> Even if they spent 150k per engineer in relocation costs (1 time fee), it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t make that up in terms of cheaper real estate and lower salaries.

Are you suggest that elite talent wants lower salaries in the Midwest or Florida as long as they can get a one time relocation payout?

Google might save support staff salaries, but I don't think they'll save engineer salaries with your plan, they might even have to boost them.

That’s how it works in medicine - salaries are higher in less desirable areas.

I think you're missing the point. It's a tough sell to relocate someone and give them a lower salary. Who'd take that deal?

Yeah, I'm agreeing with you?

My comment is that in less desirable locations people need to be paid more to be there if they don't have to be. The cost of living is not really relevant.

Sorry, I read your comment wrong. Looks like I'm missing the point.

People who understand the lower salary is easily made up for by lower living costs.

I'm not sure I'm convinced. To give an example a recruiter once tried to get me to move to some place in India (2002). He told me I'd be making $30k a year which was 10x what locals made so I'd be living like a king. Even if that was true that I could live like a king for that salary in India all I could think about is how I'd be stuck there because I'd have no money to leave to a more expensive place in the future.

Yep - this is an extreme example, but the main reason it's a bad idea.

If you live in a high cost of living area, but are okay living with roommates you can save a ton of money. More than enough to make up the difference compared to living in a low cost of living area.

You also get better quality of life and a lot more opportunities - meeting people for work/friends/dating. It's also better to have a high salary in order to more easily keep a high salary.

I think you also learn more faster from increased exposure to talented people. I grew up in Buffalo which is a nice and very cheap place, but there was nobody to learn from.

Can't speak for anyone else but I gladly take a hit in my disposable income (it's not that much of a hit) if it means I can live in place where a lot of interesting stuff is happening aside from work (Berlin, NYC, Amsterdam, etc.). I don't need a big flat and I have few expensive hobbies.

Maybe it will be different in my thirties and forties but right now I want to either live in a (cool) city to work on exiting projects or be travelling. It may sound pretentious to some, but it's what I want.

I would imagine quite a few people feel similarly. In that way a campus in New York City makes sense I believe.

That's partly true and partly not.

In particular, if one anticipates returning to a pricey location later in life (e.g. needing to take care of elderly relatives there), one has to save for retirement at a higher level than if one can stay in the cheaper place forever.

Cost of living comparisons used to justify salary reductions rarely account for such scenarios.

With that said, the numbers can still work out to make it a good financial deal, it's just less automatically true.

> People who understand the lower salary is easily made up for by lower living costs.

But it's not for lots of people who can afford positive savings in both locations, unless the absolute pay difference is less than the absolute difference in CoL at the level they would maintain in each place; even people who would prefer the lifestyle and environment of a cheaper (often rural) place often spend most of their working life in an area with a more robust economy and higher pay and CoL to increase savings, and then retire to the cheaper place. (A lot of the net domestic migration out from CA is, I suspect, that, as people executing that strategy reach retirement.) And that's not to say anything of how that utilities balance for people who actually prefer the lifestyle and environment of the more expensive location.

You'd definitely have to boost them. I feel like it's always grossly understated in these sorts of threads just how much better quality of life is in a dense city like NYC. Access to culture, to food, to public transportation, to other job opportunities is hard to put a dollar amount on. There's a reason so many people moves to places like NYC and not isolated towns in the midwest.

Personally, I have the opposite opinion. I took a pay cut to leave Seattle ( I lived in Chicago before that, I've lived in dense metro areas for many, many years now) so I could go live in a smaller town.

I can actually afford a house. My dog has a yard to play in. I haven't been mugged since I left! No one uses my doorstep as a bathroom. My neighbors actually come say hi to me and are invested in forming relationships knowing I won't just up in move in the next year due to housing costs. We have decent enough restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, pool halls, movie theater, mall, etc, and if I really want to, I am within driving distance of the city (edit: for a day trip, no way in hell would it work for me as a commute). Yet, I haven't been back since I left.

I think it's more nuanced than your comment indicates. You might be surprised how many people might take up an offer from Google to move to the boonies (I'm at least one).

