$110k seems a tad low for someone with over a decade's experience in the bay area. I'd be looking for more around $150k/year in wage slavery as an overall comp package (bonuses and expected stock sale value added to base salary)
Sure, but objectively, it's probably easier and more remunerative in many ways to work for Google in the Bay Area than, say, seek out a job in Sicily, where the weather is certainly wonderful, but there are not many IT jobs and they generally aren't of the interesting variety (unless you did something, like, say, create Redis, in which case you can happily stay in Sicily and hack on your project:-). Not to mention the language barrier and cultural differences.
Our move from Padova to Innsbruck, Austria, 4 hours away by car, was far, far more difficult than when I moved from Portland, Oregon to the Bay Area years ago. For instance, there are no one-way rental trucks in Europe that I know of, so if you have furniture or things to move, it's going to be expensive and/or time-consuming.
Trucking is hidelously expensive on the continent. No idea why. Shipping will be WAY cheaper in any port city. You'd be better off probably getting rid of your stuff and just getting new stuff (used, Ikea, whatever).
Renting a van isn't that expensive here. The problem is that you can't, say, rent it in Innsbruck and drop it off in Padova, but you have to drive down to Padova, rent the van, drive it back up to Innsbruck in the middle of the night in a snow storm over the Brenner pass, with the unloaded rear wheels not getting a lot of traction, load it up, and then drive it back down to Padova.
His overall package isn't $110k. It's that plus GSUs, which apparently vest at about 1/4 of the units per year, so an extra $25.7k/yr for a $135.7k package not counting bonuses.
Has anybody actually done their due diligence to see if there really is a lawsuit, or to see if there really is even a fusion garage? It seems to me like it has the potential for an especially lucrative hoax.
A year ago I would have down-voted a thought like this, but every time something develops with this story, it sounds more and more like a movie plot and less like a real story.
I pay $2,500/month for full use of a 1gbps circuit at one of my datacenters. 10 years ago I would have paid about $250k/month for that sort of capacity (and another $100k for a router/firewall that could handle it).
Bandwidth has definitely gotten significantly cheaper, which of course doesn't solve the broadband problem. If you live in the suburbs, or on a farm, then you've chosen a lifestyle which is inherently wasteful & inefficient, too much so to facilitate rapid infrastructure upgrades. Move to a city if this matters to you. Here in SF I pay $33/month for a synchronous 100mbps ethernet connection.
http://web-pass.com/ .. We actually found our apartment complex by calling up every building on their list of lit buildings and asking if they had any condos or apartments for rent. Turned out that there are at least 3 other geeks here I know!
Yeah, that's what I figured. Unfortunately, I'm not willing to move for an internet connection.
(For those who are wondering, this is an extremely special case -- most home bandwidth in the bay area is in the <10Mbps range, asymmetric. The OP is using a service that's available at only a handful of SF apartment buildings.)
It's growing, quickly. Others are entering this space, their main obstacle (besides the cost of running fiber) is that so many buildings have signed exclusivity agreements with comcast which have questionable legality. The economics make it easier to do in a city.. pay $20k to run fiber to a building with 1100 units, sell 25% of those units at $35/month, you gross $120k/year from that building. You probably have another $10k-$12k in equipment costs per building as well, but this sort of a network is quite simple to run.
This sort of connectivity will never be feasible in the suburbs without massive government subsidies (something I had hoped our current administration would see the value in).
