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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."
Formerly known as slashdot.
Seriously guys, it's getting to be a bit much.
Google is a company with a nice product. That's about it.
sports-minded geeks
Who what now?
The coolest voice ever.
Did i spy geeks and sports in the same sentence?
Not that we windows users don't enjoy living dangerously.
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.
Locals wonder about "internet" phenomenon.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
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.
According to some folks, the only thing down here in Florida are spammers, which is not accurate.
:)
While there are a small group of lowlife spammers in Florida, there are also many good Internet related companies, including us. And, we have front row seats for the Shuttle launches
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
It is in a place like The Dalles...
If you drive 120 miles an hour, maybe. It's at mile marker 82 or so. Do the math.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
This is just more proof of an under-reported trend in IT: insourcing. Google gets cheap(er) labor AND avoids bad PR from outsourcing to some foreign locale known for cheap labor. $60k annual for IT work is almost a joke in the Bay Area, but it's Big Bux in rural areas like the Dalles (Hell, even I don't make that much. Hmmmmmm...maybe I should consider getting a job there, despite my aversion to rural living)
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).
Advice: on VPS providers
We're all conservative rednecks out here and it's always windy, and we get snowstorms and ice storms.
Even now, taxes in California are high, and so is the price of property. Why else would management explicitly build a technology center far away from an elite university like Stanford University or UC-Berkeley?
If more companies would do what Google is doing, then the Californian government will start to lower taxes and to limit the number of legal/illegal immigrants flooding into the state. The latter is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes.
$200,000 gets you an excellent, spacious house in most places in Oregon or Texas. That same $200,000 gets you, barely, a small noisy condominium in Silicon Valley.
Is anyone else noticing an interesting trend here as far as company location goes? Though Oregon already has a ton of high-tech companies(including Intel R&D), this is the second major Microsoft competitor to set up shop there in a year(the first being the OSDL). As an Oregonian I certainly welcome this, though I'm starting to wonder if I should get a bomb shelter should MS want to obliterate the competition in more ways than one.
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.
You have to float your wagon down the Columbia and avoid the rocks.
"Google, based in Mountain View, California, is expected to pay $1.87 million for the parcel of industrial-zoned land 85 miles east of Portland, with an option to buy three other area sites."
:)
Dude, around here, (Mountain View) 1.87 million will get you diddly squat. 1.87 million for 30 acres near Portland, OR isn't all that bad. That's a beautiful area, not far from Portland or the PDX airport (lots of flights to Seattle and down here to the Silicon Valley every day) and Portland also has a lot of young professional types.
Not a bad move overall.
Um. Obviously you've never been there, but I still don't understand why you posted that. There really aren't that many trees in The Dalles. It's mostly prarie-type high plateu... halfway between grassland and desert, and very dry.
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
**AVERAGE** That means that 1/2 of their people make more than $60,000/year. I'm sure they have receptionists and janitors making way less.
reenigne
CmdrTaco has cholera.
Found 32 pounds of food.
You broke a wagon tongue.
Ah, those were the good old days.
You are not the customer.
Probably not since that's what they call their existing complex.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
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.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Anyone considered that the move is to reduce costs? In the UK anywhere near London carries a huge cost to employees in housing etc, where as the north of England is much cheaper. With these kind of underlying cost cuts google could be looking to cut the staffing budget.
"the number of legal/illegal immigrants flooding into the state. The latter is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes."
Say what now?
What fraction of the homes in california are populated by illegal immigrants? Now, what fraction of the NICE houses? Do you think that most illegal immigrants are taking high paying jobs and moving to Los Altos and Palo Alto and driving up the cost of property? You really think they're having such a dominant effect on the market, or are you just scapegoating?
I'm all for creating and enforcing reasonable immigration laws rather than the current don't as/don't tell open border situation, but someone's gotta pick the lettuce and I'm quite sure that nobody posting here is doing it.
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
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Texas is considered to be in the midwest. I know this because I live in South Carolina, which is part of the south, ask a southerner about texas. They react nearly has appaled as they do about california.
