are all big offices that are at least comparable to Mountain View, not to mention a bunch of other smaller but very serious offices. Facebook, Google, and Apple all have large or rapidly growing presences in Seattle. It does the real estate market and traffic no good, but it is what it is.

allhacks 7y ago
Yeah but at Seattle is building housing. Unlike SF and most of the Bay Area...
username90 7y ago
> Seattle, NYC, Zurich, and London are all big offices that are at least comparable to Mountain View No they aren't, Mountain View much bigger than all of those combined.
- tathougies 7y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted. I've been to the seattle office. Its a few buildings. The mtn view office is dozens
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    You can’t just include Seattle (Fremont), you also have to consider Kirkland, which is much bigger than Fremont. They are building (or have built?) a new larger office in South Lake Union (5 buildings), I’m not sure if they will be consolidating Fremont but I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to consolidate Kirkland. Altogether Google employs 4500 in the Seattle area, and that number will increase substantially when south lake union comes online. And of course, Google will just be a small presence compared to the other craziness in South Lake Union (Amazon being the biggest, but also Apple and Facebook having large presences). Now, 4500 in Seattle, 4000 in Zurich, 3,500 in London, 7,000 in NYC...that easily approaches the 23,000 in Mountain View.

ulfw 7y ago

Competitors like Infineon? They bought Infineon (through intels purchase of Infineons mobile chip assets years ago)

gyulai 7y ago
Infineon is a publicly-traded company. A part of Infineon was sold to Intel, who in turn sold a part of that to Apple. Anyway: The long-standing presence of Infineon and a whole ecosystem around it (business partners, educational opportunity, etc.) means that Munich has hardware talent, and despite Munich being the most expensive and high-paying city in Germany (next to Frankfurt), salaries are still low, and real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley. That's what I mean by "special opportunity" if you look at it from Apple's point of view.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  >real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley Everything in the world is cheap compared to the Valley, that any comparison is pretty much a meme at this point. You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that Munich real estate is cheap even when you account for local salaries. Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany when accounting for living costs, except without the high paying jobs. I have multiple friends who moved there to work in engineering after graduating and they're starting to move elsewhere once they enter their 30s because they got tired of living in shared apartments(WGs) and realized they could never afford to buy anything worthy of having a family unless you're lucky enough to get into an executive position at a top company since ICs there aren't valued as much as they are in the valley so their salaries stay low and job hopping for better pay is frowned upon.
  - thecleaner 7y ago
    Why is job hopping frowned upon ? I mean this seems to be some ploy to prevent workers from increasing their market value. It seems weird that salaries are shit in Germany when in fact the country touts itself as one of engineers.