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Comment by abbasmehdi | Hacker News Reader

Why not East Bay or South Bay, or anywhere but the peninsula?

Isn't the real WTF why a cloud company needs to invest a quarter of a billion dollars just to inconvenience 3000 workers with a commute, and narrow their talent pool to the people they can hustle up work-permits for in the US? (Yeah, I know, Google has offices outside the US, too).

I think the answer is a combination of culture and sunk cost. The people hiring do so locally for personal cultural reasons; hiring globally means changing almost all busines processes. They already have thousands of co-located employees, so switching to a global model would entail drastically changing the nature of their company.

It's "only" about $85k/year, and as many others have pointed out the value of the building is not likely to go to zero (although seeing the ghost of Detroit...)

Anyhow, not saying I support it, but at the salaries Google can afford it makes sense...

I agree, but I feel that I already know the answer. That is the assumption being the best talent is on the peninsula. If you open an office too far south or across the bay, then people from Mountain View upto San Francisco will not come to work for you.

Google already buses its employees from all corners of the Bay. So they know there is talent outside of the Peninsula.

Right.

But, there's still the time cost of commuting. If you pay a premium to live in SF, then you're not going to want to commute 90-120 minutes so South Bay. Then another 90 minutes back at night. In that situation, you'd be paying a premium to live in cramped quarters, in a city with thousands of things to do, but have zero time to do any of it during the week.

I meet people on Caltrain coming from Gilroy commuting to work all the way in SF. Commuting 3-4hrs a day. WTF? I guess there's nothing to do in Gilroy, or they hate their families. Joking aside, the honest answer is the only affordable, nuclear-family homes are in the far-south. (Back to joking. Can we even call Gilroy the Bay-area?)

As it seems to me. When you make the decision to come to the Bay-area.

* You have to decide, do I want to drastically overpay for where I live to be close to SF?

* Do I want to commute 1-3 hours a day?

* Or, do I want to have roommates when I am 30+ years old?

> But, there's still the time cost of commuting. If you pay a premium to live in SF, then you're not going to want to commute 90-120 minutes so South Bay.

Yeah. That's what I meant. Google could build offices in the Gilroy or the East Bay to improve those employees lives. Companies like Uber are opening offices in Oakland, which is a pretty central location from BART and freeways.

"You have to decide, do I want to drastically overpay for where I live to be close to SF?"

Of course, if you make good tech money (say, anything over 200K) then its a moot issue-you can overpay for ridiculously priced 1-2 bedroom apartments, and still have money left over to save/indulge with.

That's only true for the small number of outliers who make that much. For the rest of us, there's Gilroy and Santa Cruz and Livermore.

So Google et al. should start putting offices in Gilroy, etc.

I would imagine that it's more for the proximity between employees.

> That is the assumption being the best talent is on the peninsula.

I've never seen good data to back this up. Are you aware of any sources? (I know you weren't making the claim yourself.) Talent is already difficult to register, and I find it absurd to think that all the best engineers in the world would cluster in west bay. The only people clustering are those who want to work for google (or startup XYZ), not the people google necessarily wants to hire.

Actually Sunnyvale isn't considered part of the SF peninsula even though it borders Mountain View.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Peninsula

"A second Apple spaceship will be landing in Sunnyvale", October 2015, maybe it has something to do with it, somehow. http://fortune.com/2015/10/02/apple-spaceship-sunnyvale/ "The transaction is another sign—as if you need any more—of Apple’s tremendous expansion, potentially providing enough room for more than 3,000 workers. "

Like IBM Almaden, for example: http://www.research.ibm.com/labs/almaden/

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