Boston Buzzing with HQ2 Rumors | Hacker News Reader

Boston Buzzing with HQ2 Rumors

necn.com

27 pointsSQL221920 comments

This conflates two things.

1. Amazon is (already) leasing a big building in Seaport. It's mostly Alexa, ~500-1k staff.

2. Amazon is shopping cities for a 50k-person second headquarters; one candidate site is the old Suffolk Downs in revere.

For many reasons, i hope (2) does not come to pass.

> Amazon is (already) leasing a big building in Seaport. It's mostly Alexa, ~500-1k staff.

There's a building in Fort Point, but apparently they're looking to lease yet another one. [1]

[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/01/10/amazon-seeks...

If one of the motivators for Boston is proximity to top tier universities, as a data point of one I had zero desire to stay in Boston after school and didn't think to get a job in the area. I doubt I would have stayed for Amazon.

Out of curiosity, what made you want to leave?

I would guess traffic and cost-of-living.

And the winter.

I spent a week in Rhode Island for work and spent one day sightseeing in Boston in the summer ~1998, it felt a lot like Houston in terms of heat and humidity which really surprised me (long time Texan at that point.)

Funny enough, I too spent some time in Boston during the summer of 1997. Reminded me of Florida summer weather.

I went back last year in October. 20 years is a long time, but the traffic now reminds me of Manhattan (apparently the bad drivers are called Mass-holes), with screaming cabbies and bumper cars.

I did have the best clam chowder of my entire life there, so there is that.

The traffic isn't as bad as NY except for certain times of the day and once you become a regular it's not difficult. The weather in the winter really only means the snow. The cold isn't terrible, but the snow just mucks everything up. It makes sense that you'd have the best seafood since Massachusetts has the largest fishing port in the entire United States.

Maybe the other positives Boston has in its favor outweigh the downsides, but you’d think Amazon would use this opportunity to pick a city with lower cost of living. Boston is one of only a few places more expensive than Seattle, which raises the question of what is the point of doing this at all.

Part of the purpose is probably to get access to the talent pool in another part of the country. I suspect cost of living is less of a factor than access to engineers.

Not everyone wants to move to the Bay Area. I for one am one of those people.

My own employer is HQ'd in the Bay Area, and without their office being here they'd be missing out on my meager skillset.

The same is true of most of my coworkers; they don't want to live in the Bay Area. Some did a tour in the Bay to get a good name on their resume, but they've paid their dues and now want to live where they want to live.

> Not everyone wants to move to the Bay Area.

Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, not the Bay. I think they have some tiny satellite office in Palo Alto.

Amazon has thousands of employees in the Bay. Nobody’s going to hire tens of thousands of software engineers in the US and ignore the Bay completely. It has too much of the top talent.

I'm really hoping they'll choose southern NH, where I live. You get most of the advantages of Boston, somewhat lower cost of living, and an opposite commute from what typically happens now. I'm not interested in working for Amazon and would like to leave the area, so it would make it easier to sell my house...

Southern New Hampshire realistically wouldn't be a terrible spot. Manchester has phenomenal infrastructure, an airport, and the space to support the growth. I hope that they take your suggestion.

As someone who works just outside Boston, I'm really hoping they choose somewhere other than MA. Usually this comes with massive corporate welfare paid for by the taxpayers, higher traffic, and increase property costs. Massachusetts doesn't have the infrastructure in place to support a large influx of workers into a single place. The highways are a mess at the best times of the year, turning into figurative parking lots during peak commuting times, housing costs are astronomical because so many people want to live in the same spots inside the 495 belt or on RT 2 or 190. My city put in a bid which I would dread if we got. I haven't honestly seen many people who want Amazon in their hometown.

I have always thought Boston was the most likely choice. The thing most big tech cos want most is more good programmers, and by moving to Boston they can get at the supply upstream of most other big tech cos. Plus it's a nice place. (I lived there for many years.)

Wikipedia[1] lists 52 colleges and universities in the boston metro area. The anecdotal number I've heard is 65-ish, which must go out into the suburbs a bit beyond wikipedia's bounds.

Amazon is a polarizing force, for sure. Some locals are concerned that their presence will drive up the cost of living further. Others want the broader economic impacts introduced by more tech jobs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

and this

http://www.kxl.com/boston-site-amazons-north-american-headqu...

Glad it’s not coming to my city!

You've been posting lots of unsubstantive comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do that? The idea here is as follows: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com