Why is Grand Cayman not a valid location in SO Careers?

Question

There are programming positions in Grand Cayman and there are programming jobs in the Caribbean Islands. Neither of these is allowed in the "Relocation" choices under Careers.

You guys don't like sunny climates or what?

Answer 1

In order to determine whether a location is valid we assign a particular search term a quality.

Our logic is essentially:

// https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#Types
if (googlePlace.HasComponent("street_address") || googlePlace.HasComponent("route"))
{
    return 87;
}

if (googlePlace.HasComponent("city") || googlePlace.HasComponent("locality"))
{
    return 45;
}

if (googlePlace.HasComponent("administrative_area_level_1"))
{
    return 20;
}

if (googlePlace.HasComponent("country"))
{
    return 10;
}

return 0;

To be used on the profile screen as somewhere you want to relocate to you need to meet a quality of 10 or above.

However, Grand Cayman is categorised by Google as a 'Natural Feature' or 'Establishment' which maps to a quality level of 0 on our side. Establishment essentially means uncategorised by Google. I've submitted a general item of feedback to them to categorize each island correctly. I guess we'll see what they say.

Google categorises Cayman Islands as a country which maps to a 10 on our side so you could use that in the meantime. I know this isn't the exact location you want to relocate to but I don't think it makes sense to assign natural features or establishments quality values.

Carribbean Islands on the other hand is marked as a political region because it isn't any single country but a group of countries governed by different governments. We don't currently support this or whole continents in the profile pages. I'll discuss with the team and update this post to see whether it makes sense to treat these as countries!