... consumer demand combined with available resources like major bandwidth and tech people to fill needs.
There are no major tech companies in the south because of two things:
1. There are no major tech schools, as such there is no major talent pool to draw from.
2. There is no need. Since there are no major tech schools or major tech companies the need for tech people and tech companies is minimal. Hence the market demand isnt there and there is not company that will move into an area where it is likely to fail.
Its getting better in some places. North Carolina has a fairly large amount of tech people and tech companies and atlanta is coming along nicely as well (do believe they have a google center IIRC) but generally places like Myrtle Beach, Wilmington, Savannah, Nashville, Mobile etc etc just dont have the market to support it. Not size really
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Most high school kids would describe where they live as 'a depressing shitholes'. That's the way teenagers are. It does not say much about the town, since most teenagers wish to flee their depressing lives for the "excitement" of The City.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
"if there were no illegal immigrants, then the entire American population will starve because no one is picking the vegetables."
This is most certainly not true, but I would think that due to the higher wages required to pay American workers, the cost of food would rise and our overall standard of living would drop.
I have no idea how significant the effect would be just for illegal immigrants into california, but if we decided to stop using any labor from other countries with lower standards of living in areas like manufacturing, we'd see a pretty drastic effect.
But I guess it's cool to have some Asians in a sweatshop someplace far away making our jeans and sneakers, but can't they find a way for Mexicans to work the fields without coming into our country?
The other cool thing about England is that some cheaper towns can almost rival London in terms of culture and will offer a better quality of life. Manchester is my favourite example, I know a few people (myself included) who call it "London Up North". Newcastle is also getting better, though I don't think it's quite there yet.
Come to California! We got both!
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.)
An anectode: a friend of mine was offered two faculty positions, one in a rural setting and one in a large city. The salary was a little higher in the large city. When the rural school argued "but homes here cost only $100k, but they cost $300k in the city" my friend answered: "then it's clear, I must accept the position in the city". "But why?" "Because in 20 years I'll have a $300k home, while in your town I'll be worth $100k plus some gadgets".
If you can, spend your young years paying into a more expensive home, even (especially?) at some hardship to yourself. Your future self will have a substantially higher net worth in 10 years when comes time to relocate. Then you can go either to the country, or to an expensive city. But you can pretty much *never* move to the city from the country without starting another deep mortgage later in life.
Well Oregon, though some don't know it, is extremely well engineered for anything networking related. We have a lot of fiber laid down, designed for redundant links to the 'major' cities throughout the state, so for Google, there is a lot of bandwidth they can tap into, without having to worry about digging holes.
>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
I'll take Oregon over Mumbai, India. At least they're staying domestic.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
In Slashdot's eyes Google can do no wrong,
and in Fuckedgoogle's eyes Google is going down the well-worn path of dot.com excess and hubris.
Somewhere in the middle is the truth. But fuckedgoogle is a hell of a lot funnier. :)
Greetings from The Dalles! Just wanted to let you know that here 60,000.00 a year is wonderful! The average home here sells for around 75 to 85,000.00.We are a community of ranch sytle home and small farms and orchards.We are famous for our Cherry industry. We have had 3,000 people out of work since the aluminum industry collasped. We have a lot of educated citizens that don't want to leave our great city. We do have a laid back lifestyle and we love what the gorge has to offer.. We do have our problems like other cities, drugs, ect. but on the whole its a great place to raise a family or to retire. We are an hour and fifteen minutes from Portland and the gorge communities have a lot to offer too. Each has its own unique personality. We have a wonderful Community College that has expanded its role in the community in the last few years. Were so proud that Google chose us.
In 20 years your $300K home will be worth $150K (and you'll still have $150K to pay for it. So you'll end up having to pay the bank when the government reclaims your property as part of some urban renewal scheme to give a billionaire a new parking lot. My $100K home will be worth $2M and so will the the second home I bought with the extra money I had. I'll have another $300K in the bank from the money I've saved by not paying interest, but by then it'll just barely be enough to put my kids through college.