Google will open a new office complex and add hundreds of jobs in Taiwan | Hacker News Reader

Google will open a new office complex and add hundreds of jobs in Taiwan

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253 pointsjrwan80 comments

>Last year, the project trained about 5,000 students in AI technology and 50,000 digital marketers.

I feel like Taiwan represents a talent opportunity like no other. I dream of starting an engineering company there that is literally a clone of some upcoming business model, and doing nothing but capping the work week at 40 hours and guaranteeing 4 weeks vacation. I could snipe the best talent on hand in the country, which is at the very least equal to some of the best silicon valley has to offer, at nearly half the rates. Lord forbid we target foreign contracts and the company can pay near US rates. I'd pilfer everyone's engineering department ;)

Overworked, underpaid, extremely competent was my experience of Taiwanese engineering. Google is good to step up in Taiwan - I believe it will pay dividends for them. I wonder what the Google work culture and salaries are like for their Taipei 101 office engineers? Last I checked it was about 2,000$/month for entry level.

> I feel like Taiwan represents a talent opportunity like no other.

Yup.

When I was in Korea I met a few Taiwanese that my employer poached from Asus, HTC, Benq, ...

The state of their tech scene seemed quite dire. They would easily double their salary in Korea, for a pretty similar CoL. Eventually most got fed up with the Korean work culture and left for even higher salaries in... mainland China!

A lack of language/cultural barriers would work well for those who go to mainland China. 5-10% of Taiwanese currently reside on the mainland, due largely to China granting long term resident status (with full rights to work and public services) to virtually everyone. It's a masterstroke in increasing ties and knowledge transfer while undermining the island's economy through brain drain.

Yup, that easily fits in the evil genius category

Plenty of Taiwanese and Korean and even Japanese SDEs work in the mainland because the pay is much better (this is how it was when I was working at MS China). China is almost second only to the states in programmer salaries.

Tech companies are the ones to blame. There is insane numbers of untapped talent willing to work remote and to adapt to the bay area time zone if needed. They'll also work for less than 1/10th of their US based ones.

There are two possible explanations:

1- Tech companies didn't try to expand overseas; didn't care and just tried to limit salaries inland (I just remembered their fiasco).

2- Tech companies failed to expand overseas. This might be due to concentrating in a single location (India) for all outsourcing.

I think they should try to have satellite offices in most countries out-there. Instead of big ones, rather small ones that higher only the best of the best of that particular country.

They don't even need to look abroad. Plenty of the flyover country and the south eastern USA would work Cali hours and accept probably half or less the pay for a better qol than can be had in the Bay area.

Central VA has UVA and VTech, half the people I work with went to one, the other, it both. A lot of them pull maybe $100,000/year. Around my area that's a pretty comfortable pay, few acres and 3000sqft would cost maybe 150k all in.

And Charlottesville has Ting FTTH. The fiber in Silly Valley is AFAIK in SF and to the north.

>> a clone of some upcoming business model

>> target foreign contracts

Both involve working for someone for a long time, then leaving on your own. Really high risk, and people will just dump all their problems on you.

This is actually what I've been looking into - and the biggest issue is:

1. Capital

2. Crony/Local Graft.

3. Supply Chain/Logistics

4. Talented people/niche rows. Thankfully if it's software, Eastern Europe has best bang for buck, Filipinos are 50/50 and the language barriers for Chinese/Japanese are high (but not so high if you take some time to learn nuances e.g. JLPT N4-N3 for Japanese)

5. Local banking regulation/Residency/Working as a non-national (foreigner.) Especially if you're an American (FACTA)

Tried, and tried again and just you need a solid team of people that know the natural climate/society and see if your clone can be molded to fit theirs.

Still trying though :)

This will be good for Taiwan and god Google. They already have a pretty decent presence in TW, though my understanding is there was some env but not a whole lot of eng. This will up the presence. It’s interesting they’re doing more in TW than in JP (if it’s strictly about talent rather than a kind of bridge to China).

It be good if Google influences a better work-life balance given the propensity to stay in the office till the boss leaves even when there’s nothing to do (it’s not just a trope in their TV shows, it actually happens a lot for office workers).

Remember when (USA) mall bookstores had technical books (or at least programming books)? In Taiwan they still do. I remember seeing Pro/E CAD manual in Chinese there among many others.

