Google purchasing and expanding its Warsaw office for $700M (opens in new tab)

It's one part cheaper labor, it's one part taking over market, it's one part gaining political influence. Just like defense companies have parts made in all 50 states to gain political influence, google does it internationally. The more offices you open up in EU countries, the more political influence you have within the EU. Also, by opening more offices in EU companies, you make sure no EU headquartered google competitor can arise.

For the love of god, why doesn't the EU simply ban/limit google and grow a homegrown google. The EU's incompetence is so astounding. Their population is much larger than our population and they certainly have the talent to create tech giants. China is doing it. Russia is doing it. Why can't the EU do it? At least try. Why are they giving away their market to amazon, apple, google, facebook, etc? They did it with Airbus, why can't they do it with tech? It's much more difficult to create an Airbus than it is to create an amazon, google, apple, facebook, etc. It's insane that after 20+ years after the beginning of the internet/tech boom, the EU is so tech poor. The few that they create have been bought up by american companies.

Oh absolutely, but what I have noticed as well is that companies in lower wage countries have started charging more as well as there's now more demand for outsourced workers.

This is a good thing. Enough with the birthrights.

How is this outsourcing? Also, how is it any different from Google opening other international offices, which they've been doing for many years?

That doesn't make any sense in this context. As the article says, they have 1000 engineers there and they've been there for 15 years. It is neither new nor outsourcing.

Alternative take: This is the next step in work from home movement - investing in office space outside of world's most tech-heavy megacities.

We are all already working for your companies and other multinationals.

There is no giant pool of engineers working for "domestic" companies to be poached, other than domestic outsourcing, who already are contracted by multinationals.

It really isn't, just like outsourcing to India didn't kill engineering in the developed world.

It seems that you can't just be a US company hiring FTEs from other countries for the most part. You either need to hire contractors or setup a foreign subsidiary.

But force them into a office in their location.

Is it?

Can you share your internal source for this claim?

Google salaries in Poland are below market rate, actually. They probably think that people will come to work for them for free just because they want to have "Google" on their resume. Source: I was approached by a Google recruiter once, but did not even schedule an interview because of the lowball offer presented (total comp, including stock options, was way below what I make currently). $7k is not a market rate in Poland, unless you're talking $7k after all taxes.

There’s also lots of talent in neighboring Belarus, where Google indirectly has a presence through their acquisition of Fitbit (or had, not sure if their office is open anymore after the recent events in there). Sort of glad though that they didn’t decide to expand their small office they have here in Bucharest (also through the Fitbit acquisition), the local real estate market was getting quite heated regardless so extra gentrification brought by behemoths like Google extending their presence wouldn’t have helped.

Sorry but I interview regularly for positions based in Warsaw. First Codility/Hackerrank filtering and/or take home assignment, then rounds of algorithm smartass questions alternatively about nuances from every generation of Angular framework. All these for a job with a total compensation of equivalent of max 60k USD but more likely 50-55k USD. I have no idea what they are doing but certainly they are not hiring. There will be no hiring happening there, or rather I'm your "not good enough" candidate. These cutthroat processes are for positions with total compensation well above 100k USD, your poor miserable zealots.

As noted in your link, that wasn’t a divestment. The Warsaw office already existed at that point (and was bigger than Krakow, I believe) and that is essentially where the positions from Krakow were moved to. In this context, the news is an actually a continuation — more investment in Warsaw.

It's planned for 2500 employees AFAIK