LinkedIn has roughly 10k employees - they're in an arms race for office space with Google and Apple in the area, but it sounds like this agreement should resolve most of the issues with Google and LinkedIn. Being that LinkedIn's headquarters is currently blocks away from the Googleplex and considering Google's dominance of the land north of the 101, it has left LinkedIn with little room to grow in its main cluster of buildings, and so it has been forced to look in Sunnyvale. Unfortunately, Apple has also expanded quite significantly into Sunnyvale in search of more land.
According to LinkedIn (this is a cool use of their website), of 12K employees listed the top 3 functions, covering 75% of employees, are Sales (4K), Engineering (3K), and HR (2K).
I don't get these engineer counts. Neither at LinkedIn or at Twitter, or even Etsy. What are they doing? Sure, there's behind-the-scenes analytics, and a good sized ops team. Does talent and capability fall off quickly when teams scale up?
Mostly because teams become more specialized as company sizes grow. While in an early stage startup you might have "the ops guy" who runs all the infrastructure, within LinkedIn there's a team that runs Kafka, a team that runs database operations, a team that runs Voldemort, a team that runs Pinot, a team that runs Hadoop, a team that runs the ads platform, a team for the feed, a team for messaging, a team for search and so on. Even if most teams are rather small (eg. two pizza rule), with many teams it eventually adds up.
Furthermore, as you point out, the more teams you have, the more overhead there is in cross-team collaboration, which means that engineering output is sub-linear with the number of engineers due to having more meetings. It's not really about talent, but mostly about having to spend more time coordinating. For example, in a small company, say that you want to create a new feature, then you just do it and check with one or two other people if need be. In a larger company, you might need to have meetings with other teams to deal with provisioning hardware resources, security review, data schema review, compliance with privacy regulations, code reviews, etc.
It's a very different thing from coding by yourself or in a small team/company.
It's not HR in the sense you think. LinkedIn makes the majority of their money selling recruiting tools. That requires scads of talent management experts.
Are these 2K HR employees helping other companies in recruitment? (some Linkedin Service that I don't know about?) Because otherwise these numbers would seem excessive to me.
What restricts someone from constructing a tall building?
If I buy a piece of land, and it's my property, I can do whatever I what with it right? Who can stop me from constructing a tall building on my own property?
The United States is a free country right? I assume a free country respects property owner's freedom to whatever[1] they want with their land?
[1] Of course excluding actions would cause significant harm to one's neighbors, like environmental pollution.
I was actually asking that question in a rhetorical sense.
I'm well aware of zoning laws. I think when they're taken too far, they impinge on personal liberty.
There are localities that mandate that every house be painted the same color. The Bay Area zoning laws benefit a few (the landlords) at great cost to everyone else who lives there, and stunts the growth of the regional economy. (If taller building were allowed and property prices were more sane, there would be more companies and more people, thus leading to economic growth).
I think what we need is a constitutional limit on state power in the United States. The Tenth Amendment[1] and the Enumerated Powers Clause[2] limit federal overreach, but there is no analogous limit on state power in the U.S. Constitution. The states' powers are not enumerated, well-defined or limited in any way, and states are free to legislate on almost anything (unless it infringes on an enumerated right of the people or a right covered under Ninth Amendment[3]).
> I'm well aware of zoning laws. I think when they're taken too far, they impinge on personal liberty.
Well then it's a good thing we have courts to decide what "too far" is. The Supreme Court has decided that zoning laws are not inherently unconstitutional (Euclid v. Amber), but they've struck down more infringing laws on multiple occasions. Maybe you don't agree with the exact balance they've chosen, but that's your problem, not a fatal flaw of our government.
> I think what we need is a constitutional limit on state power in the United States.
We already have one: the Supremacy Clause. Federal laws and the national constitution override state laws in all cases. If a certain right is not granted either by a state or by the Supremacy Clause, it's because both the state and the Federal government have decided that particular right isn't a natural one. Again, you seem to be taking your particular conceptions of liberty and what the law should be, and deciding the government is flawed for not obeying them. A lot of us like the current system.
If there's a particular right you feel should be Constitutionally protected against state laws, we have a system for that with Constitutional amendments enforced by the Supremacy Clause. Propose one to your representative if you like. But your suggestion of more non-specific Constitutional limits on state power is not going to win you many followers: the vague right-libertarianism of your attitude will alienate the Left, and the Right will balk at your suggestion of more Federal limits on state power. You're walking a lonely road here.