Do people still go to mall bookstores? There is a pretty big online bookstore now.

Yeah. Going to a bookstore has the same feeling as going clothes shopping with respect to online shopping: it feels good to look at lots of product and to feel the pages in your hand. You can't tell if something will spark joy over Amazon.

> Overworked, underpaid, extremely competent was my experience of Taiwanese engineering

As an undergrad student studying both Electrical Engineering and CS in Taiwan, this is what I heard from my seniors. For most of the tech job, you are held "responsible" for the progress, so overtime is very common.

We're held responsible for our work in San Francisco as well.

My take is that the overwork aspect is raw culture - arbitrarily needing to stay as late as your boss while you fiddle with your phone, lacking any actual work to do.

Underpay is because of market forces - the average salary is 30k because the average salary is 30k because the average salary is 30k.

My advice to you is learn to pull solo contract work off US companies early.

This is similar to what I am doing in Seoul with a side project called Current - http://currentdev.com

Are you saying that you want find a business model with potential that is being fudged by the silicon valley slackers, who only care about work life balance and spending quality time with friends and families, and try to get that built in Taiwan where you can overwork and exploit desperate workers. Talking like a true visionary.

I visited Taiwan recently and was shocked by the weird economics there. Rent, food, clothing, and labor are extremely cheap. Foreign goods and property are insanely expensive. It's clear there's wealth, as I saw several dozen rare BMWs and Audis, and some Lambos, Ferraris, Bentleys. But then I read that the average annual salary of a new university graduate is $11,000 USD.

It's also a very friendly place to foreigners. I'm surprised there aren't any enterprising people jumping from Shenzhen to Taipei now that Shenzhen is so expensive.

If you're a Taiwan local that is able to sell the local talent in the form of offshore services for even 70% of US rates or even just have a remote job that pays well, you will have a Lambo/early retirement/whatever faster than you know it, because you will be able to save the entirety of your post-tax salary.

As someone who is doing exactly that I can confirm!

That's a common sign of huge wealth disparity. There isn't a middle class for luxury goods manufacturers to target, and the ultra rich can pay pretty much whatever you want them to.

I spotted more Maseratis than BMWs and there were already a lot of BMWs.

Totally agree with the rest of your answer but rent is definitely not extremely cheap, at least in Taipei (wich is where most of the jobs are). It can actually be argued that the property market in Taipei is a bubble.

That's not true. It is indeed expensive to buy a house, but rent itself is definitely very cheap. This is of course a clear sign that the property market is a bubble there.

I am glad to see Taiwan getting this type of attention from a major tech company. Taiwan's economy really needs an economic lift, after decades of brain drain and economic dominance by the People's Republic of China, the United States, and Japan.

I am concerned, though, that this is Google's way of getting around issues of not being able to operate with a free hand in China, i.e. it will serve as a platform for developing Chinese-language services and be ready to release them in the PRC when they can do so without attracting negative attention. There's some history of this -- in the 90s and 2000s it was a common strategy among global corporations to launch and iterate ideas and products in Taiwan before moving them over to China.

ETA:

Another more depressing assessment: Google is placing a bet on annexation, as the PRC has repeatedly insisted it will do by any means necessary (see "Xi Jinping Warns Taiwan That Unification Is the Goal and Force Is an Option," https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/world/asia/xi-jinping-tai...)

Another more depressing assessment: Google is placing a bet on annexation, as the PRC has repeatedly insisted it will do by any means necessary

Unlikely. Taiwan is really no closer to annexation now than it was in 1972. The situation with Taiwan has always been left intentionally vague. The CCP doesn't have to suffer the humiliation of acknowledging their own impotence and illegitimacy in bringing a 'rogue province' to heel, and the US doesn't have to maintain troops in Taiwan. No one is happy, but no one has to go to war either.

Some differences between 1972 and 2019 include the U.S. no longer has a military presence in Taiwan, and the PRC has engaged in a vast modernization of the PLA, including its air force and navy (https://thediplomat.com/2018/09/less-visible-aspects-of-chin...).

Is it enough to carry out a successful amphibious assault on and occupation of Taiwan? Maybe not (see https://www.ft.com/content/44586804-195c-11e9-9e64-d150b3105...), but Beijing is very adept at pulling other strategic levers to undermine Taiwan's economy, society, and democratic institutions.

I doubt China will actively invade Taiwan. It goes against the soft power mentality they usually prefer. More than likely, Taiwan will be compromised by Chinese companies, power and influence and its democracy corrupted from within. There's also a strong pro-China and pro-unification movement.

Yes, of course. But I think I was responding more to the linked article and what seemed to be the original claim that China hasn't ruled out using force to take Taiwan. My point regarding that is,

1. Xi's sabre-rattling is nothing new. He's not the first scoundrel in Beijing to level these threats. And,

2. I doubt Google is basing their decision on any of this.

I think sometimes Westerners are shocked by how belligerent the Chinese government has become. Actually, the CCP has always been belligerent and their demands of and threats against our treaty allies have always been truculent and unreasonable. It's just that now we've made these scoundrels very powerful by trading with them. I hope its become clear to everyone that this was a civilization-level strategic blunder - that knee-capping western industrial labour unions probably wasn't worth empowering a new 21st century fascism in Asia.

Particularly in Google's case, I doubt they see it as empowering 21st century fascism in Asia. There's no love lost between Google's executive leadership and the Chinese government. China has attempted to directly hack Google and steal its source code and data on multiple occasions, and there have been previous pull-outs over diplomatic relations between the two of them.

Rather, I think Google views its China expansion as a way to get an information beachhead on China's 800 million citizens. Once they become an ingrained habit for China's populace, they become very difficult to get rid of (the same way Uber and AirBnB have become virtually impossible to get rid of, despite breaking numerous municipal laws), and can leverage that foothold to expand their influence.

Amphibious assaults are really difficult, particularly of a large populated landmass. Iwo Jima cost the U.S. 30,000 casualties, Okinawa almost 70,000, to capture a tiny island with a garrison of about 100,000 with a huge (> 6:1) numerical superiority. Japan's military was a joke at the time. The U.S. didn't even try to capture Formosa (Taiwan), and atom-bombed Japan rather than risk an invasion of the home islands. The force advantage required for an amphibious assault scales super-linearly, and beyond a certain population may not be possible at all, because of the inability to get more than a certain number of landing craft on the beach in a given time period.

Taiwan is

- small, dense, and urban, which means that everything of value is close together, and urban warfare is extremely difficult and costly.

- forested and mountainous, which would present problems with guerillas after a main invasion is over

- across a sea, so they will probably lose people just trying to get to Taiwan in the first place

If China were to militarily invade Taiwan they would probably bleed quite a lot and be the king of ashes in the end.

>king of ashes in the end

At the very most, king of at least 2 generations of extremely politically active, very pissed off people.

These are the people that took over their government buildings back in 2014 because of a suggested trade deal with China. As the young people did so, local businesses donated food, water, blankets, pillows etc in droves, demonstrated a cross-generational political activism that would be an absolute fucking nightmare to deal with as a brute-force conqueror.

Oops, the water lines to your PRC bases all clogged at the same time, weird!

Oops suddenly the internet doesn't work for PRC government offices, huh, strange!

>Google is placing a bet on annexation

Why would that possibly be a reason to invest in Taiwan? Unless you can somehow imagine that "annexation" is a purely de jure arrangement that leaves Taiwan's regulatory structure untouched (very unlikely), any corporate structure you erect will have to be totally rebuilt upon annexation (employment law changes, people move, etc); if you're lucky you can keep the buildings (assuming they aren't bombed).

The better reason IMO would be that Taiwan is at this point cheaper than Japan or South Korea, safer than mainland SE Asia, and has (much) more room for growth than Singapore. As a base of operations in East Asia it is one of the best choices, political stability notwithstanding.

Annexation can take place with the direct threat of extreme violence but without a shot being fired, a la Hitler's "Anschluss" of 1938.

Under the terms of the 1997 Hong Kong handover, China allowed some institutions to be preserved (albeit greatly watered down) while permitting foreign companies to continue operations and have better access to the larger market (mainland China). Beijing regularly trots out this "One Country, Two Systems" model for Taiwan, something that many Taiwanese reject (recent survey results: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3663870)

I agree with your second point. Positioning Taiwan as a center of Asian operations is something Taipei actively promoted in the late 1990s as Hong Kong waned as an international center of business. It never took off then, but I hope it can get some traction now.

> safer than mainland SE Asia

Safer in what sense? crime? traffic? other?

