Sure, we just use SV as a great example of places located in the middle of nowhere with tones of potential for Tech Giants. Look at the FB campus in Menlo Park, the median employee age is 28 years old. Now look around the campus... it's a giant swamp and there's a free way. That's it... oh and it's next to East Palo Alto.
Young talented folks came en mass. It does work to open a campus in the middle of nowhere. Why Tech giants still go to large and expensive cities? It doesn't make any sense but to satisfy a few folks who for the most part share an apartment with roommates or rent a studio in downtowns making 6 figures.
The vast majority of employees who "moved" to the new Menlo Park office were old Facebook employees who worked for them in Palo Alto right before the move.
Facebook now has an NYC office too. My uneducated guess is that their candidates now have far more options than they did 10 years ago, and more people would rather not live in SV.
Have you ever visited their campus in Menlo Park? :) you’ll see young and fresh employees all over the place.. they finished their new campus next to their old buildings and are now building another campus next to the new campus. On top of that they’ve bought land around to build a Facebook village for employees. It looks like 5 college campuses in one. Offices in cities like SF are very limited in space and can hold only a few employees. This is true for google, FB, linkedin, etc. Majority of the folks are recruited on teir main campuses in SV.
No doubt many new hires are OK relocating to Menlo Park. Evidently, many are not. Facebook would not invest in an expensive offices in NYC, for instance, if everyone was just happy to relocate to its huge campus in Menlo Park.
My comment referred to the first proper Facebook campus was going to be very close to Palo Alto since that's where their first offices were. Just like has been the case for Google and a bunch of other SV employers.
I'm a young person considering job offers in the Bay Area right now - one of my major considerations is that I want to live in a city. One company is in Oakland, which makes that possible, and the other two are in SV, which makes it very difficult. It's really dissuading me from wanting to do stuff in SV.
I completely agree that SV isn't a very attractive place nowadays, especially not for young talent.