Comment by wfo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wfo | Hacker News Reader

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It is terrifying how this power is being wielded. Cities try to compete to see who can be more obsequious and subservient to corporate interests in the hope that they win some "victory" -- the company moving to their town -- which in the end does very little for the actual city or the people in it. It is just an impressive line item on the mayor's resume when they try to move up in politics, "I got Amazon!"

Seattle hates Amazon and what it has done to the city. They provide nothing for the city, do nothing to help ameliorate the problems they create, they overcrowd every area with ultrawealthy out of towners who push actual Seattleites out of the neighborhoods they've lived in for generations, replacing local culture with bland silicon valley tech-ennui. And the jobs they offer aren't even good. They create new white-collar sweatshops in their office buildings to mirror their blue-collar sweatshops in the warehouses.

If they are paying attention, people in all of these cities should be praying to god that Amazon doesn't choose their city. If they can, they should protest, riot, refuse to let it happen.

If you want a left-wing prospective on this general issue (which is called "lotteryism") there's a great podcast that does media analysis on this and issues like it. As it turns out, for example, reporting describing the supposed 'benefits' Amazon could bring to a city are literally copied without attribution or further investigation from Amazon press releases. There is a reason Jeff Bezos bought a huge newspaper, and it's not charity.

https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/lotteryism-part-i-how...

You act like the highly paid people you are whining about dont pay taxes. They do. You are also acting like you and the other "actual Seattleites" have an ancestral claim to the region. Are you a Native American? Doubtful. Your ancestors stole the land and now you act like your entitled to say who gets to live there?

What a hypocritical, provincial attitude to have. And honestly, greedy as well.

My family came to this country in the 1600s. If I had your attitude, I would hate everyone. But I'm not entitled enough to think that my earlier arrival means I earned privileges.

Welcome to America, where effort and talent win over "I was here first"

<< Welcome to America, where effort and talent win over "I was here first"

This is an utterly vacuous and false statement. There are mountains of empirical evidence to prove it if you could spend a few minutes in your favorite search engine.

It's not greedy to protect the area you're from; it's human nature. I'm sorry, but Amazon's tens of thousands of out-of-town employees don't need to live in Seattle. Most of them could work remotely or find jobs at other companies.

Just to make sure it's clear that this is not a universal opinion:

I am a non-Amazon Seattle resident, and I'm thrilled with what the economic growth has done to the area. Some examples:

- Converted an un-safe warehouse district into prime, central real estate and a thriving neighborhood (South Lake Union)

- Grown a progressive, thriving economy that has in turn supported development of mass transit (ST2, ST3 - citywide light rail)

- Pushed the median household income up 13% over the last decade

Seattle ain't perfect, but there is no question in my mind that we'd be worse off without the thriving local tech economy.

>Converted an un-safe warehouse district into prime, central real estate and a thriving neighborhood (South Lake Union)

SLU was not un-safe. The idea that there is a seriously unsafe neighborhood in the city of Seattle is laughable. I remember SLU before Amazon. It has become extremely expensive and gentrified, that's it.

>Grown a progressive, thriving economy that has in turn supported development of mass transit (ST2, ST3 - citywide light rail)

Has massively inflated the population with wealthy transplants over a short period of time, pushing non-tech workers into the suburbs and requiring the citizens to pay for the added infrastructure costs due to Amazon-caused overcrowding without chipping in to help the city.

>Pushed the median household income up 13% over the last decade

You don't actually believe this is due to Amazon? I'm sure they helped a little.. mostly by pushing the poors out...

>Seattle ain't perfect, but there is no question in my mind that we'd be worse off without the thriving local tech economy.

Agreed, and Seattle has always been home to a thriving tech sector which is great. But other companies behave better with respect to their local community. Microsoft set up shop across the water, with a big campus so that employees could head into Seattle but didn't invade it and has adopted the culture of the area fairly well. Employees are treated well.

TIL software engineers aren’t actual residents of the places we live.

Are you a software engineer in one of these cities struggling to find a job?

Would you take one at Amazon, knowing that it's one of the worst software jobs out there because of horrible working conditions?

Would you last significantly longer than the average 1 year turnover rate at Amazon?

If you said yes to all these questions, your response makes sense. Congratulations, you are the .25% of the population that my argument doesn't apply to and I'll gladly note you as an exception and admit my argument was a generalization, though a reasonable one.

edit: It's also worth noting that I don't blame Amazonian transplants to Seattle themselves, I find them wholly sympathetic and I think it's sad these people are blamed for the state of affairs: rather, the company, that draws so many from outside, makes no effort to acclimate them to local culture, works them to the bone so they have no time to do so themselves, and provides nothing for the city to aid in the overcrowding, traffic, and housing crises they have created is to blame.