One thing to point out about the NYC metro area is that there is a ton of land surrounding it with reasonably priced homes in safe areas with less than a 45 minute commute by public transit, where in the Bay Area and Seattle, the waterways are far larger, and transportation options more restricted. Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.

> Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.

A train which sometimes get you there in 45 minutes, sometimes in 60 minutes, sometimes gets cancelled because of (Amtrak signal problems | disabled Amtrak equipment in the Hudson tunnel | overhead wire damage | $ PROBLEM_OF_THE_DAY).

He says while crammed in to an NJTransit train.

NJT is a mess but Metro North is pretty great. I walk to the train and then walk GCT to our office on Park. I grew up in Queens and my commute to Manhattan is shorter now when I live 30 miles outside the city. But I also pay for that with Westchester taxes.

This is absolutely true, from what I've been hearing NJ transit has just been getting worse and worse since I had used it on a daily basis.

It has been going slowly downhill since I moved here two years ago. I'm glad I don't have to go into Penn any longer. Hoboken has its own problems, but at least the NJT cancellations are rare and the trains usually get there within 5 minutes of when they are supposed to.

>Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.

Not to be a ass, but where? And please don't just point out a home with no pictures you just found on Zillow, but a place where you've actually been to which has decent property taxes, decent schools, and is safe? And actually a 45 minute commute, not 45 minutes if you ignore the 20+ minutes it takes to drive your car from home to a train station and pay $50+/month to park for a reserved spot.

I ask this because I used to live in a NYC area highrise and always used to think over the about the seemingly fantastic deals in the suburbs. Then I started looking and realized real-estate websites and Google Maps commuting are a far cry from reality.

Look, you wont find this in the towns with the absolute best schools, and it is only possible to have this sort of commute if you work on top of the lower manhattan path station or penn station. Additionally, prices could've have risen since I last checked, and property taxes in NJ will always be high. But towns ranging from Maplewood to Cranford fall in this price range. Note when I say sizable I'm talking the ~2000 sqft range also.

Maplewood is a great example of homes that look amazing at first glance on real estate websites, but the high property taxes cause your mortgage payment to jump significantly.

Here's a great example. 36 Ball Ter, Maplewood. $550K, ~2200 sqft, interior looks newly renovated, looks really nice in pictures. $15.5K(!!) in taxes. With 20% down you're still looking at $3.5K/Month(includes property taxes) on a 30 year mortgage.

If you look at the price history on Zillow or Trulia, it looks like it was flipped (I think that's when the interior renovation was done) late 2017/early 2018, and the price went up to $750k and has plummeted since then. So the property tax assessment is probably on the pre-renovated value, not the renovated value. So whomever purchases this house can expect a fat tax increase when the town reassess the value.

Also, look at the prices between the East and West side of Maplewood. The East side is fairly close to areas that lots of people would prefer not to live in due to safety concerns.

Again, I'm not trying to be an ass or attack you. I'm just trying to present some real numbers so people have a realistic view when they think the greater NYC area is a place you can escape to when you want access to NYC with a medium CoL. NYC is a very high CoL area and moving to the suburbs can hurt (e.g. terrible commute) in unexpected ways, and you still have a high CoL compared to the majority of country.

Oh for sure, NJ home prices do not tell the whole picture, but the truth is that even with these high taxes, a Software Engineer at a top company should easily be able to afford to live there, even with a spouse that doesn't work.

3.5k a month is affordable to people who make 130k+ a year, which is less than a new grad makes at Google, where this is absolutely cheaper than anything within a comparable commute to google offices in the bay area at all, or around Seattle in school districts of similar quality.

New York Metro is in no way cheap, and I was never trying to make that argument, just that it can be substantially cheaper than the existing major tech hubs.

Reasonably priced homes within 45 minutes of NYC, via train, are definitely not a thing. You're also not even counting our absurd taxes in places like Morristown, Montlcair, Fair Lawn, etc.

No one I know who commutes from outside NYC/Hoboken/Jersey City into NYC has a door-to-door 45 minute commute. 45 minutes might get you to the train station (if the train is running on time), but unless you work right next to Penn Station or Grand Central, it takes at least another 10-15 minutes to get to your desk.

