Does Mozilla’s Portland office point the way for a new kind of tech migration?
Summary
“We talked about doing Portland neighborhoods for a while, but…breweries just seemed to make sense to more people.” It’s a nice touch for the space, three floors up in the Pearl District’s Brewery Blocks, which is already buzzing with quiet activity despite its newness. Unlike most of the regional offices that big tech names have opened in the city lately, this one wasn’t the result of an acquisition or a strategic relocation, but a way of accommodating the 26 Mozilla employees who already live here. That workforce could theoretically live anywhere there’s good WiFi, but a lot of them end up clustering together, some in cities—like Toronto, Taipei and San Francisco—where the company maintains offices, and others in cities—like Brooklyn, Chicago and Seattle—where it doesn’t. Jennifer Fong, a Firefox web app developer from Toronto, also picked Portland as her new home recently, over several other cities where Mozilla already maintains offices, including Vancouver, BC. But increasingly, even Bay Area companies are using non-monetary benefits to entice workers, placing more emphasis on work-life balance, and doing their best to counteract the downsides of living in one of North America’s most expensive regions.
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