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Comment by ethagknight | Hacker News Reader

As a real estate developer, I would love to see some more discussion on this thread. What would it take to get a major tech company to relocate an office or two from Bay Area to much cheaper regions. Obvious items would be network effects, primarily access to skilled labor and capital. What else? Cheap, frequent flights to the mothership? Has Google fiber and the likes had any real impact on luring tech workers out? If anyone knows of existing discussion or papers on the topic, id love to read it. I'm in Memphis TN, and cities in the area have low cost of living, some dense urban areas, etc. Oh, and 30-40 story class A office towers that are partially filled.

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People have to want to live there, otherwise you're very limited in your recruiting pool to people either already in that region, or possibly people from that region.

As an example, I work in Oslo, and we have offices in Trondheim and Tromso as well due to the universities in those cities. Recruiting people to work in Oslo is quite easy, but almost nobody is willing to move to Trondheim or Tromso unless they were looking to move back there anyway.

Opening office is not good enough.

The center of gravity also should move. Example, if all CXOs move then there is a chance that office will prosper and people from other parts of country would also move there even if they had no plans earlier.

Quite often I have seen that satellite office don't prosper because the center of action is still at HQ, that translates to freedom of moving between teams, opportunity to work on problems that really matter for the company, etc. Satellite office attracts only those folks who have reasons to be in those cities (usually for personal reasons, very seldom for professional ones).

Only way it can be really effective is if a company moves lock, stock and barrel to a new location - the way Boeing did in early 2000 (moved its HQ from Seattle to Chicago).

Google already has offices all around the world. They are already doing this.

But aren't a lot of those offices either 1. much smaller than MV or 2. not engineering offices?

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