People mentioned multiple big offices being opened in various locations, none of them in SV.

I completely agree that SV isn't a very attractive place nowadays, especially not for young talent.

Sure, we just use SV as a great example of places located in the middle of nowhere with tones of potential for Tech Giants. Look at the FB campus in Menlo Park, the median employee age is 28 years old. Now look around the campus... it's a giant swamp and there's a free way. That's it... oh and it's next to East Palo Alto.

Young talented folks came en mass. It does work to open a campus in the middle of nowhere. Why Tech giants still go to large and expensive cities? It doesn't make any sense but to satisfy a few folks who for the most part share an apartment with roommates or rent a studio in downtowns making 6 figures.

The vast majority of employees who "moved" to the new Menlo Park office were old Facebook employees who worked for them in Palo Alto right before the move.

Facebook now has an NYC office too. My uneducated guess is that their candidates now have far more options than they did 10 years ago, and more people would rather not live in SV.

Have you ever visited their campus in Menlo Park? :) you’ll see young and fresh employees all over the place.. they finished their new campus next to their old buildings and are now building another campus next to the new campus. On top of that they’ve bought land around to build a Facebook village for employees. It looks like 5 college campuses in one. Offices in cities like SF are very limited in space and can hold only a few employees. This is true for google, FB, linkedin, etc. Majority of the folks are recruited on teir main campuses in SV.

No doubt many new hires are OK relocating to Menlo Park. Evidently, many are not. Facebook would not invest in an expensive offices in NYC, for instance, if everyone was just happy to relocate to its huge campus in Menlo Park.

My comment referred to the first proper Facebook campus was going to be very close to Palo Alto since that's where their first offices were. Just like has been the case for Google and a bunch of other SV employers.

I'm a young person considering job offers in the Bay Area right now - one of my major considerations is that I want to live in a city. One company is in Oakland, which makes that possible, and the other two are in SV, which makes it very difficult. It's really dissuading me from wanting to do stuff in SV.

If you want to live in a city, don't go anywhere in SF Bay would be my advice.

SF is not a normal city anymore. Oakland isn't much of a city.

I'd focus elsewhere.

I don't speak for all young folks, but at least for me I just want to be in a big city where there's a lot going on - people from all over, interesting events and new experiences. Oh and also good public transportation, most young people aren't super into owning cars. It's hard to say if people would move to the middle of nowhere for the big names, I'm sure a lot of people would but I definitely would not, and I believe many of my friends feel similarly.

It's a bit of circular logic. Big names are where big populations are. By that criteria San Francisco city has more "nowhereness" than San Jose.

New York metro area is much more nowhere than Tokyo metro if you want to go buy sheer population in a continuous urban conglomeration.

And to me, personally, NYC is just as nowhere as Boise, Idaho. Just a bunch of people living in groups doing things they find interesting, or can't leave due to financial/family/personal reasons. You can do lots of stuff in and around Boise that the same people can't do in NYC and visa versa, depending on individual preferences.

Many folks I know get bored quickly in NYC and SF. I do. I still love NYC and SF, though. I suffer from a bit of Stockholm Syndrome ;)

> NYC is just as nowhere as Boise, Idaho. Just a bunch of people living in groups doing things they find interesting, or can't leave due to financial/family/personal reasons

I am having difficulty thinking of any group of humans living anywhere that doesn't meet this definition. The same could be said for a mining town in Siberia, or an uncontacted tribe living in the Amazon, or prisoners in a prison.

> You can do lots of stuff in and around Boise that the same people can't do in NYC and [vice] versa, depending on individual preferences.

The list of things you can do in Boise that you can't do in NYC is effectively zero if you exclude "the outdoors" as a category. For people who don't prioritize the outdoors as highly as other things in life, this makes Boise effectively nowhere by comparison.

It's hard to definitively say, but I'd bet that the young people enjoy getting paid between 2x and 50x what they'd earn back home then retiring when they're 30 more than they enjoy the fame.

50x? FAANGs pay well, but you are wayyy off.