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Comment by metildaa | Hacker News Reader

Is Google just desparate to expand in the Bay area? I guess its nearby to commuter rail, so there is some infrastructure, but unless San Jose starts doing many upzones, or Google includes over 10k units of housing, this will boost rent and property prices in the area.

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They don't care, their employees can / will be able to afford the cost of living, and others will flock from the areas around to work low-paying jobs to support them.

I'm leaving the area because I don't want to be forced to work for a FAANG to be able to have what should be middle-class lifestyle abilities without having to worry about how I'd be so much better off just working at one of them. I find it fairly appalling that no BigNameCos are at least trying to work at:

a) remote work being a thing they offer b) expanding on meaningful satellite office space

I don't want to really hear about how Amazon is trying to do this - they are simply exploiting alternate economies for their own gain instead of genuinely deciding to bolster them to give everyone involved an upside.

I don't buy into the belief that this is the only place where people can build good software, that this is the only place to meet people to build great opportunities. The sooner we stop continually buying into this the sooner we can work on a change.

In regards to your point 'b', Google at least does have some rather substantial offices outside of Mountain View, but other than NYC and Zurich (the big ones) they don't get a lot of publicity I guess. For example Pittsburgh & Waterloo are two great offices that are in smaller more affordable cities, and both offices are growing.

I don't think you can say the same for Amazon, Facebook and Apple though. When my wife worked at Apple Canada a decade ago the trend was to strip engineering from remote offices and leave them as marketing/sales orgs only. I understand that changed some in the last bit, but I'm not sure how substantially. Amazon's offices here in the greater Toronto area are growing, but they're in Toronto, where cost of living is extremely high.

Google does to some degree, however, from what I know (and Googlers feel free to jump in) it's non trivial to work for the Cloud team in sunnyvale or wherever but actually work from the Pittsburgh office. Because you can't do this sort of thing, the type of work that may be available to you at any given office not around headquarters may be limiting.

I could be wrong on the above, but it's what I've minimally gathered from talking to some friends / recruiters over the years.

Yeah, you're roughly correct. There are exceptions. But in general 'remote' sites (hate that term) have learned over time to avoid excessive fragmentation, as that has led to undesirable results. Sites tend to try to focus on a small number of teams with a strong centre of gravity.

I know Apple has some engineers that work in other offices - there’s a good component in Cork (Ireland) in Software Engineering, and other offices where engineers work out of.

Similarly, I know of a fair number of engineers at Facebook working or who have worked out of their London office.

The big tech companies definitely prefer to centralize engineering though, simply because video conferencing software is not there yet, and in-person communication is still far superior to the remote communication tools we have today.

I say this as someone who works at one of the companies mentioned above.

This is the only place where they can effectively make an echo chamber. Try going to Indianapolis with their political views. A messiah complex won't go to far in the Circle City.

It has been agonizingly slow, but the BART extension is slowly closing in on downtown San Jose. That opens up a lot of the East Bay to commute in by rail.

The BART accessible parts of the East Bay are not especially cheaper than the Peninsula. Prices already reflect the substantial tech job market in SF.

The cheaper BART accessible parts of the East bay substantially cheaper, though not cheap. Peninsula can be the triple or four times the price per square foot.

https://m.estately.com/bay-area-home-affordability-transit-s...

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