Since the wages paid are based on _local_ prevailing wage, and the Bay Area has the highest prevailing wage, Google will get cheaper engineers.
This also avoids the US immigration system, which is a terrible, expensive, stress inducing (performance sapping) thing for staff (and businesses) to interact with.
Finally, by distributing engineers to other countries, they counter some of the political "They're not _local_" arguments being made in various countries.
But FAANG are no longer hiring the smartest, most innovative people in the world. Those people served their purpose, and were instrumental in making FAANG huge. FAANG stays huge by keeping the lights on at minimal cost. That takes legions of schlubs to maintain and incrementally improve their massive infrastructure... and those are more plentifully, and cheaply, found elsewhere.
Moving to SF was a career multiplier. I instantly doubled my salary.
Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities.
Walmart was started in Arkansas. Warren Buffet famously lives in Nebraska.
But the Tier 1 cities create more wealth for more people than Tier 2 or 3 cities.
If I hypothetically doubled my salary _and_ my expenses, that hardly seems worth it. Although NorCal is gorgeous.
If you go from say 120k to 240k in salary your housing may go from say 1k (12k/year) to 3k (36k/year) but at the end of the year 120k-12k is 108k while 240k-36k is 204 which is a net gain of 96k!
Of course you still need to eat and stuff but when you check out the "Regional Price Parity" [1] you'll see that nowhere do things actually become twice as expensive. So you're really getting a 2x boost in salary in exchange for a 1.3x increase in expenses.
[1]: https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-par...
All else being equal, the improvements in other non-financial areas (chances to grow social life, many more attractions, etc) should make up for it.
The savings gap hopefully should widen as well (unless it's a deficit, in which case, cut expenses).
You can't expect the same quality of life as you did in the lower cost cities, but it is much easier to save way more money when you have a high income, than a low income.
Salary or takehome? Sure, your net in SF will be higher than Orlando or London, but looking at resources such as levels.fyi, internal salary sharing sites at large companies, etc. the math for Seattle comp with no state income tax is pretty close to bay area minus tax.
I go on way more road trips and hikes than what San Francisco ever permitted. While SF has a few good hikes, it expensive to own a car (parking, insurance, break ins, ticketing).
Seattle has access to Canada, islands, mountains, snow skiing, and boating.
I've never met a person who didn't understand that this show is satire. Every single tech person I've talked to about Silicon Valley thinks it's funny because of how plausible and yet ridiculous it all is, and because of all the totally accurate details scattered throughout—from golden handcuffs / resting & vesting, down to minor things like which drinks were stocked in the show's office fridges. And I lived in the Bay Area during its entire run, so most of my network is current/former Bay Area tech people.
I agree with much of this post, but there is a reason the areas with the highest intellectual output are on the coast.
I just moved from Dallas to the bay. Going from multiple allergy medicines a day and a persistent brain fog from ragweed and mountain cedar to none. Going from keeping windows closed with co2 levels spiking to levels that effect cognition to living with windows open and breathing fresh air. There is a reason Texas is where dying companies relocate to.
Having corporations bring jobs here with the current housing situation is kind of irresponsible. In the long run, if they spent some %age of money on yimby causes, they could save money by reducing the cost of living
The only reason I don't live there anymore is because I already got the "in" I needed, I think remoteness actually works best if you're ambitious (provided you visit occasionally), and because I really didn't like living there. Idc if someone takes the last part as an excuse, my work speaks for itself.
