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."

Welcome to GoogleRecruiting.com

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.

Re:Welcome to GoogleRecruiting.com

Indeed. Some geeks nurse a desire, others desire a nurse.... everyone has their own wants and desires!

$60,000 isn't that much

Are they all hoping for stock options, or are they working "for the glory"?

Re:$60,000 isn't that much

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.

Re:$60,000 isn't that much

**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.

Re:$60,000 isn't that much

**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.

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.)

Re:$60,000 isn't that much

This idea that rural sourcing is good for employees is a fallacy.

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.

the south

All tech houses seem to be in the North...nothing in the south? Why? Will this be called the GooglePlex?

Re:What about Texas? (Re:the south)

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.

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 ... consumer demand combined with available resources like major bandwidth and tech people to fill needs.

Re:What about Texas? (Re:the south)

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.

Hmm?

sports-minded geeks

Who what now?

Re:Hmm?

Yes, geeks participate in sports. Don't be so stereotypical.

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.

Google building a new complex...

Will they call it a googleplex?

Ow, stop throwing things at me!

Re:Google building a new complex...

Probably not since that's what they call their existing complex [google.com].

Sports geeks?

Is that some sort of oxymoron? True geeks play video games most of the time.

eh?

Did i spy geeks and sports in the same sentence?

Not that we windows users don't enjoy living dangerously.

Re:eh?

Did i spy geeks and sports in the same sentence?

Not that we windows users don't enjoy living dangerously.

Using Windows isn't sport, it's masochism.

Ideal location for geeks

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.

Google moves to The Dalles

Locals wonder about "internet" phenomenon.

Expect more of this

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.

Re:Expect more of this

While I guess what you're saying is true, it has always puzzled me. Then again, I left a very rural area to go to a school twice the size of my hometown (2500 students). I guess the environment breeds different sets of interests. I for one don't find wandering aimlessly around downtown at all interesting. The theatres here are all owned by the same poorly operated company (Regal), you have pay most stores just to use their parking lots, and there's no place to mountain bike. The only real advantage I've experienced so far is that Portland has a pretty well organized adult rec soccer league. Well, plus I get a pretty good laugh from city people joking about cow tipping. What a bunch of uneducated concrete-dwellers.

45 minutes?!?

If you drive 120 miles an hour, maybe. It's at mile marker 82 or so. Do the math.

Re:45 minutes?!?

If you drive 120 miles an hour, maybe. It's at mile marker 82 or so. Do the math.

Okay...

82 miles take 41 minutes to make at 120mph. Driving at 109mph will get you there in 45 minutes.

why?

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

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.

Tired: Outsourcing Wired: Insourcing

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)

Hopefully desks, not servers

Putting lots of people in the Dalles makes sense. Putting lots of computer doesn't. Let's see:

• In the Columbia river flood plain
• In an earthquake zone
• Not far from the Umatilla chemical weapons depot
• And the big one: we're overdue for the every-300-year Cascadian subduction zone tsunami event, which will roll right up the Columbia river. And there are dams both West and East of the Dalles...

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).

Additional information for slashdotters

We're all conservative rednecks out here and it's always windy, and we get snowstorms and ice storms.

$$$: Motivation for The Dalles, Oregon

The principal reason that Google's management is building a technology center in Oregon is that building and running such a center in Oregon is cheaper than building and running such a center in Silicon Valley. Similar reasoning applies for why the management chose an economically depressed city in Oregon.

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.

I grew up in The Dalles

The Dalles is a depressed area that suffers from a heavy criminal activities. Meth labs are common place in the area and meth junkies are prevalent everywhere. The drug has reached epidemic proportions there and I'm amazed google hasn't taken that into considering when deciding where the facility should be located.

Hopefully any geeks that decide to move there are well armed incase of any incidents.

Oregon = The Anti-Microsoft

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.

Silicon Valley Part Deux?

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.

one catch

You have to float your wagon down the Columbia and avoid the rocks.

It's a lot cheaper there..

"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. :)

what about kiteboarding?

windsurfing is so 80's.

I find that hard to believe

No, I know for a fact they aren't going to build a Google complex in The Dalles.

How? I asked Google Maps [google.com]

:P

Little-known irrelevant fact

The Dalles was a point along the oregon trail.

CmdrTaco has cholera.

Found 32 pounds of food.

You broke a wagon tongue.

Ah, those were the good old days.

Very common occurence nationwide.

The call center I work for is in a rural area of less then 20,000 people. There are three types of jobs in this town. The educated work here. The uneducated work at a Tyson Food processing plant. The rest work in retail such as restaurants and grocery stores that the other two groups keep open.

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.

To get to The Dalles

Do I still have to raft up the Columbia River, or have they opened the newfangled "toll road" yet?

Great!

Now there's *two* employers in The Dalles, Wal Mart and Google. Could there possibly be two more diametrically opposed businesses in one small town?

Talk about your 'have's' and 'have nots'... Now we'll have a textbook example to follow along with.

What are these "outdoor sports"

I'm not sure I understand this concept of "outdoor" actually. I tried looking for the IETF RFC on "outdoor sports" and came up blank. Can someone help me?

- Typical Slashdot Reader

About that link to Yahoo Maps ...

On the TheDallas page the article refers to, they have a link to a Yahoo Maps map of the area. I'm fairly certain they meant to link to Google Maps instead.

The Trail

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.

What good are all of those outdoor activities...

