Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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