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Comment by Klockan | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why they don't open more remote offices instead. Around 90% of their employees are currently within the US, wouldn't it be a lot easier to find tech talent if they had a major position in other areas of the world as well?

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Where are you getting that 90% statistic from? I'm pretty sure at least 30-40% of their employees are based internationally, and even within the US they have offices in pretty much every major city. So most Google employees are already working "remotely".

two reasons time difference and communications

Those are not issues when you have thousands of employees at a location, then you can base entire products there. There is plenty of people in Europe who would love to work for Google but there are so few positions here that it is almost impossible to get one unless you want to move to the US, it wouldn't be hard for Google to get ten times as many engineers here as they currently have if they just wanted to.

And why would Goggle move a product away from its HQ - low level support maybe (but google doesn't do much support and they can just recruit in Ireland for that)

Several products are already stationed in Europe so it is just a question of how much. Ireland does mostly support, yes, but both London and Zurich owns products.

There's plenty of people in Europe that work in Google's European offices. When I left in 2014, Zürich was something like 1500 people, with London and IIRC Paris having similar sizes, and many other smaller ones. That's hardly "so few positions", let alone "almost impossible to get one".

Also, time zone differences (and to a lesser extent communications) were inconvenient, although there were very viable ways to work around them.

I know, I work there. Most I know don't even bother applying since it is hard to get an interview, they don't see getting into Google as an alternative. All Google would need to Gobble up all talent in Europe is basically to start pestering every developer like they do in Silicon valley, they already pay twice of what 99% of developers are earning so taking everything would be easy for them.

Does Google pay more than decents contracts in European big cities (i.e. 120k+ €)?

Depending on your skill level: yes.

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