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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

This isn't an unreasonable generalization. But a) there's plenty of talent that wants to live somewhere other than an urban core, and b) if Amazon opens an HQ in a place, that place will become a somewhere, and c) Amazon is at the scale that they can afford to take raw talent and train it up.

Personally, I find Amazon's decision disappointing, and I regret getting caught up in the hype. I was hoping that they'd do something bold and interesting, not open a couple of satellite offices in obvious places.

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More on this point, there were a number of perfectly reasonable second tier cities in their 'final 20' shortlist already, which were lagging behind first tier cities only in transit, or, for all we know, in the amount of incentives they were willing to throw at Amazon's feet.

Raleigh/Durham would have made for a fine urban or suburban campus and would've capitalized on the presence of tech talent already drawn to the area; Austin would have been another obvious choice for pre-existing tech talent. A pick like Nashville or Columbus would have been bold, picking a rising star midsize metro with diverse strengths and no strong background in tech and lifting it further. Instead, it's looking to be NYC and DC. Much ado about nothing.

It's amazing. All of those months of speculation about what secondary city or emerging tech hub will become the next Austin, gone just like that, in favor of Amazon deciding to set up shop in the super-obvious capitals of finance and government.

Guys, Amazon is not a charity.

They aren't looking to build up a city. It's a foolish business decision to put something with the needs of HQ2 in a place with no transit. Sure, you can build transit, but A - it's expensive, and B - it's not your job or expertise.

Instead of lamenting the jobs they missed out on with HQ2, a forward thinking city would get to work building out its transit system. Many cities are doing just that. Houston for instance.

If places like Columbus or Nashville have a better strategy than building attractive infrastructure for competing with places like Houston and NYC for such jobs, then let them pursue that strategy. The market will settle the issue in the end.

You're ascribing moral judgment to my post. I'm not criticizing for taking potential jobs away from a secondary city. Playing host to an HQ2 is both a big boon and a great curse; witness all the articles about Amazon's impact on prospective cities' real estate markets and traffic. But my specific criticism is in questioning why did Bezos put on this charade to evaluate cities throughout North America, if he was just going to choose the obvious choices? The only more unimaginative city than NYC and Washington DC, would be to build HQ2 in the Bay Area itself.

Was this all a ploy to test how far local governments be willing to bend over for Amazon? A PR spectacle to show how important and influential Amazon is to warrant that kind of kowtowing from mayors and governors? If you're going to claim that Amazon earnestly pursued the search for HQ2, only to decide that NYC and D.C. were the best choices at the end, then their strategists must have done a poor job in not figuring that out before the city talent show.

And for us HN commentators: these picks are just boring. So much for innovation, imagination, and daring. Ho-hum.

So much for innovation, imagination, and daring.

Maybe you shouldn't have ascribed those qualities to Amazon's search for a new HQ?

Maybe they shouldn't have framed the contest as finding "a city that is excited to work with us and where our customers, employees, and the community can all benefit", but rather a purely financial and strategic decision that would take their analysts less than a day to wrap up.

None of those things have anything to do with "innovation, imagination, and daring".

Maybe it's too much to ask a company to embody its professed values in every aspect of its operations.

> Personally, I find Amazon's decision disappointing, and I regret getting caught up in the hype. I was hoping that they'd do something bold and interesting, not open a couple of satellite offices in obvious places.

I share this sentiment. I feel sort of silly about thinking that the outcome would justify the groveling and begging that Amazon invited. But at the end of the day it is the same as it ever was.

A lot of people want to live in NYC, that's why it's so expensive to live in NYC.

Amazon cannot replicate NYC in the middle of nowhere, or even the middle of somewhere. The confluence of geography, history, commerce, culture and sheer verve can't be bought.

There are more people that don't want to live in NYC than do. What's your point? At no point was there an HQ2 requirement of "be as cool as NYC"

My point is that Amazon's making some place "a somewhere" is never going to be on the scale of NYC.

They want to attract talent and the way to do that is to go where the talent is or wants to be. The bay area is such a place. Seattle is such a place. New York is such a place. But they couldn't turn Mt Tinroof Springs into a world centre no matter what they did.

