You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people that Google would be interested in.)
Much better to be in that NYC-Boston-DC corridor where high powered opportunities abound in multiple sectors. Or SF. Or Chicago. Etc. But trying to move a lot of these types of couples to, say, Lincoln Nebraska, is just asking for trouble. The spouses or partners are definitely not going to go for that.
I’m sure Google (etc) could lure a lot of young, single folks out to the hinterlands for a year or two, but retention and recruiting further up the ladder would be awful.
Universities in the US, which—for historical reasons-are often located in rural areas, have similar problems. They solve this through “spousal hires.” This can range from merely coordinating interviews and offers across departments [0] to creating entirely new positions, or even tenure lines, for a rockstar’s spouse.
This can work relatively well for universities, but I’ve never heard of companies doing anything similar. I wonder if you could even get a set of companies to agree to preferentially hire their employees’ spouses, so there’s a more diverse set of options.
[0] The university often kicks in some money so that both departments will be happy with (say) their number three picks, instead of history hiring an unattached rockstar and chemistry getting no one.
Happened to a prof in my university just this year. Had offers from top universities & labs for tenure in CS, but stayed in our rural college town because of his SO.
To help shape the future of the community that rasied them?
What was deal with your class? You lived in the middle of knowhere and the only option would have been farming or mining coal or something?
You can always come back to "shape the community" (so american ^^) later
www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/387736/
> Of all respondents, about 54 percent said that they lived in close proximity to where they grew up.
nypost.com/2018/01/11/a-shocking-number-of-americans-never-leave-home/amp/
> 11 percent of survey respondents have never traveled outside of the state where they were born.
You might pass on opportunities for social stability reasons in middle age, but as a 22-year-old you jump without hesitation.
People sometimes migrate back when their own kids are school-aged.
In addition to the reasons you give, there's also whether you like a place. I might (or might not) be willing to make some tradeoffs for a locale that's particularly desirable for recreational opportunities and so forth. But not for an exercise in creating a new city, revitalizing one, etc.
For those that have both then sure, it's more nuanced and may come down to which of the two has the better future chances, or to make different decisions. Most potential workers will not be in that situation at all.
I believe the few high profile people who actually make the big decisions will usually have a partner who has a high profile career as well. Those key people wont move because their partner wont move.
And in hotbeds like NYC, with the opportunities all over town, there's little career reason to go somewhere else. If Google left NYC, they'd lose most of their engineering team to other tech firms in the city.
Don't underestimate the power of network effects and critical mass. The people good enough to get into FAANG also have the abundance of options to specify where they'd like to live and work.
This seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if they decide to open an office in some rural backwater.