[qmalzp]

Google doesn't open a 500-engineer research lab in Grand Rapids, MI because there are not 500 Google-caliber engineers already living in Grand Rapids, MI. This is not a statement about the average talent there, but simply that the starting pool is not sufficiently large; hence the need to build offices in high density urban areas.

Google doesn't open an office in Denver so that Bay Area engineers have a slightly cheaper place to work, they do it to tap into the talent of folks who already live there.

Edit: I am basing these claims off of my own experience. I work at a satellite office of one of the big tech co's, and the vast majority of my coworkers are people who are either fresh out of a local university, or already lived here for many years before joining the company.

[mlthoughts2018]

So Google only interviews candidates already living in the cities where the offices are? Google never relocates a candidate from somewhere else?

This is super false. Google doesn’t open an office in Denver because there is already a sufficient talent market in Denver to staff the whole place. There isn’t.

They open an office in Denver so that when a person passes the interviews and will need relocation they can be relocated more cheaply and paid a relatively lower salary in Denver.

They can only get away with this for certain cities that are granted high-status, like Austin, Seattle, Denver. Companies are trying to create similar status facades for e.g. Pittsburgh and Atlanta too.

It absolutely is wage arbitrage for the company— has nothing to do with the preexisting talent base in the given city, except insofar as that talent base confers some type of mitigating high-status effect.

For Denver it’s access to glamorized nature and skiing. For Pittsburgh it’s centralized around the presence of CMU. And even with these effects, these cities are not looked at as all that desirable for many, many candidates.

[qmalzp]

If you pass the interview as a generalist, Google absolutely prefers for people to work in their Mountain View office.

1. The cost of relocation is minuscule compared to the total cost of employing someone, so I don't buy that argument.

2. Do you have data to back up that Google engineers in Denver get paid less than their Mountain View counterparts? I believe this is true when comparing US to non-US salaries, but at least where I've worked, engineers get paid the same everywhere within the US (and indeed, you can relocate from the Bay Area to cheaper locales without taking a pay cut).

[mlthoughts2018]

Based on salarytalk.org and h1bdata.info, median software engineer salary in MV is $127,000 - $129,000. In Pittsburgh: $113,000 - $114,000.

Relocating without a pay cut would be uncomparable, since it would involve pay cut dynamics for an established worker. Google is probably atypically generous in all these areas though, and I don’t think it counters the points about status. They want wage arbitrage to alleviate some headcount, doesn’t mean all headcount, and very likely Google would be among the least worried since revenue per headcount is so ludicrously higher than what they pay in total comp anyway. It still doesn’t suggest they open these office locations for some other reason than urban status or co-location with academic center status. Google US locations look mostly exactly like that’s what they are doing.