I was primarily thinking about corruption and political stability, and civil rights (particularly women’s rights) are a concern wrt Malaysia, which otherwise leads in the EDBI for the region.

Got it, thanks.

Why is developing Chinese language services a bad thing?

Because Google is developing unethical censorship tools for the Chinese government.

OP strongly implied that working with or serving the Chinese at all was a bad thing.

They're 1/5 of the world.

I'm sure this is new office is for Google to move its "Chinese work" away from a campus where Western or other liberally minded employees would protest.

And that is good. If they don't want to do it, the jobs will go elsewhere

Facilitating authoritarian control of a population is a...good thing? Mind expounding?

Support a language that billions use is a bad thing?

Don't shift the goal posts. Nobody is objecting to "mandarin being supported". The issue has always been with working with a totalitarian state and working on censorship tools for said state. Saying "the jobs will go elsewhere" is not a tenable argument. Google providing those tools is not better than another actor doing the same thing.

This is a common practice today, even among startups. Being in Taiwan can give you access to mainland markets without the risk of the PRC coming by and demanding your tech, or someone frivolously suing you and you losing in a PRC court.

I don't see what it follows that google is placing a bet on annexation, this seems almost the opposite of that. If you wanted to support that out of china, go to Hong Kong maybe. This seems against annexation if anything.

I lived in Taiwan for a couple of years. The cost of living is also extremely low, which will benefit Google and many other companies that open offices there.

A nice apartment in a great part of town was only around $350/month USD. I also had the benefit of making US wages contracting at the time.

> I also had the benefit of making US wages contracting at the time.

Ohhh, do tell more. This is my plan sometime over the next 5 years. Lived there as a broke English teacher in my early 20s, can't wait to go back as a working engineer.

I quit my job before I left with enough to last me about 6 months, in savings, just in case I needed it for expenses, etc.

While I was there, I started consulting and found a remote gig that didn't really care where I was located. The only downside is that you are now 12 hours off from the EST timezone in the US.

Morning meetings are now your night-time, which can be inconvenient, and you just won't be able to communicate during part of the day, but I was able to make it work.

If you want to stay longer than 3 months, you will either need to study Mandarin (which I did) and get a student visa (you will need to find a university/school that will allow you to do this..which is pretty affordable) or do a visa run where you leave and come back (I think you can do this up to 2 years).

I studied Mandarin for about a year and then traveled around Asia every few months for another year. It was a great experience.

I wanted to do this since I was 19..but couldn't make it happen until I was 30. The only issue I had was that making friends with other expats was difficult.

Most expats are in their early 20s and only interested in partying and drinking every night and teaching English during the day. If that sounds like a disaster, it is.

Many of the English schools also aren't really picky about the teachers they hire, so you will get some people that shouldn't be anywhere near a classroom..especially with elementary aged kids.

I think Taiwanese engineering is a great bunch of seemingly underpaid developers. I visited Taiwan for 2 weeks from India and had a few observations:

1. Food and transport are quite cheap. So cheap that almost everyone eats out for all their meals.

2. Everyone stays far from the office. They said the area around the offices is expensive but the rent I heard did not sound so high. Most of my friends in Mumbai, India already pay rent close to that figure and they get by just fine.

3. Consumerism is quite high. Almost everyone in the office had fancy clothes and gadgets which are usually considered signs of good wealth in India.

My conclusion was that people are not paid a lot, and they spend a lot of what they make on clothes and gadgets but that is just the picture I could paint.

Would appreciate some input from people who have more knowledge about Taiwanese culture.

I think this is a great opportunity for some Asia-oriented Americans. I lived in Japan, and the quality of life there is amazing when compared to what we get in US cities. The problem is that most Japanese companies are terrible to work for. If you work for Google but live in a modernized Asian country, you can probably get the best of both worlds.

When I visited last AWS was planning to open a large data center near taipei with similar AI ambitions. It's a small island and it's interesting to me that these two giants are both headed there with similar projects in mind.

Good for Google –– and smart to open in the sovereign democracy of Taiwan rather than China.

After google acquired HTC's mobile department, the salary in google Taiwan is localized too. One day, the world-wide capitalist finally realized: "Wow, we can hire good engineer with pennies...in Taiwan."

In 5 days:

"whoops nevermind"

How long until the office is closed as a result of PRC protestations?