My parents commute from NJ west of the parkway and when things aline the commute is 45 minutes (of course things often don't align). The key piece is that you need to live and work right near the various stops.

If you're within driving distance of Seattle, you're still in the catchment area for working there though. The equivalent would be living in New Jersey or Connecticut or Long Island and working in New York City - which hundreds of thousands of people do.

There's dozens of us!

I didn't mean to come off quite as harsh as that. There are plenty of goal sets that align well to being outside of the city; but I do think that y'all are the minority. When playing the numbers in trying to staff huge multi thousand head campuses catering to a specific minority doesn't add up.

Not many people want to work in those places though. And I say this as an engineer at Google living and working in Manhattan. NYC has a huge draw to it that most other places don't. Good luck attracting top talent to Des Moines or Orlando. Way more would rather work in NYC. You don't want to be in a one-company town either; if you left Google in Orlando, where else could you work without moving? There's no credible competition at the same tier.

Network effects are real.

Feel like most of the top talent was already swept up by Deere , Hy-vee and a couple of the insurance places in Des Moines anyways.

I was in Des Moines a couple of weeks ago to do interviews for our office there. The talent pool of people who would want to work in Des Moines is very local, and the quality is far lower than in bigger metro areas. (the distribution curve skews right) Anyone with talent there tended to want to move out of the area. We ended up postponing our hiring.

Des Moines favors people that want to settle down and have a quiet, comfortable suburban life. It is a nice, clean, orderly place with lots of new infrastructure. The landscape is pristine and beautiful. It has all the creature comforts you need. Nothing wrong with that--if anything, Des Moines is a hot real-estate market right now, including surrounding areas like Ankeny--but by definition that doesn't attract ambitious people.

You can have a good career in Des Moines working for big insurance companies etc. (and many do). But it is not a hot house for the upper end of tech talent. You're looking at a different range of talent there.

>Des Moines favors people that want to settle down and have a quiet, comfortable suburban life.

I'm 24, but that is definitely what appeals to me. The mere thought of working in NYC or other tech hubs is nauseating. I'd feel totally out of place culturally.

FWIW, when I was 24 my dream was to move to a small house in the woods of Vermont, and I was sure I'd never leave New England (I grew up in a small town between Lexington and Concord). Moved to Silicon Valley because I also wanted to found a startup and the Bay Area is realistically the only place for that, and besides, Google had just offered me a job and was paying for my relocation.

Don't underestimate how much your culture can change, particularly if you're young and go into life with an open mind. It's one thing if you have no desire for whatever might bring you to a big city, but if you do have that desire but are stopped because of the nauseating feeling of how your lifestyle & culture might change, that feeling does pass.

Did you just explain why his feelings and culture are wrong with 'you can change'?

> Did you just explain why his feelings and culture are wrong with 'you can change'?

Where in nostrademons' comment did they the parents culture and feelings "wrong"?

NYC is such a big city that you can find everything and everyone here. You're more likely to feel out of place culturally in a small city if you can't find your subculture there, whereas in NYC your subculture is guaranteed to exist. How many hacker groups, meetups, and conventions does random small city have, for example? Or gaming? Or anime? Or comics? We've got all that in spades.

It is still a city. Is it that hard to accept that not everyone wants to live in a city, never mind a metropolis like NYC?

By definition those who don’t want density aren’t located densely enough in a place that a high end tech company can relocate to.

But the old IBM campuses outside of NYC are actually like this. They are usually one or two hours from NYC, in really leafy forested areas...basically country side. People commuting from the city to those places (eg Yorktown in West Chester) are the first ones google attracted with their In-City office, they were extremely successful just because they were in the city and IBM wasn’t.

The problem, though, is that the density outside of cities doesn't exist to support the talent pool required for a large office of a major multinational corporation. By the time you've added enough people to have a sustainable population for the highest tier of a given industry -- which includes multiple alternative employers plus the whole attendant service industry -- you end up with a city.

Of course I accept that not everyone wants to live in a city. The point is, though, that you have to make serious sacrifices if that's your first priority -- you need to either accept a long miserable commute, or acknowledge that you're limiting your ability to grow into the top tier of your chosen profession. Cities have very real beneficial network effects for businesses.