...if you don't get to take advantage of them b/c you are working 70 hour weeks?

yeah

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

All two of them ;-)

It's a big, big world..

Why do they have to build a center so close to that cursed state of Washington, where you know who develops you know what.

"Sports-minded geeks" is an oxymoron

Kind of like "unbiased slashdot discussion" or "Microsoft-loving slashdotter".

Geek girls named "Debbie"

Seriously, someone has to make a movie called "Debbie does Dalles".

Could be much worse

I'll take Oregon over Mumbai, India. At least they're staying domestic.

The Dalles?

Was Chimney Rock already rented out? What about Snake River? Stupid Oregon Trail :)

is fuckedgoogle.com the anti-slashdot ?

http://www.fuckedgoogle.com/ [fuckedgoogle.com]

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. :)

I wish that I'd applied, for sure, now

They're going to find The Dalles to be very pretty. When I lived in Portland, doing engineering work for an ISP, I took several weekend trips to Eastern Oregon, driving through this area. I remember wishing they had some sort of substantial industry there that I knew something about, so I could move there and watch the salmon go up the river, hike around in the hills, etc.

You can still see wagon trails faintly on some of the hills nearby, out there, remnants of "the" Oregon Trail. Seems very appropriate that Google is physically returning to the frontier. I expect them to be much better stewards of the land than the industries of the last century, too.

*sigh* I wonder if it's too late to try to apply :)

No big deal

Google is opening offices in lots of places. Maybe we should have a slashdot story for each one!

This Oregon facility will only appeal to a niche market (and will only be 50-100 jobs they say).
Outdoors activities are great, but people will go to the Redmond office if they want that.

Young people like to live in, or near, major cities. It's exciting, there are more things to do. Since Google is mostly young people (median age under 30 I think), they won't have droves going to work in Oregon, even given the lower cost of living. Those types of things appeal to older employees with families.

That said, since in 10 years Google will have a lot more older employees with families, having this office may help later.

Oregon is skateboarding mecca

windsurfing, hiking, mountain biking, skiing

Uhhh.. You forgot skateboarding. Oregon has the best public skateparks [skateoregon.com] in the world. Hands-down.

Seth

Google = Umbrella Corporation

This it the remote isolate lab where they will begin working on the T-virus and regenerating human life. Of course this will create man eating zombies and we'll be forced to defend ourselves. I'm stock piling water/guns and wolf brand chili right now. I'll be ready!

A trend we might be seeing more of...

From what I've read/heard on the radio, many businesses are planning on either leaving California, expanding outside of the state's borders, or are not planning on opening any new facilities within the state, due largely to the state's high taxes, business-unfriendly worker's compensation laws, and socialist-minded legislature. From Businesses Ponder Leaving California [caltax.org] [PDF]: "In a recent survey conducted by the California Business Roundtable, about 20% of 400 California businesses said they are planning to move or expand out of state. That's by far the highest figure ever recorded in their survey, the group says."

I think Arnie has helped quell some of the concern businesses had with previous governor Davis, and I do personally believe the State is getting back on track from some rather fiscally irresponsible years, but California does have wildly inflated property prices, high labor costs relative to other states, and an ever-growing illegal alien problem (which helps mitigate the expensive labor for manual labor jobs, but brings with it a high social services cost that must be borne by the citizens of the state).

Re:Are trees at stake?

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.

Re:Give me a job!

yeah but $60k doesn't go nearly as far in NYC than it does in portland - the land of no sales tax (god do i miss it)

Re:Give me a job!

Come to California! We got both!

Re:Why is Google so important?

Christ here we go with the typical /. attack on all those who have the gall to succeed.

Re:Am I the only one who thinks

Perhaps it was a result of Google Hacking? [google.ca]
They may not want to be seen as the exploration tool of choice.

Not a troll, reality

Portland and southern Oregon are not/ were not friendly places for non whites. Portland at one time
had a particularly bad reputation. May still have,
( I am a whitey).

As for The Dalles I don't know.

Re:and then you'll realize

whome ever modded me troll,
have you ever actually been to portland for more than a few days and didn't go to just NE. cause if you haven't you have no busness modding me troll. After spending 17 years of my young life living in SW portland (well actually mt. park lake oswego, but i was less than 5 min out walking distance and went to portland public schools) i can tell you, it is not a friendly place for people of color. my freshman and sophmore years in high school i went to wilson, a school of 1,600 students and we had under 50 students that were people of color (really, i should say they didn't pass for white). oh and then there is that whole neo-nazi skinhead part; read the book A Hundred Little Hitlers and you'll see just how far the racism has gone. i moved to brooklyn this past june and live with some friends of mine (yes, i'm 17, yes its a very stable living situation, and yes my mom approves - she knew that i couldn't live in portland any more). and now, after moving over 3,000 mi. away i can finally begin to work on my internalized racism which was probably made worse because i grew up in portland. i have had one teacher in portland who was a person of color in the 5 schools that i went to (i went to two high schools, one middle school, and two elementry schoos). so next time you try to talk about how poc (people of color) friendly portland is try and check with someone who lived there and is a poc first, you may just hear a diffrence in oppinion.

and if i spelled anything wrong in here i really don't give a shit - you'll all live.

Re:Give me a job!

I'd take 60k any day, that's four times what I earn now. And it would mean sitting down at a computer all day rather than doing any actual work. Also London isn't a 'cool' city. It's a horrible city full of southerners and flat beer.