Tuesday night the Santa Clara City Council unanimously voted to approve Yahoo’s development plan for thirteen six-story buildings. The buildings will be about 10 miles away from the Googleplex and be large enough to fit 12,000 employees. Yahoo currently has under 14,000 employees worldwide. Yahoo bought the 3 million-square-foot property for $112 million in 2006.

Yahoo has not commented about when they will start construction and if they plane on increasing staffing anytime soon. Since 2006, Yahoo has had a rough run, so it is hard to predict what the future of their current offices or new offices will be.

Yahoo employees over the past few years have been “encouraged” but until now not required to take the time off. According to Yahoo spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek “essential functions” will remain staffed during the period. Beyond “customer support” it’s not clear what those roles are from the article.

The Journal article points out that other tech companies in Silicon Valley, such as Adobe and Apple, either close or are effectively shut down during the same period.

These engineers announced the strike yesterday on the blog and posted a video to express their distaste for the decision to cut these jobs:

You can learn more about the strike at Techmeme.

Both locations are in the Seattle area — Fremont is just north of downtown and Kirkland is across the floating bridge on the east side (near another company you may have heard of called Microsoft). Yahoo also recently announced the opening of a new engineering office in the Seattle area. Theirs will be in Bellevue, which is also on the east side, near that little-known Redmond company. Both Yahoo and Google have downplayed Microsoft’s potentially recruiting potential (and Yahoo, being the third one in, is downplaying the possibility of recruiting from Google).

Yahoo Senior VP David Sobeski (previously at Microsoft) said to the Seattle PI, “We’re here to build a good presence of engineers. You know what, if Microsoft guys want to come and ask us questions, great. Google guys? Great. We’ll talk to everybody.” Earlier, Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, told the PI that Google didn’t set up an office there in order to attract employees from Microsoft. (Although that office certainly has its share of ex-Microsofties.)

Fun fact: the picture in that PI article of the Google office includes me in the corner “brainstorming.” Sadly, the Buffy action figures on my old desk aren’t visible.

Steve’s blog post points out the many Google products to come out of the Kirkland office, and I can’t help but add that Sitemaps grew well beyond its roots into Webmaster Central thanks to the efforts of the Kirkland-based team.

Vanessa Fox ate lots of yummy cake as a Googler during the first and second birthdays of the Kirkland office and wishes them a very happy third.

It appears Yahoo is hiring software engineers for the Bellevue location.

This is Yahoo’s first large presence in Seattle. Google has their Kirkland office and we all know Microsoft’s headquarters is in Seattle.

More coverage can be found at Techmeme.