My city is small compared to NYC (about 1mill people) and we have all of that.

I am of a completely opposite opinion, at 24 (now), I wouldn't want to stay in any sparsely populated place.

The likes of NY, Boston are my perfect city. Everything I need is by my doorstep, don't need to own a car (or use it regularly) and can find not-unreasonable rents if I have roommates and don't stay in cheaper locations. (eg. Allston in Boston)

I work in a Boston suburb and can't imagine staying in such a drab place, unless I had a family, kids and all. Almost everyone there is older than me and almost entirely invested in family living. Everything from conversations to activities lack any sense of freshness and feel routine. Don't get me wrong, people seem to be happy there. But, a lot of it hinges on their family and social relationships built with people over many years.

I don't see myself having either of those things at least till I am in my mid 30s. Even then, I would probably live in a condo where human density is larger, rather than suburban sprawls.

In my experience, suburban living comes at the turning point of the exploration-exploitation curve. People who want to explore, will stay in urban locations and see out new experiences .... Until they start feeling good about a certain local optima and "settle down" on it.

My hypothesis is that tech workers usually slog it out in till they get a job (usually in their early-mid twenties) and then start the exploration phase, that may have come sooner for other majors. As a result they prefer staying in cities for longer and till an older age than other majors.

I have noticed this among my peers, but of course it is anecdotal and have no idea how well it will generalize.

But you seem to want to work at a big tech company and exactly what do you mean out of place culturally?

I as a white brit enjoyed working (London UK) for an Arab company which was incredibly diverse - just with I had take a language class at night school.

Not OP, but likely city life vs countryside stuff. Cafes/theatres/etc vs fishing/hiking/woodworking/whatever. Lakeside BBQ in the woods with no people around vs busy park. Everybody-knows-everybody vs big city anonimity. And all that stuff that isn't related to skin color or ethnicity.

How many Google engineers do you think would be willing to move to the midwest or Florida? Especially in return for lower pay (and a one-time bonus).

There are several cities I'd be willing to reloc to -- Florida and the Midwest are not in that list (not even Chicago, due to the winter weather). SF, Seattle, Portland, NYC, Boston are at the top of the list. Maybe San Diego or Austin or the DC area.

I have the same opinion, and actually, one could say that many people are accepting lower net income in exchange for living in and near big cities, because for many the higher rents and decrease in living conditions are not made up for by the higher income.

10k software engineers in Des Moines? What planet do you live on? Is it the same quadrant of the Milky Way as mine?

Well, problem with Orlando etc., as opposed to NYC is it would be harder to attract elite talent there. In fact, it will be hard enough to attract talent at NYC when most tech companies are still in SV.

There is more demand for working in NYC than is currently met by existing tech offices, that simply isn't the case in other metro areas.

The real problem is that Google is choosing to expand in the neighborhood they are currently in, where the same applies to Amazon should the Long Island City rumors be true. Regional transportation infrastructure already prioritizes midtown and the financial district, and there are tons of distressed areas regionally, that still certainly do benefit from a growing economy all around.

St John's Terminal really isn't the same neighborhood as Chelsea Market. It's little over a mile to the south.

I must've overlooked that part, that doesn't seem too bad actually given that it's about a half mile from the christopher street path stop.

I'd hope they negotiate a ferry (maybe NY Waterway) from Hoboken, PATH is fairly crowded already and that Christopher St stop is a one–exit nightmare.

High quality talent are attracted to elite cities because other high quality talent is already there. It's easier to hire and retain the top 1% of engineers in an elite city because they're already working for other top companies. Also New York is closer to research centres of the universities compares to Orlando. This means access to students and academics.

Goodwill with whom? some local political hack sure for 6 months or so going to piss off a lot of staff and the good ones will not go.

The goal isn’t to reduce costs or move existing employees. It’s to tap a talent pool to hire new people.

I think its more likely the other way around the "talent" doesn't exist there

If there are good, seasoned engineers in Silicon Valley that can't pass the Google interview, they sure as hell can't find very many in Orlando or Des Moines.