Probably never? Google already has a significant number of employees in Taiwan (partially because they bought part of HTC).

They've had floors of Taipei 101 for about a decade now so I think this is unlikely.

PRC can dream all they want but they have no authority on the island.

At the end of the day, laws and authority are just a bunch of humans playing make believe with each other.

It all comes down to enforcement. Without enforcement, laws and authority are meaningless.

Take the USA and England as analogous to Taiwan and China.

In the 1700s, England had a "One-England policy" and claimed authority over the US colonies. The US colonies disagreed. Some of the international community acknowledged the One-England policy. Some didn't.

At the end of the day England tried to enforce their authority/laws and lost. Thus, England actually didn't have authority over the US colonies.

I suspect something similar may happen someday with Taiwan (though hopefully with less violence than the American Revolutionary War).

A key difference is that the governments of the British colonies in North America were officially installed by, and reported to, Britain.

cf. the Taiwanese government, the KMT, which at one point controlled the mainland, but was pushed into exile on Taiwan by the communists. The existence of a free Taiwan threatens the legitimacy of the communist government on the mainland: the PRC, like most propaganda-fueled authoritarian regimes, does not like anything that suggests there's an alternative to their system.

It's also just not a good analogy because Britain didn't have missiles pointed across the strait, or a humongous military that Taiwan has even acknowledged they can't contend with. Diplomacy is the only thing that's kept Taiwan free in the current state of affairs.

Well, the threat of nuclear war with the U.S. also helps with stability a bit.

And a US carrier group in the region

Another key difference is that Taiwan Strait is much narrower than the Atlantic Ocean.

I think the PRC is less bothered about taking extreme measures than the UK was also less incompetent.

If George III had had as big a bee in his bonnet about reclaiming the colonies as the PRC has about Taiwan I doubt that America would have remained independent - compare the Uk Army of 1770's vs Wellingtons Army circa 1812.

At the same time Taiwan is so small that any invasion would destroy anything of value. It is so dense, urban, forested, and mountainous that it would combine the worst parts of combat in Syria and Vietnam.

Whether they have authority on the island or not, they have pull with Google.

It's strange the focus is on a speculative project that is not near happening from a company not very cooperative with China when there are lots of companies who are doing business as usual in China

Really? Among companies of its size, Google seems like the one China has the least pull over. Apple's entire business lives and dies with a supply chain in China. Microsoft runs bing in China, and probably other services as well.

Arguably, this news may be the most real confirmation that Dragonfly isn't going to happen. As Google likely would not increase it's investment in Taiwan while trying to get China on board with their return to China's search market.

Tons of Chinese companies do business with Taiwan (Chinese smartphone makers and TSMC or Foxconn for example) without issue. China wants reunification, it's not like there's a full on blockade or anything.

For TSMC and Foxconn it's the other way around. They are Taiwanese companies with significant business ties in the PRC.

Interesting. If I were Taiwanese, I would be very wary of the aspirations, and perhaps keep a #BlockSidewalk campaign idling in the driveway. I don't trust Google's ability to steward and govern a thoughtful city-building project that respects local agency and cares to tread softly around local power and autonomy

The article is not about Project Sidewalk or smart cities, it's about opening an office campus.

I recognize that. But it's plainly a big connected operation, at least until we break it up. They operate via succession -- one subsidiary moves in and helps create space for the next.

fwiw, you do people a disservice when you assume they don't know what they're talking about, just because you don't see the connection. If you took a second to offer me good faith and maybe presumed I'd read the article, then you could have responded with substance or asked a question, like a curious person might. Or not -- I wouldn't particular mind if you passed by. But your response was condescending and silly. What you said was obvious, and so the implication for others to follow was that I'd simply read the title and you were "calling me out". Basically, I feel very hackernews'd through our small interaction :/

Disclaimer: I've spent months on a civic research fellowship in Taipei. I live in Toronto. I've done community organizing in both. I work in tech. I have tons of experience with both places and topics -- not just an article.

I downvoted the comment because you didn't connect what you were saying to the article, and so the comment reads as off-topic. Google has offices in dozens (if not hundreds) of cities around the world and has only launched Sidewalk in one of them, so it's not clear that a new Taipei office would lead to a Sidewalk launch there.

I hope this makes sense. I unfortunately cannot remove the downvote at this point.

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