Hacker News Reader

Comment by ialyos | Hacker News Reader

That isn't true. Downtown Toronto has multiple Google engineers. I know one in brain and one in cloud. One has been in TO for ~2.5 years, the other for 1 year. As far as I know the only way to get into the office is by special permission. One of them only got their role because they said they were quitting due to the waterloo commute.

Fwiw I'm a Canadian that just signed a Google offer to work out of downtown SF because I hate the winter too. I think people care more or less about the weather based on their hobbies / interests.

View on HN

It absolutely is true in actual practice; unless you're some unicorn ML researcher all our engineering talent is in Waterloo (or Montreal). If it was possible to work in Toronto I wouldn't have had to have sold my house and moved my family years back.

We do have a rather comfortable bus which runs from Toronto, if you don't mind the 2 hour (each way) commute.

(The company I worked for was bought by Google back in 2011. We had people in NY and Toronto; all our Toronto people were told we had to move to Waterloo and that was that. Most of us have stayed @ Google but for some the practice of having to rip up their entire lives in Toronto to move wasn't ideal and they left.)

The number of engineers at Google Toronto is so small that they're the exception that proves the rule, though. For all intents and purposes beyond some very special cases (and the Hinton stuff) you can treat the site as having no engineering.

> The number of engineers at Google Toronto is so small that they're the exception that proves the rule, though.

Exceptions don't prove the rule.

The point of this idiom is that they end up not being exceptions at all.

That is not what I understand it to mean -- rather, the opposite. That is, finding an engineer at the Toronto office is so improbable that it is remarkable, hence you are reminded that it is normally an engineer free zone.

There are some idioms that do mean it is unexceptional. You might be familiar with the Pratchettism "Million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com