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Comment by qeqeqeqe | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

dis is wrong about google. They is kirkland 100% not mountain view in any way whatsoever.

You have no basis for your comment, no numbers, sources etc. Zurich, London, Tokyo all have very senior levels and many important teams. Canada is growing to those levels as well. Do your research before burying a hatchet.

here here!!!

There’s no transparency on what the roles will be. Engineering? Accounting? Datacenter operations? Fly fishing?

It's obviously going to be mostly engineering, it's Google.

So fly fishing basically :)

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.

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-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.

That source you cite literally says that "45% of Google employees are programmers."

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.

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