Looks like a damn nice office.
I’m thinking I might consider giving them my services.
I hate lazy reports that only say “New Taipei” which is geographically meaningless.
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Taiwan is allowing companies like Google to show up, raise wages and expectations.
Taiwan has been an OEM, kept costs low.
Taiwan is about to experience huge changes in the next few years as established brands show up, which will cause other Taiwan companies to raise costs to compete.
Taiwan has been great, under the radar, as OEM for major brands, keeping costs and prices low.
Things are a changin.
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This is Google’s largest hardware R&D hub outside the US.
Pixel, Nest, and Chromebooks are all designed in Taiwan.
Damn right. Never doubt Taiwan.
TSMC is certainly kicking ass but an island-wide engineering renaissance to international status? I have my doubts. My experience after working in Taiwan industry since the mid-90’s is that it’s an engineering wasteland at the highest levels of innovation. Whenever my many suppliers get in trouble, which is often, I have to step in and solve their engineering problems if it’s a problem they haven’t seen before.
Thanks for adding your experience to those of others’ here.
I worked with over a hundred engineers in the R&D office of a Taiwan tech company from ‘98 to 2001. I was shocked at what a clown show it was.
Send your thoughts to Google and get them to withdraw the investment.
For low cost engineering grunt work Taiwan is the place to be. Dressing it up as a world-class innovation center is just for show.
Yay for grunt work!
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I’m sure Taiwan has its share of lazy Chabuduo infested companies but there are so so many top-notch engineering going on here. Mediatek, Asus, Acer, Gogoro, TSMC, UMC, AUO, Micron are just some of the leading companies. This is not a subjective anecdote from 20 years ago when Taiwan’s cutting edge tech was just getting started either, its pretty much a fact proven by the results and that these companies beat the shit out of international competition. I’m not saying your experience is invalid but I also have firsthand experience with Taiwanese tech companies and they are really good at what they do. Maybe times have changed or maybe you just met the bad ones but there certainly ain’t no shortage of world-class engineering in Taiwan today.
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Four of them are mine.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1121213.shtml
Over a five-year period, more than 91 percent of Chinese design patents granted in 2013 had been discarded and similarly 61 percent of utility models lapsed by last year, with a disposal rate of 37 percent for invention patents. By sharp contrast, 85.6 percent of US patents were maintained during the same period. In other words, most patents filed in China are worthless.
There has indeed been remarkable progress in innovation in various aspects of China’s development, but the patent boom does not show where Chinese technology truly stands. It largely results from robust government subsidies and administrative incentives as well as a lax process of approval, indicating a relentless pursuit of patent quantity rather than quality.
There is a similar situation in other fields such as higher education. China now has the world’s largest output of scientific papers and ranks second in paper citations, but the average citations per paper are still below the global mean, suggesting a low quality of papers.
Not my recently-granted patent for a reusable swab for anal rapid Covid testing though.
And that’s my favorite news source!
Banqiao
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I think this is the one near Far Eastern Memorial Hospital MRT. Would be fascinating to see how that area gets more food choices in the future. 
Google anyone?
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Probably to do grunt work.
Where in New Taipei?! People got to quit using that useless term.
Largest hardware engineering office outside of USA. One of six facilities in Taiwan.
Lots of vacant jobs.
That was like two months ago. It’s in Banciao.