Said Svec » austin http://www.saidsvec.com meta-Software Development Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:17:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Google closing Austin office http://www.saidsvec.com/2009/01/14/google-closing-austin-office/ http://www.saidsvec.com/2009/01/14/google-closing-austin-office/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:15:06 +0000 svec http://svec.wordpress.com/?p=132 It seems like just yesterday Google was celebrating the opening of their new office in downtown Austin, Texas – actually, it was mid-October, 2008, according to the Austin American Statesman (google has the story in their cache, but the Statesman’s link doesn’t work).

But today Google announced that they are closing the Austin office, along with offices in Trondheim, Norway and Lulea, Sweden, in order to “build larger and more effective teams, reduce communication overhead, and give engineers increased options for future projects” :

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/changes-to-engineering.html

Google says they’ll try to keep people from those sites at Google, but of course the employees would have to move to larger Google sites.  That makes sense for Google in terms of managing tons of projects, sites and people, but that’s a real bummer for the Austin Googlers.

Again, from the Statesman:

“We really do like Austin, we like the engineers in Austin, we like the town, we like the geography, but there just wasn’t any way in the short term or medium term to really grow the office to the size that Austin deserves,” [said Alan Eustace, Google senior vice president of engineering].

Hopefully Austin tech companies can pick up some good talent from those who don’t want to leave Austin.

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