
Facebook opening an engineering office in Seattle - awa
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/facebook-engineering-seeks-new-friends-in-seattle/386192358919
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dlevine
Could be that some veteran Facebook employees want to move to Washington state
to avoid paying taxes on their stock.

Shortly after Google went public, a lot of old-time Googlers moved to
Washington so that they could avoid paying CA taxes

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jbeda
The number of Googlers moving to Seattle post IPO was very very small. Most
growth in our office came from local hiring. I believe the company tried to
filter this out. That isn't to say there aren't one or two though...

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xpaulbettsx
I'm glad they announced this _after_ all of the privacy nonsense came out, so
that I now know to avoid them on moral grounds. It's a pity too, because
they're doing some pretty awesome stuff from a technical perspective.

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seiji
Nice byline: "Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at Facebook, is moving to
Seattle because he couldn't bear to be 800 miles away from Michael Arrington."

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mitchellhislop
I spit my latte when I read that, especially because of the HN comments on
that story yesterday/Monday

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mikebo
This is awesome for Seattle engineers. Even if you don't work at Facebook it
should give a nice compensation bump for all good engineers in the area.

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potatolicious
I'm glad they're staying downtown - I wish more tech companies here had the
balls to do the same, instead of setting up campuses out in the boonies and
forcing everyone to drive and live in disconnected suburbs (MS, Google,
looking right at you guys).

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codexon
Kirkland isn't a small town and I think most people prefer to live 30 minutes
away from the city to avoid being stuck in traffic for an hour.

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potatolicious
> _"I think most people prefer to live 30 minutes away from the city"_

I doubt this. A lot of my peers who work at MS loved living in the city, but
had to move out to the suburbs (that they don't really like) to save on
commute. Which is the point - if MS was downtown it would be reasonably
commutable by just about everyone (including suburbanites in Bellevue). The
reverse (putting the office in the 'burbs) makes commuting slightly simpler
for suburbanites at the cost of making it nigh impossible for urban dwellers.

Personally, having grown up in a sleepy suburb not at all unlike Kirkland, I'd
loathe to go back - and I know a lot of my younger peers feel the same. This
is on top of all of the requisite issues with suburban lifestyles (e.g., over-
reliance on cars, health concerns due to driving everywhere, sprawl,
walkability in general, social homogeneity, etc).

I currently live 20 minutes away from work by bus (plus side: I get to walk
home on a good day, try doing that in the suburbs), and luckily my employer is
reasonably close to downtown. That's less commute than most suburban office
parks demand, and all of it is "free time" (i.e., I can be doing other things
than watching the road).

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codexon
Well I doubt you. I know people at MS as well, and most of them prefer to live
outside the city where they pay a sane amount for a nice house instead of a
cramped apartment, and lower crime rates. My experience is that it is only the
young 20 somethings that want a vibrant nightlife that prefer the city.

Putting the company downtown will effectively force everyone to go through the
I-90 or 520 bridge which suffer from massive traffic or live in the city. City
life is not for everyone.

And about the exercising, there's much less to be done downtown unless you
like doing everything indoors. Walking around the street isn't very
entertaining unless you are shopping or eating at restaurants. You could take
the time you save from not having to commute to seattle and use it to
exercise. And didn't they tell you they have trails and soccer fields at the
Redmond campus?

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potatolicious
> _"Putting the company downtown will effectively force everyone to go through
> the I-90 or 520 bridge"_

Which has plenty of capacity for transit, especially the mass, rapid sort that
cities on the east side are so busy trying to prevent from being built. Yeah,
screw efficiency and the environment, as long as the smelly poor people can't
get to our neighborhood!

It's clearly a much better solution to have everyone trying to cram down a
freeway, a single occupant to each 1-ton vehicle.

Side note: it's a bit disheartening that 2 passengers qualify for the car pool
lane around here.

You see a nice house, I see rows of identical houses with equally identical
people in it. I see stagnation and loss of perspective, as everything the
least bit unseemly and incongruous with your hard-earned socioeconomic status
is blissfully hidden.

You see a cramped apartment, I see living in a neighborhood with history and
soul, with something more than more rows of cookie cutter houses. Where people
living in highly developed places don't pretend to be living on a "ranch",
"glade", or "estate". Where there is so much life teeming around you that
walking home is a treat, not a chore.

Putting it that way, no wonder the same money buys a big house in the burbs...
I mean, there's gotta be something to justify all that you lose by leaving the
city.

It's all perspective I am merely telling you that not as many tech workers
enjoy the suburban thing as you seem to think. This goes far beyond hard-
partying young types. I've met many a middle-aged or even elderly folk who
like livin in the city for the same reasons.

Hell, I know some people with children that greatly prefer living in the city.

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codexon
And there's also a reason why suburban living is considered a luxury. For the
past thousand years, people have chosen to live in the city

 _You see a nice house, I see rows of identical houses with equally identical
people in it._

I see faceless skyscrapers, I see people packed like sardines where a 2
bedroom condo costs $1 million. The uniformity of city condos far surpasses
that of the suburbs. Instead of nice green shrubbery and pine trees I see
cracked concrete stained with oil and skoal spit out yesterday. Broken glass
bottles on the sidewalk, some foul liquid oozes down into the sewer grate with
a noxious odor. Crumpled cigarette butts line are nearly as numerous as the
number of people walking over them.

The streets are lined with pan-handlers and people that are too busy to give
you the time of day. A walk through the city will show you soulless corporate
buildings taking up so much space. Or the occasional century old abandoned
building with broken windows and carelessly pulled drapes that barely attempt
to hide the empty interior. And countless rows of residential skyscrapers that
peer out with 1000's of identical windows.

When going to sleep, you are annoyed by the number of sirens going off at 3 AM
in the morning or the idiots who are shouting outside about how drunk they
are. And then you wonder why most of the people who have a choice, don't
choose the city.

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codexon
_For the past thousand years, people have chosen to live in the city_

Hmm HN didn't update the full sentence. It was supposed to be: For the past
thousand years, people have chosen to live in the city because they needed to
get a job.

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sosuke
They just opened an Austin office too, I was excited until it ended up just
being a sales hub.

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jseliger
I wonder why is there so much talent in Seattle that Facebook can't afford
_not_ to go? Or do some of its California people want to move north? Or does
it want to raid Microsoft? Or something else altogether?

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tybris
Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing engineers looking for a change and UW grads
looking for a job.

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awa
There is Google too

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brown9-2
I wonder if/when they plan to do something similar on the east coast.

