Update 11/7: I was partially right… looks like it’s Brian Bershad AND Craig Chambers leaving, and Brian’s leading the lab, according to John Cook at the P-I.

Some interesting tidbits here in the Emerald City.

So it’s no news that Yahoo! is busy creating an office up here in Bellevue. What’s a big surprising is how they’re going about doing it. Unlike Google or Microsoft remote development centers (RDCs), rather than having Someone In Charge of the Center and trying to have the center work more-or-less independently from the main office, Yahoo! Seattle will just be a collection of random remote teams tied to the main team in Sunnyvale. I spoke a bit to the director for the International Search team, which is the development team that handles requests made by the international subs that the main search group, which presumably is focused on US search, would normally ignore. He’s got the main team there in Sunnyvale, a remote team in Paris, and he’s looking to have a remote team in Seattle. I asked him two questions and got two, well, iffy responses:

1. Why Bellevue, and not Seattle proper?
2. What value add would the International Search team get from being in Seattle with the other teams located in Seattle?

The first question was why Bellevue and not Seattle proper. For those not familiar with Seattle’s geography, there’s Seattle, a long, narrow lake that runs north-south with two congested bridges across it (520 and I-90), and then the east side consisting of places like Bellevue and Redmond. People who live in Seattle hate commuting to the east side due to the miles of stop and go traffic. Microsoft isn’t moving anytime soon, and Google opened up an office in Kirkland, also on the east side. So why not offer something different, like a nicer commute or better digs? He didn’t know.

The second question also got a non-answer. He wasn’t sure who else was going to be up in Seattle, so apart from having an office with a bunch of Yahoo! engineers, it wasn’t clear that there’d be any synergy with the other teams. Seems… well, broken to me. Hey Yahoo!, is this really what’s happening?

Oh, and while we’re talking about something in Seattle, rumor has it Craig Chambers, a CS professor at the University of Washington, will be jumping ship to lead the Google Fremont office. This is total rumor at this point, as I heard it while at UW Affiliates the other day, but hey, you heard it here first. What is not rumor is that Google Fremont will be a dev office, meaning at least one of the big three will have an option for people to stay in Seattle. Of course, those people could always come to Amazon, located in the heart of the I-District with much better locale and food!

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