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abbasmehdi | 10 years ago

Why not East Bay or South Bay, or anywhere but the peninsula?

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e12e|10 years ago

Isn't the real WTF why a cloud company needs to invest a quarter of a billion dollars just to inconvenience 3000 workers with a commute, and narrow their talent pool to the people they can hustle up work-permits for in the US? (Yeah, I know, Google has offices outside the US, too).

Inthenameofmine|10 years ago

I think the answer is a combination of culture and sunk cost. The people hiring do so locally for personal cultural reasons; hiring globally means changing almost all busines processes. They already have thousands of co-located employees, so switching to a global model would entail drastically changing the nature of their company.

matheweis|10 years ago

It's "only" about $85k/year, and as many others have pointed out the value of the building is not likely to go to zero (although seeing the ghost of Detroit...)

Anyhow, not saying I support it, but at the salaries Google can afford it makes sense...

yes_or_gnome|10 years ago

I agree, but I feel that I already know the answer. That is the assumption being the best talent is on the peninsula. If you open an office too far south or across the bay, then people from Mountain View upto San Francisco will not come to work for you.

cpeterso|10 years ago

Google already buses its employees from all corners of the Bay. So they know there is talent outside of the Peninsula.

hkmurakami|10 years ago

I would imagine that it's more for the proximity between employees.

duaneb|10 years ago

> That is the assumption being the best talent is on the peninsula.

I've never seen good data to back this up. Are you aware of any sources? (I know you weren't making the claim yourself.) Talent is already difficult to register, and I find it absurd to think that all the best engineers in the world would cluster in west bay. The only people clustering are those who want to work for google (or startup XYZ), not the people google necessarily wants to hire.

ycosynot|10 years ago

"A second Apple spaceship will be landing in Sunnyvale", October 2015, maybe it has something to do with it, somehow. http://fortune.com/2015/10/02/apple-spaceship-sunnyvale/ "The transaction is another sign—as if you need any more—of Apple’s tremendous expansion, potentially providing enough room for more than 3,000 workers. "