Wanna career? Move to the center!

But remember that life on the periphery can be good too…

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When I worked at Google in Zürich (Switzerland), I was regularly asked for career advice. Of course, people who ask for that kind of advice often feel stuck, so a typical recommendation is to move: Move projects, move teams, move jobs, and, in a surprising number of cases: Move offices. “If you want a career at Google,” I often told people, “move to Mountain View!”

A typical response to this advice was: “But I don’t want to move to Mountain View.” That is of course an understandable sentiment, especially if the person involved lives in Switzerland, as that country consistently rocks up in the upper echelons of the list of best places to live. But it is unfortunately indisputable that, at Google, the best projects are in Mountain View and that is where the biggest careers are made. Gravity eventually “forced” the VP of engineering for Europe to move to Mountain View, because that was where he thought he could represent the interests of Google’s European offices the best.

When I worked at Facebook, I regularly told people to move to Menlo Park and at Amazon the advice was to move to Seattle. In general, if you really want to give your career a boost, you have to move to the center of power! Depending on the organization, that center of power can be Amsterdam, Veldhoven, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Rome, Seattle, or Redmond, but regardless of the physical location, the center of power is where it happens. So if you want to make it big, that’s where you should be. I should know, because over time I have steadfastly refused to move to the center of power and that’s why, after a 36 year career, I am still a nobody.

“But Jos,” you might say, “why is this true? Can’t I have a big career on the periphery? Why is there a center of power at all?”

To start with the second question: Yes, you can have a satisfying career on the periphery, but it will not be the biggest career possible and you will constantly have to deal with being on the outside. For instance: When we were starting an SRE organization at Google in Zürich, the first thing that Alan Eustace (Google’s then SVP of engineering) asked when he visited in 2007, was why we were there at all and if it wouldn’t be much more convenient for Google if we were all in Mountain View.

In addition to fighting for your existence, being on the periphery also means constantly fighting for cool work and dealing with the fact that your projects are often canceled or moved to the center when they become cool. If it is big, and new, or maybe important, it is going to happen in the center and not in some organizational exurb beyond the control of the senior executives.

There are many reasons for the importance of the center. Typically, this is where the company got started and where the founders and the first batch of employees live and work. The first and second generation of executives are often recruited from this first batch of employees and so this is where they build their organizations, each of which is a little power center of its own. Then, as the company grows, it is much easier to grow in a single location, so that is what happens. Companies typically only start opening remote offices if that is necessary for commercial reasons (think regional sales and marketing offices), for legal reasons (for instance an obligation to have a representative in some jurisdiction or as a way to make an annoying lawsuit go away) or if they have depleted the pool of eligible employees in their home area. When I was at Google in Zürich, it was completely obvious to me that we were a hiring beachhead and a convenient place to stash people who didn’t want to move to the US or who lost the H-1B lottery.

Many people thought that Google went to Zürich for tax reasons but that is not correct, they went to Dublin and Amsterdam for that.

When companies start having remote engineering offices, they need to shift some work there. These are new offices with new staff, so the first batch of work that goes there is of course not the most critical and cool work. If all goes well, eventually a few cool projects will migrate to the remote offices by virtue of the fact that there is too much cool work happening to be contained in the HQ alone. That’s all fine and dandy, until such a point as these remote projects become really cool or really important, in which case they will inevitably move back to the center.

At this point you might wonder why it is inevitable that these projects move back. Good question! The reason is that the executives, who are still all in the center, want to keep a close eye on the now cool or important project and that means having people they know and trust work on them. And where do these people who they know and trust work? In the center, because how else did these executives come to know and trust them? Not from umpteen video conferences or their biyearly two day visits to the remote offices.

All of this means that the most senior and most wel;-connected people are all in the center, making it hard to get promoted to higher levels in the remote offices. This pattern is so strong that when it is broken, it is noteworthy. At one point or another I was the first individual contributor that got promoted to a certain level in Google SRE outside of Mountain View. This was considered a big thing, because in order to get promoted you need to do a lot of good work with higher level people and as you climb that ladder the air is getting a lot thinner very quickly. As distributed offices grow, there is a bit more room to grow senior staff locally, but inevitably there is a glass ceiling that you cannot break. That dearth of very senior people locally radiates downwards and impacts everything in the office.

All of this goes to say: Power concentrates and if there is a clear center of power, that is where you need to be. Over time it will only get more important to be there in order to get to the higher rungs of the corporate hierarchy. Being in the center opens up career options because there are more impactful projects to choose from, more senior people to work with, and more opportunities to get face-time with the executives.

This is not new by the way, the book “Moving Romans” contains a detailed study of migration to the city of Rome in the first two centuries of the common era.

As companies get really big, the remote offices in the periphery grow too and you start to see some second order effects. For instance during my travels to various European Google offices, I frequently heard the complaint that people in Google Zürich, which had grown into a really big remote office, were by now as hard to work with as the people in Mountain View had been in the olden days. Oh, sweet irony…

So if you are ambitious and find it hard to work on really cool and impactful projects in your remote office, moving to the center is a good option and probably by far the easiest option to unlock good career opportunities. That is not to say that you have to move. Most big companies offer very satisfying careers in the periphery too and personally I always valued quality of life over a bigger career. But when you make that choice, you have to realize that you cannot eat your cannoli and have it too. Something’s gotta give. Choose wisely.