You've got a lot of good points. I agree that the current system works very well, and I personally appreciate it deeply (esp. considering how well-functioning it is, compared to many other countries today). But there's always room for improvement, and I was just suggesting something that I think could be an improvement.
Why do you think having federal government pass laws to override local government is less threatening to personal liberty than allowing local governments to manage themselves?
The Bill of Rights[1] restricts both federal and state power. It, empowered by the Fourteenth[2], has been used by the courts to strike down state (and federal) laws as unconstitutional several times. This has overall been in the interest of the people, and have served to protect our individual liberty -- wouldn't you say so? And the rights of the people enumerated Bill of Rights is supreme over all laws whether passed by Congress, state government, or local government.
What I'm essentially arguing for is for a sort of massive expansion of individual liberty through federal restriction of state power, by for example, having a list of "Enumerated Powers of the States" similar to the federal Enumerated Powers clause added to the Constitution, and establishing (just as in the Tenth Amendment) that all powers not specifically delegated to the states are reserved to the people. This would expands personal liberty, as it would put well-defined limits on what the states can legislate on.
Of course excluding actions would cause harm to their neighbors with their actions.
What would you call it when your new 50 story building leaves neighboring properties in permanent shadow, or get in the way of their previous panoramic views of the bay?
Most of the other comments are off base for Mountain View/Sunnyvale shoreline area. Google and Linkedin can't build tall buildings here because their campuses are next to Moffett federal airfield and the surrounding area is subject to building height restrictions.
There's a map for this, I'll edit my comment when I find it.
Edit: I found the map (http://i.imgur.com/B48yRGK.jpg), the maximum building height for this area is 182 feet above sea level. The Google campus sits around 15 feet above sea level and LinkedIn around 50. That works out to a max height of around 10 stories for the Google area, 7 stories for LinkedIn. So actually, it's higher than I thought.
There are quite a few tallish (7-10 story) buildings along 237 and Central expressway that seem to skirt this restriction.
This has got to be wrong. Have you seen the "Moffett Towers" buildings that are actually bordering Moffett Field? Google's buildings are 2 floor max; Moffett Towers has 6-8 floor buildings.
Google's current buildings were built years (or decades) ago, long before the current space crunch, and say nothing about current City policy. The maximum height in the current North Bayshore Precise Plan is 140 feet above ground (155 feet above sea level), which takes it pretty close to the federally imposed limit.
Which confirms the fact that current zoning code is more restrictive than the federal guidelines for the airfield, in direct contradiction to the claim that Moffett was restricting the heights rather than the city.
There was a skyscraper in downtown San Jose that was proposed a few years ago that was designed to the maximum height allowed by San Jose airport. After the designs were finalized, the FAA decided that the maximum height was too high, and lowered it a few feet, leading the developer to almost abandon the project, before redesigning it at some expense.
Lesson: it's a mistake to design to the limit.
I suppose in some idealized, maximally YIMBY world, the difference between 8 stories and 10 represents some horrible market interference by "NIMBY asshats". But in the real world, Google would be foolish to build above 8 stories no matter what the Mountain View city council says. The Precise Plan just reflects the practical limits of building in that area.
That's not true. There are at least seven four storey buildings (Alza, Crittenden) on the main campus, and there's also a new 5 storey building on Pear Ave. But almost none of their buildings were built new, most were already built and acquired. Their proposals for new buildings have mostly been around 6-8 storeys, but they've had problems getting the city to approve their plans. I believe the LinkedIn land they acquired also already has approval for taller buildings.
You're right, the other comments aren't incorrect (I wrote that word earlier), it's just in this spot there's federal restrictions on building height that prevent certain developments.
The citizens of Mountain View want nothing to do with tall buildings. They only have a handful that are over 5 stories.
A 12-story building was planned back in 2012 and they almost had a protest over it. The name of the town is 'Mountain View' and not 'city skyline view', after all.
This shocked me the first time I went out to SV. I thought the bay would be a deep body of water with a shoreline, and it's basically a mud flat / salt factory. Really disappointing. Many cities built along rivers have better water views & access.
As a Seattle refugee, I still don't understand why there are so few boats on the bay.
I get that the Bay is not Lake Washington.. but seriously, lakes vary in height too, and still have docks.
Somehow the bay has almost no docks, no boating (except some sailboats way up north in SF), no recreation at all. Is it water quality? Chop? Regulation?
there is a marina in redwood city, but notice how shallow the bay is south of SFO (aside from the channel) - much of that is mudflats (lakes don't have tides), marine preserves, etc.
