Not the case with the main Google SF office (except now some buildings are indeed the results of acquisitions) but definitely for San Bruno and varied for the other ones.
I had the impression the Google SF office was for capturing that talent that would not be bothered to commute south; but that for most people there it was a career dead end, if you weren’t in Mountain View you weren’t in the game.
At least that’s what the people I know who worked there told me, I don’t have any real inside knowledge and the stories could be wrong despite being plausible.
Yeah, like almost every other central-city engineering office of that era, SF was initially a sales office that SF-resident ICs would sometimes work from on Fridays...and then more often, and then eventually teams wanted to move there, and then...and then...