>Would you take one at Amazon, knowing that it's one of the worst software jobs out there because of horrible working conditions?

Source? It is consistently ranked as one of the better places for software engineers to work, despite NYT hit pieces.

>Would you last significantly longer than the average 1 year turnover rate at Amazon?

Amazon's turnover is almost indistinguishable from Google's. It's an industry issue (at the highest tier, at least), not an Amazon one.

> It is consistently ranked as one of the better places for software engineers to work

Where? By whom? I looked for a while and I couldn't find a single source to suggest this. There are plenty of lists of good software workplaces, Amazon shows up on none of them.

People like working there because it is a great resume-booster. Work a couple years at Amazon, kill yourself for work, then move on to a real company with that on your CV.

>despite NYT hit pieces

Or as everyone else in the world knows it, "accurate reporting".

Here's a quote from an article from an employee that I think captures it: “Amazon is a culture of self-driven workaholics”

If you join the cult and agree it's a good idea to work yourself to death, it's a good place to do that. It's not a good place to go if you want to be a Seattleite, participate in a community or have a life at the same time.

>Where? By whom?

LinkedIn, for one.

>Here's a quote from an article from an employee that I think captures it: “Amazon is a culture of self-driven workaholics”

You are quoting a subjective statement from an article, in support of the article's veracity? That makes absolutely no sense.

Amazon employs tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands have worked there over the past 20 years. The NYT article was a collection of anecdotes.

"Accurate reporting"? Lol, I for one am shocked that out of the hundreds of thousands of current and former employees they were able to find a handful that had bad experiences. I mean, what are the odds? Amazon must be the worst.

"Accurate reporting"? From what I remember, not a single individual references worked in software development, they were exclusively in marketing and bureaucratic levels.

>If you join the cult and agree it's a good idea to work yourself to death, it's a good place to do that

Again, based on a few anecdotes you've reached the conclusion that it is a cult? It's really obvious that you've decided Amazon is evil a priori, and are using circular logic to rationalize this, because your evidence so far is anecdotal (from an article based on anecdotes).

>It's not a good place to go if you want to be a Seattleite, participate in a community or have a life at the same time.

I work 40 hours a week, average. So does nearly every engineer I know here. I love Seattle and my work-life balance is awesome.

TIL software engineers think it's okay to participate in the economic and social destruction of neighborhoods in which people have lived for decades.

Young adults necessarily occupy space in a way that hasn’t yet been legitimized by the passage of much time. Populations that need to work for a living must go where there is work. Many of the consequences of this set of facts are dire and inhumane, and responsible public policy manages their impacts as best it can. A world with no new households is one that has stopped reproducing. A world where people are confined to their economically depressed birth cities is another kind of dystopian hellhole.

Half of this wouldn’t even matter if we let housing become a positive-sum game.

You could always refuse to participate in the social and economic destruction of communities by simply not working at places that have a disproportionate impact on the surrounding community.

Yes, it's that easy!

<< A world where people are forced to leave their community of origin because rich tech workers can outbid them for housing is another kind of dystopian hellhole.

Fixed that for you.

The size of your employer has nothing to do with your contribution to housing demand. A million employees of two-person startups have the same effect as a million Googlers, assuming similar budgets.

Interesting argument strategy. You pose something that will never happen in Seattle (a million employees of two-person startups) with something that actually has happened (Amazon).

If you're a transplant who works for Amazon, then it's because of a choice. You came from somewhere where you lived in a community with people you knew and who knew you. You don't need to be in Seattle.

People who are from Seattle need to live in Seattle. A lot of us don't want to leave our families or watch while our communities (or surrounding) communities are destroyed by waves of outsiders who know nothing about the area and who are only here for career/money.

Is that so hard to understand? How much should we have to accommodate? How many people? Should we sit idly by while people drive us out of our own neighborhoods?

Sorry, that's not going to happen.

>You came from somewhere where you lived in a community with people you knew and who knew you

Sure. College, which ends. After that, returning to your hometown is only possible if you're privileged enough to be born somewhere with a decent local economy, and even then, chances are you'll be moving from family-oriented suburbs to an "up-and-coming" urban neighborhood with other young adults... same set of issues. Or you got priced out of the Bay Area, or your hometown's economy finally shrank to below the level where it can sustain you, etc.

> A lot of us don't want to leave our families or watch while our communities (or surrounding) communities are destroyed by waves of outsiders who know nothing about the area and who are only here for career/money.

There is nothing an American city can do to privilege its natives relative to other Americans. Privileges and Immunities Clause. What you can do is rent control + plan and zone for growth so that it's an increase in population, instead of a displacement.

TIL that people own the neighborhoods they live in by virtue of being there first, without any form of payment, deed, title, or record of ownership.

I should point out that the arguments against gentrification are identical to the arguments white ethnic urban neighborhoods made against blacks moving into their neighborhoods in the mid 20th century.

"They are ruining the character of our city! We were here first!"

Losers.

Gentrification disproportionately affects communities of color. This is quite exactly what's happening in Seattle.

<< TIL that people own the neighborhoods they live in by virtue of being there first, without any form of payment, deed, title, or record of ownership.

I hear this argument a lot and it's really like saying "only people who own property should be allowed to vote". You're saying that only property owners belong in the community.

That's just sad and wrong - not to mention racist in the context of this discussion - and it truly exemplifies the attitude that myself and many other natives are pushing back against.

This attitude, which I see in so many tech workers, is why Amazon has gotten such a cold reception from many people in Seattle.

No, I'm saying that nobody is entitled to anything. I love how you bring up the race card.

Please explain to me the system of who gets to suddenly stop a city from changing, and when? Your attitude is based on emotion and illogic. So if I'm talking about South Boston, where it is white Irish Americans being booted out by a much more racially diverse professional class, am I bigoted against whites?

Again, you have an emotional argument and nothing else. Take that same argument, apply it at a national level, and you are in anti immigration territory. If Trump ran for mayor of Seattle and said he'd build a wall to keep newcomers out, it would help your agenda.

People who have been in an area for a long time have every right to fight back against overwhelming changes that have incredibly serious long-term implications for their quality of life.

It's a sign of your argument's inherent weakness that you equate people's heartfelt sentiments about feeling overwhelmed by cost-of-living increases, and the resulting destruction of their communities, with Donald Trump's agenda.

The reverse side of the incumbent and established having unlimited rights to protect their quality of life is that the young have none.

The young are also feeling overwhelmed by the cost of living, and are starting to question whether tenure really confers a special moral status that makes the most superficial elements of your quality of life (perception of crowding, architectural taste, ease of parking) more important than the fundamentals of ours (access to employment, housing cost burden, ability to start families).

Socioeconomic vulnerability justifies additional protection, sure, but any community against any change? Come on.

I know, I know, kids these days are entitled. It would be fine to arrange housing as a delayed-gratification, wait-your-turn sort of thing. But the economic cards are stacked in my favor about as well as they can be, and I don't see any such path. So excuse me, but I'm going to fight for a world in which my generation plausibly gets jobs and shelter at the same time.

This isn't about age, and I'm not sure why you're even framing it that way.

The crowding, costs, and congestion in Seattle have increased very significantly with Amazon. There have been very ugly social side effects as well.

Amazon's employees, most of whom are out-of-towners, don't need to live in Seattle as much as the people whom they're displacing. Basically, a lot of the Amazon transplants could work remotely or find jobs in other cities.

This was all entirely avoidable.

The reasons this sort of thing happens are the reasons humans organize themselves into cities at all. Turning off the growth spigot while maintaining everything else in working order isn't a lever that policymakers have.

What they do have are ways of dealing with population growth that lead to drastically less displacement.

Sure, no out-of-towner needs to live in Seattle specifically. New entrants to the workforce do need to live in a city with job growth in their industries, and all of those (for software development) are having this conversation. Could change if remote work becomes more available.

It’s a cycle. Tenants need more rights => the economics for landlords are less attractive => the supply of rental housing dwindles => tenants need more rights.

Rearranging the deck chairs can only get us so far in the face of scarcity. The experiment in a distributed and suburban country is over. The population is urbanizing, as it has throughout human history. Whether it wants to or not, that's where jobs are going. That presssure will always show up in some form or another unless the housing supply grows to meet it.

Whether it’s the market or the government, someone needed to be building on a massive scale, yesterday. That’s not incompatible with protecting long term renters, but when we make it less lucrative to build we must also give more of a push to build anyway.

If you've been on HN for any extended period of time, this should not come as a surprise to you.

Sadly, it's not!

Thanks for posting this. I remain horrified at the changes that Amazon has pushed on Seattle.

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