Damn. DAMN. I didn't realize it was that shallow. (I'm familiar with the RWC Marina as I bike by there on my commute, and in college I rowed out of Seaport). Thanks. Obviously it goes without saying that if the water is only (say) 5m deep, there's a hell of a lot of crap between 0m and the 5m floor.
The changing height is not as much of an issue; plenty of lakes vary in height by 5-10ft and docks accommodate it just fine.
The muddy marsh/salt ponds surprised me too! But there are a few spots where the actual Bay (open water) is visible... e.g. Baylands Nature Preserve in Palo Alto. Also nearby hills have views -- I used to take walks to the top of the hill behind Google's Crittenden buildings, from where you can see a good bit of the southern Bay and up the peninsula northward. (Those hills also used to be MTV's garbage dump, so it could be worse!)
Then why not build down instead of up? Besides the obvious suckitude that is working under ground? Build 5 floors of prisms and light pipes above ground and send sunlight down 20 stories or whatever the math works out to.
Mountain view borders the coastline of the bay. I just used a tool[1] to find the level above sea they are, and it shows ~ 8 ft. I imagine there are problems building below sea level when you are only a few hundred feet from the coast.
Biggest question I had when I first arrived in bay area. Gov. Regulation are the reason why it is a bit harder to have taller buildings, tech companies have lot of money to go for more land grab is the main reason.
If you are building a building with X floor area the city government requires you to have f(x) area as open land. If you want to build a very tall building it will have to look like the Saruman's Tower. This regulation is part of the reason why Sunnyvale or Mountain View do not look like SF. It is also the reason why property prices are so expensive. The good part however is that it means less crime, better neighbourhoods and overall good quality of life.
Are the better neighborhoods, crime rates, and qualities of life a result of lower-rise buildings, or because the cost of living is so high that only the wealthy or upper-income can afford to live there?
Asking the real questions. I'm not sure what the correlation between tall buildings and crime is. "Better neighborhoods" is usually code for the sorts of things people don't say in public and it seems to be that quality of life is more dictated by your level of income rather than where you live.
It's happening. I think the one thing people need to realize is the big "space crunch" in the Bay Area is a relatively recent issue. There is NIMBYism to be sure, but development is slowly catching up. Look at the Sunnyvale side of Moffett Field, it has rapidly grown a collection of tall buildings.
The potential issue that was brought up in Mountain View is an unwillingness to become a "company town" for Google. Residents can remember being a "company town" (to a lesser extent) for SGI and then SGI went poof, leaving the Shoreline area vacant for a time. I actually think it is good for residents to be suspicious of tying their fates to one very large employer; nothing lasts forever.
The same issue may one day impact Cupertino...how many companies could or would want to acquire a single property as big as the "spaceship" campus? Apple isn't going away anytime soon, but this is still a valid concern.
Would it really be that bad for them if Google went belly up sometime in the future? Sure their property values might decline, but in the interim they'd go up. Is it that bad if property values go from x, to x + y, back to x, as opposed to just staying at x? In the interim, allowing Google to expand means they'd get a bunch of new infrastructure, run down parts of the city would be rehabilitated, the area would gentrify some. I'm not sure how these people are acting/voting in their own interest.
The land they just gave to Google was going to be used for more buildings. I doubt they were going to build skyscrapers, nor could they with the amount of additional parking space that would be needed. The North Bayshore area isn't really accessible except by highways, and even those are pretty much at capacity - in fact, the city council has approved only a limited amount of office space due to the strain on transportation infrastructure.
Indeed, their plan that the city rejected did include an additional off ramp.
But highways are nonetheless terribly inefficient. One extra lane or off ramp isn't enough to handle all of Google's traffic. They've already widened 101 around Google, rebuilt the whole Shoreline/85/101 interchange area to add more lanes, etc. The bottleneck is the off ramps themselves and the local streets -- they cause traffic to back up onto the freeway and make all lanes congested.
The real solution is to allow more housing to be built close to the campus, and elsewhere in Mountain View, so that more people can walk/bike/take transit. The land use just across 101 is really inefficient right now.
Indeed, there's been discussion about connecting Moffett Blvd to the North Bayshore neighborhood a new bridge over the creek that would connect to La Avenida. And creating a spur of the Light Rail system into the neighborhood as well.
