I'm also not saying that there's anything wrong with these companies expanding their presences outside the valley. (I would very much welcome it), only that we're not seeing enough of it right now to contradict the notion that these companies are still very much centralized. Maybe real estate prices and competition for tech talent will eventually force them to properly decentralize. But I could also see a scenario where those companies could put their might into play to overcome that resistance-level and allow them to continue growing while remaining centralized. It's simply too early to tell which way this thing is playing out.
What are you basing this on, and what would be enough ?
4.3%, if indeed happens that way, would be a substantial portion. They already have significant presence in NYC, Seattle/Kirkland, London, Zurich, LA, Hyderabad, Dublin, Tokyo, Austin, etc. A few thousand here and a few thousand there add up quickly.
EDIT: Added a few more that I remembered.
"This information is most likely buried in Google’s annual report — the last one I could dig up is their 2015 fiscal year end report. According to the paper published by Google Inc and Alphabet Inc, there are 61,814 full-time employees with 23,336 in research and development."
Bear in mind R&D isn't pure developers. It also includes QA and project/program management roles.
Facebook, Google, and Apple all have large or rapidly growing presences in Seattle. It does the real estate market and traffic no good, but it is what it is.
No they aren't, Mountain View much bigger than all of those combined.
Altogether Google employs 4500 in the Seattle area, and that number will increase substantially when south lake union comes online. And of course, Google will just be a small presence compared to the other craziness in South Lake Union (Amazon being the biggest, but also Apple and Facebook having large presences).
Now, 4500 in Seattle, 4000 in Zurich, 3,500 in London, 7,000 in NYC...that easily approaches the 23,000 in Mountain View.
SF to Mountain View is 38.7 miles.
This doesn't sound right TBH.
Most junior people are actually in HQ, because HQ has head counts and can offer to train them, while satellite office won't have so many HCs and usually there to snatch up experienced developers.
As to promotions to higher level, yes HQ are definitely better, but that is only because it is HQ, so critical decision is made there naturally.
The traditional wisdom is that you should work from HQ to maximize your career advancement, but I think many people are weighing this against the untenable housing situation and realizing it's not worth it.
Also, San Francisco was considered a fun alternative to living in Cupertino or Menlo Park or Mountain View, but the city just keeps going further downhill. Junior employees likely have a higher tolerance than senior employees for the quality-of-life issues you deal with in San Francisco.
There are advantages to being at headquarters but it's not practical to move everyone to the SF Bay Area.
As a tech worker in Atlanta, I find that quite the opposite is true. People tend to career-(s)hop out in the valley and don't stay at the same company for long.
In Atlanta people tend to stay with the same company for years and grow their role and influence. As such, the SF headquarters tends to put its most important pieces in its remote offices.
I also think SF sees a lot of products spun up as promotion vehicles, whereas remote offices tend to think long term with long time horizons.
They bought Infineon (through intels purchase of Infineons mobile chip assets years ago)
Everything in the world is cheap compared to the Valley, that any comparison is pretty much a meme at this point.
You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that Munich real estate is cheap even when you account for local salaries.
Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany when accounting for living costs, except without the high paying jobs. I have multiple friends who moved there to work in engineering after graduating and they're starting to move elsewhere once they enter their 30s because they got tired of living in shared apartments(WGs) and realized they could never afford to buy anything worthy of having a family unless you're lucky enough to get into an executive position at a top company since ICs there aren't valued as much as they are in the valley so their salaries stay low and job hopping for better pay is frowned upon.
In my various data sources tracking job advertising, Munich has been and continues to be where almost all of the interesting jobs are based in Bavaria, and I'm not seeing falling real estate prices at all.
> Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany
I'd argue that in many ways it is worse than the Bay Area in the sense that the pay-differential, though in existence, is not nearly as pronounced. Stack Overflow keeps pestering me with emails about jobs that it has classified as "high pay jobs" for Munich. The salary beneath those job ads is usually something like €80k/year before taxes (which are extremely high in Germany). This must seem like a steal to a company like Apple. And this is in a city that has one of the best technical universities on the planet, an extremely vibrant engineering scene, and offers a better quality of life than the Bay Area at lower prices to any senior Apple executive who might want/need to move there from the Bay Area. -- My initial statement holds in that this is a "special opportunity" for Apple, that must be worth capturing for them.
Fells like a place with Bay Area prices but without the pay.
I've found that German-based companies are perfectly willing to pay 2x - 3x for an onsite freelancer than they would pay for an onsite employee, but they just don't do remote.
Since U.S.-based remote-only companies don't pay nearly as well as U.S.-based companies doing onsite - in my experience[!] -, this means that I could actually be earning more by doing onsite freelancing for German companies than doing remote for U.S. companies, but if you factor in the time & money for commuting and the increased cost of living from spending a lot of time in the cities where German companies offering interesting opportunities tend to be based, my disposable income/rate of savings, purchasing power, and quality of life are actually all better by doing remote.
The thing about recruiters you gotta keep in mind is, they're not your friends and they're not here to help you land your dream job. You're just a meal ticket to them and they just want to find some sucker to quickly fill the position as they're in competition with the other recruiters so whoever gets the position filled first gets paid, the others are left hanging. If you start making demands that the employers don't want to hear like remote work, they'll realize you're not a sucker and they won't get their money with you so they'll drop you as a candidate all together even if you would be a great fit for the position.
My question to you was how to you proceed to find good remote jobs? Linkedin? HN? Any advice is appreciated. My email is in my profile if you want to go private.
[0]: https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/chief-invest...
Germany is indeed a country of engineers, but poorly paid ones.
In the large, European salaries for technical professionals are just way worse than American equivalents.
Also: I'd quite like to see what the distribution of carreer-levels is, when comparing Silicon Valley to non-Silicon Valley locations for these companies. I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley.