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Google Building Tech Center Near Portland
jdray writes "It seems that everyone's favorite search powerhouse, Google, is building a tech center in The Dalles, Oregon. About 45 minutes by interstate highway from Portland, The Dalles is a small, economically depressed city near the world-famous Columbia River Gorge. The $60,000 average annual salary of Google employees is about double the average for Wasco county. With all the outdoor sports (windsurfing, hiking, mountain biking, skiing) in the area, sports-minded geeks should be flocking to apply for a job at the new facility."
These sorts of locations are ideal for geek workers. If you're running a design or marketing agency, being out of town is going to really hurt your company, but for the sort of people Google hires, this is ideal. Your money goes a lot further out of town, so you can spend more on gadgets, and since they're indoor types anyway, it's ideal. Perhaps more tech companies should be getting out of the smoke and letting their workers live in more idyllic locations. I certainly appreciate being out in the sticks and getting less distractions.
This is going to be The Next Big Thing. Such "Rural Sourcing" has been going on somewhat quietly for a while now and is giving offshoring your workforce a serious run for its money.
There's even a company named (imagine that) "Rural Sourcing, Inc." that is consulting companies on how they can open up call centers, technology centers, etc. in economically depressed or extremely rural areas of the U.S.
I'm a big tall mofo.
If you compare it to the salary surveys that seem to go around, no, it doesn't look anything magical. If you compare it to reality, however, then $60,000 is pretty respectable when you consider all the benefits they get.
I'm thinking that Google is pulling the old 'provide everything at work, and make work so "fun" that they'll stay all hours' trick. This works for a while, but when your employees start getting girlfriends and kids, it kinda goes to pot. Still, as previous news stories here have shown us, married, old staff are not as innovative or useful as young hopefuls, so perhaps this plan isn't so bad on Google's part after all.
Heck, I know coders who make $30,000 a year in major metropolitan areas without Googlesque benefits. Google are just placing themselves above the average in an increasingly popular trend.. but they're no Microsoft, that's for sure.
The Yahoo story I read (several days ago) said that maybe 100 jobs would be created. Not a lot, folks...and that's 100 jobs total. Not "100 techie jobs"...100 -jobs-.
Those jobs won't be doing sexy things. The only reason you put a facility in the middle of nowhere is because it's cheap in terms of space. Skilled labor is virtually nonexistant and relocation expensive.
Google strikes me as being like the Army. They talk a great talk(in Google's case, innovation, exciting workplace, etc; in the Army's, it's "defending freedom" and "jobs skills") and show you eye candy galore, and when you actually get in, you spend your time wading in shit (metaphorically in Google's case).
Nevermind the locals are going to hate you because you're making twice what they are and you're "some city kid", etc. Experience has told me, "trickle down" is never popular until you forcibly remind people (for example, I've heard of companies exchanging cash to silver dollars for employees to use in the local town, to demonstrate to the community just how much of their income comes from employees).
No thanks, I'll pass.
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I'm just saying...not where I'd put a data center. Many of the major data centers in Portland have moved elsewhere in the last 20 years for reasons such as this. (Yes, there are still some around...I work at one).
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When many of the pioneers of "the Valley" first set up shop, they were building on cheap farmland far away from the sky-high rents of San Francisco, and even Palo Alto. Look at a map of a place like Cupertino in the 60s...you will be blown away...nothing but farms. Some tech companies looked for cheap digs...and look at things now.
I live in a 4 bedroom house on 7 acres 15 mins from my job and the payment is 650 a month.
Of course the DSL is about 400kb down on a good day.
The problem with this is that the town growns so dependent on the two industries here that when trends cause employee moves, have the town goes belly up. The whole company used to be here but then they moved our merchandising and logistics departments to a new complex in the nearest big city and about half of this town has shutdown. Not to mention you are an hour away from any real forms of entertainment or good shopping.
This is positive as it's cheap, beautiful, and quiet.
It's negative because it's quiet, less technologically advanced, small town minded.
/My 2 cents.
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Actually, no, he's pretty much got it right on the spot. I stopped there while on vacation last year, and found pretty much the entire town dirty, run down and generally depressing. We didn't stay long, and I wouldn't go back there voluntarily, unless it was just to pass through at freeway speed. The words 'a depressing shithole' spring to mind.
One of my best friends is from there and grew up there in the 80's and early 90's, and has never once had anything good to say about the place, and is very glad he's not there anymore.
I'm sure Google is just looking at their bottom line, as far as the cost of NW real estate is concerned. If anyone from the company actually spent some time there, they would probably beat feet in the other direction back towards PDX as fast as they could go. I know I would!
...not that I'm a pirate.. Hell I've never even fired a cannon. - oldwolf13
Google is planning going to provide equipment for all the popular sports on the campus: nerf basketball, ping-pong tables, video game consoles, model rockets, and super soakers.
In Oregon Trail The Dalles was the place where you got to control the raft going down the river. Everybody always chose that option. You were just dumb if you took the Barlow Toll Road. Looks like Google didn't crash into any rocks.
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Well, people just don't want to work at Microsoft like they used to. Or IBM. And I don't believe Apple is hiring anywhere near the degree that Google is. Still, though, it does seem like Slashdot is acting almost like Monster.com or something.
What the hell are you talking about? There's several tech schools in the South: Virginia Tech, Clemson, Georgia Tech. VT and GT and two of the highest-ranked. Plus there's lots of other very large universities in the South: Univ. of Virginia, FSU, Auburn, Univ. of Tennessee, etc.
As for what Southerners think of various states, lots of Southerners don't even think Virginia is in the South, even though it was the capital of the Confederacy. Idiots.
So yes, there is a very large talent pool to draw from in the South. However, most people leave the South as soon as they finish their degrees, heading for greener pastures in the northeast, California, Texas, etc. Of course, this is mostly because that's where all the good jobs are. This gets back to your point #2; companies don't want to move someplace where they're likely to fail.
Now, the real reasons why both employees and companies don't want to stay in the South are very debatable. Maybe it's a chicken-and-egg scenario. Are companies staying away because the employees don't want to live there? Or are employees just moving to where the companies happen to be currently located?
Personally, I graduated from Virginia Tech, which is located in the mountains of southwest Virginia. I stayed there for 2.5 years after I graduated, working in a couple of local jobs, before I took a job with a megacorp in Arizona. I thought I'd like living someplace where the cost of living was lower (as my salary was also quite low, which they tried to justify with the low CoL), there was no traffic, etc. I rapidly grew to absolutely hate the area. For one thing, it wasn't the same living in a neighboring small town as it was living in Blacksburg and going to school there (I couldn't stay in Blacksburg proper because my salary was low, justified by the low CoL, but the housing prices in the town were very high). There were many reasons. Traffic was a big one: even though there weren't many cars, all the roads were 1-lane windy mountain roads, so you couldn't go anywhere without getting stuck behind some slow-ass, making your trip take literally twice the time. And if you tried to get around at any speed, you had to constantly watch for overzealous cops eager to give out speeding tickets for exceeding the extremely low speed limits. Big-city driving isn't like that: everyone drives fast, there's many lanes, and cops are busy stopping real crimes instead of harassing motorists. Another reason was just the type of people living in that area: everyone is dirt poor, has no education, etc. There's an overriding backwoods mindset to everyone you come in contact with. Lastly, there's nothing to do there: there was one dinky mall with crappy overpriced shops, one huge wal-mart, a few other standard big-box stores, and that was about it. No specialty stores, no diversity, etc. Don't forget a lack of access to services like cable internet.
If the people in the South want to know the real reason why tech companies and tech employees don't want to live there, personally I think they should look at themselves and their neighbors; most of us just don't want to live in that environment.
You're thinking of the median. The average is the sum of every employee's salary, divided by the number of employees. This is easily affected by exceptionally low and/or high salaries.
The median is the 'middle' salary, when the salaries have been arranged in order. This is much more 'stable', in the sense that exceptional salaries wouldn't affect it much.
So, the mean actually does a better job than the median in terms of exposing exceptionally low salaries. This means that either they have a lot of very highly-paid people to offset the low salaries of receptionists and janitors, or that the receptionists and janitors don't make too bad of a salary.
(Or the more likely reason: they probably outsource the low-paying jobs, especially food-service and janitoral) to an outside company, so those salaries aren't directly paid by the company... those wouldn't be included in the average/mean or median.)
Google never had a product, it has a service. And it's a branding monster that wants to expand its "services" / tentacles all over the place.
They're out to lasso that massive herd of know-nothing people who use computers at home and work to be dependent on them and they will drag the rest of us in their wake.
Eventually, they'll become like Microsoft and AOL in terms of crushing the innovative start-ups that they can't / won't buy out.
Well, at least AOL is dying a slow, inexorible death as is Microsoft 1.0 (Microsoft 2.0 may be an open source company).
Google just wants to fill the power vacuum.
>Still, as previous news stories here have shown us, married, old staff are not as innovative or useful as young hopefuls, so perhaps this plan isn't so bad on Google's part after all.
Google is trying to hire PhDs like crazy. These people are not the youngest people around, but they're smart, articulate, self-directed, and self-motivated. I think they're banking on the same things that make people succeed at a PhD being the same things that make people inventive and productive.
I don't think it's such a bad bet, myself.
Lea
Hey--this is big news out here in the Gorge.
It means someone will finally drag decent internet services out here. Currently I have to connect at 42k because the phone lines are shitty, and the providers suck. If you are in one of the 'bigger' cities you can get 512k DSL for something on the order of $45/mo. It really sucks hearing my friend say he has 6MB down/3MB up for the same price in Portland...
There's no place like