How does Google decide type of work for different offices?
I have seen that Google hires engineers for only specific offices. Like, they have an office in Gurgaon and Mumbai in India but mostly they hire engineers only in their Hyderabad and Bangalore offices. Similarly, for Microsoft, LinkedIn, Uber and some other big companies. Why do they not hire engineers for these locations? How do they decide the kind of work for different offices?
Google hires engineers for all over the place. The only hesitation is when you want to work in an office that has zero engineers. They want you to be located close to those you’ll work with when possible but this is quite flexible. The developers on my product are spread over at least 6 locations.
But, if you see the job openings in different locations, you will see that they just don't hire engineers for some locations in spite of having large offices and much talent in market from that location.
The locations listed in the job openings are not always a requirement. If you interview well they will usually try to get you at whatever location you choose.
Acquisition of companies often dictates the location. Microsoft buys a company for the customers tech or employees, and they want to stay where they are. Not everyone wants to relocate to Redmond, but most engineering work is here or downtown Bellevue. Some Silicon Valley down the road from Google. Buildings sprinkled here and there elsewhere in the Valley. Microsoft has a large Real Estate and Facilities team that does the space planning. Building coming online, going offline for major renovations. We just tore down almost all of the original campus to build the new one. There are a lot of dinosaur managers who think that colocation is critical to effective work, so most teams are not spread out. They move to even be on the same floor of a building, let alone in different buildings, or different cities. I think that’s archaic and Google for example is much better at leveraging a distributed workforce.
I'm talking about the distribution of work among the offices and locations and not just the choice of office space.
I edited my answer a bit and added more that may answer that. Colocation within teams and close location to partner teams. RE&F figures it out. Lots of moves, mostly after team re organization to make the physical offices closer match the org.
It depends a lot on the availability of the talent in the city. Some cities have better engineering talent than others so those offices are better suited for engineering. Also most engineering teams are expected to be in office and work closely with team mates, so having them in the same city makes more sense.
Where is the data to support it suggest availability of talent in a city? It's not true that the cities with engineering offices are producing more engineers than other cities. Like Zurich doesn't produce more engineers than the Gurgaon or Mumbai region.
Dude, Zurich will be compared to other cities in same country and not to gurgaon/Mumbai. Company should be able to find L5, L6 and others in order to establish a proper engineering team. I don’t think there is a straightforward answer to your question. Once you join a particular location, google is flexible to move you to different location based on projects and opportunities but asking to set up engineering teams in all the offices is not the right ask.