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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

Facebook already pays its median employee $240k (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Yes-me...). You can assume that at those salaries, they've already hired a large percentage of the Bay Area software engineers who meet their bar and are willing to work at Facebook.

So if they want to hire another, say, 5k engineers, they either have to somehow convince 5k people to move to the Bay Area or expand in satellite offices. Word on the street from local recruiters is that you can still get new grads to move to the Bay Area (for a few years at least), but it has become nearly impossible to get senior talent to move in because of cost of living and quality of life issues. So depending on the type of engineer they're looking for, yes, they may be effectively forced to expand in other locations.

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Strongly disagree. Have people here actually worked with former Facebookers or Googlers (or people who left for Facebook et)?

They are very likely to be very good and very unlikely to be bad. But they are not gods walking amongst us. There are hundreds if not thousands of professionals in the Bay Area who have the talent FB is looking for AND are working at nearby, lower-paying companies. Facebook pays higher than Amazon, Uber, and all kinds of "sexy startups". So I can't buy the scarcity of talent excuse.

I'm actually not sure how much talent Facebook could pick up locally by just opening the floodgates, which is what I believe you're advocating? I'm a former Facebook intern and Google employee, and don't plan on returning to either company even if it were the income-maximizing move for me (luckily, it isn't). Anecdotally, I've met many other local engineers who feel the same way.

What didn't you like about working for Google?

What do you consider to be more income-maximizing than Facebook and Google?

I can believe that, but NYC is just as bad, maybe even worse, isn't it? Seems like "out of the frying pan into the fire".

Software engineer salaries are fairly comparable between NYC and the Bay Area, although most quantitative sources I've seen have NYC coming in slightly lower. But NYC could have a large number of engineers who (1) are willing to work for Facebook (2) for $240k but (3) are unwilling to leave NYC.

Expanding their NYC office will allow Facebook to hire more of those engineers without lowering their hiring bar or further fragmenting campuses.

At a minimum, NYC is just very different from SF and the South Bay. Leaving aside costs and salaries, which are both probably a bit higher in the Bay Area, the environments overall are just a lot different.

Lots of people who love the access to nature, the climate, etc. in the Bay Area would never move to NYC. And lots of people who consider anyplace that's not Manhattan to be a provincial hick town would never move to the Bay Area.

> Lots of people who love the access to nature, the climate, etc. in the Bay Area would never move to NYC. And lots of people who consider anyplace that's not Manhattan to be a provincial hick town would never move to the Bay Area

I'm closer to the second camp (though I live in Brooklyn).

Something a lot of people don't seem to realize is that there are a lot of very smart people working on trading apps for big banks on Wall Street that absolutely hate it. High Frequency Trading apps require a ton of programming talent, but a lot of the engineers who work on this stuff really dislike the bank atmosphere. When I worked at Jet.com, I had several coworkers who were substantially smarter than me, who actually took a paycut to work for Jet, simply because they hated the bank environment so much.

I think some of the tech companies know this fact, and feel that they can probably poach some of this talent by offering competitive salaries while having a more interesting atmosphere.

EDIT: DISCLAIMER

I work for one of these "primarily California companies expanding stuff to NYC".

I actually like visiting Manhattan but I don't think I could ever tolerate living there. I spent a summer interning in Midtown for a small consulting firm while in business school. We're admittedly talking pre-Giuliani New York in the summer with very little money but it still wore on me to the point where I pretty much decided I wasn't interested in working there.

I do, on the other hand, understand the attraction of the Bay Area given enough money although, in this case, the negative side of the balance sheet has gotten much longer and redder.

I agree with your basic point. Another reason I never seriously went after an investment banking job was that the sort of thing I was interested in was pretty much viewed as grunt stuff that techies did, i.e. not really respected.

(ADDED: I was using Manhattan as a term for the [nice uber-urbanized] parts generally although I know that's not accurate. I don't think I ever set foot in Brooklyn until relatively recently.)

The nice thing about New York is that the transport infrastructure, while unreliable, exists so that you could live anywhere in the five (well, four) subway connected boroughs that pleases you. Want to live in a leafy suburb with a modest front and back yard? Head to Queens!

The Bay Area’s transit system is a joke in comparison; if companies have to resort to a private shuttle system to get anything done, it’s reflective of a failure in planning.

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