How does Exxon attract talent to Houston? How about FedEx attracting talent to Memphis? Weird how only software engineers seem to only be attracted to NYC or Silicon Valley (to hear us talk about it.) A desirable company can attract talent no matter where they are. Startups have to leach from the existing community because they don’t have the clout to attract talent to Amarillo, Texas. But Google or Apple certainly could. A Silicon Valley salary in a cheaper place: half of the Valley would jump on that chance. I live inMountain View and I certainly don’t see a huge value to being here outside of work. It’s basically one continuous traffic jam. Los Angeles is a heck of a lot more fun. I came here because my company is in the area. I certainly wouldn’t have picked this place as a first choice: more restaurants per capita in Houston, better weather in Los Angeles, better mountains in Colorado, lower taxes and cheaper gas almost everywhere else. Visiting San Francisco occasionally is certainly fun, but then again so is Miami, Austin, New Orleans. The only thing uniquely special about SV is the proximity of VC money — something that has no relevance to the Amazons of the world.

> How does Exxon attract talent to Houston? How about FedEx attracting talent to Memphis?

Two big differences:

1. The talent crunch for Exxon and FedEx isn't nearly as bad as the crunch for engineering talent that Amazon is facing. Simply put, engineers that can get offers from Amazon have many options, and moving to Buttfuck, Nowhere won't be the best of them.

2. Exxon and FedEx employees, especially the senior, harder-to-secure talent, tend to be older folks with families. The talent Amazon would typically go after is much younger, often recent graduates.

> The talent crunch for Exxon and FedEx isn't nearly as bad as the crunch for engineering talent that Amazon is facing.

Not accurate (IMO).

1. ExxonMobil is now, and has been for years, hurting for petroleum engineers. It's a discipline that isn't taught at many universities, so the supply is rather constrained. In recent years new grad petroleum and chemical engineers have been pulling in offers that rival FANG offers.

2. If Amazon, or any other FANG, was really hurting for talent they would do something about their false negative problem in interviews. That they aren't indicates to me that they are either passing enough people or just being choosing beggars.

1. ExxonMobil was established in Houston many decades ago, back when it was a crucial area for an oil company. It's not going to relocate a huge campus even if it did calculate that it can help recruitment somewhat.

Amazon on the other hand is opening a new campus, so they are more flexible to locate it in the most advantageous area.

Moreover, not sure how many petroleum engineers Exxon is hiring, but guessing it's far fewer than the amount of software engineers Amazon is looking to hire, which is in the tens of thousands.

Recruitment is a much bigger factor for Amazon. The article says basically the entire reason for opening not one but two new big offices is to tap into more talent.

2. FAANGs don't agree that they have a "false negative" problem. They think they are accepting and rejecting the right people. Right or wrong, this is their position.

> ExxonMobil was established in Houston many decades ago, back when it was a crucial area for an oil company. It's not going to relocate a huge campus even if it did calculate that it can help recruitment somewhat.

Houston is still a crucial area for an oil company, and will continue to be so until the Gulf Coast fields stop producing. Their "huge, now-misplaced campus it won't relocate" is their headquarters in Irving/Las Colinas (since Dallas is no longer very important to the industry). In fact, Chevron is moving their headquarters operations to Houston.

Also, the original point was about the perceived difficulty of getting highly-paid, highly-educated people to move to "uncool" places. This is only relevant if you think ExxonMobil would have chosen a different location if they got a free do-over again today.

> Moreover, not sure how many petroleum engineers Exxon is hiring,

As many as UT, TA&M, OU, and the few other schools that graduate them can pump out. I'd have to bug my wife for numbers, but I think it is in the thousands (if they can get them).

> guessing it's far fewer than the amount of software engineers Amazon is looking to hire, which is in the tens of thousands

You think Amazon is looking to increase their SWE head count by 50% or more in a short period of time? I question the "tens of thousands" assertion, as that is a fair description of the entire size of Google's software engineering population, and larger than Facebook's. Are you actually claiming Amazon is looking to hire multiple Facebooks worth of software engineers in a short period of time?

> FAANGs don't agree that they have a "false negative" problem. They think they are accepting and rejecting the right people. Right or wrong, this is their position.

Assuming your statement is correct, I would classify them as choosing beggars.

FWIW, the party line I hear from their engineers is that they know they have a problem with false negatives, but that it is OK because it is worth it to keep out the false positives. They also (sometimes) claim they have more qualified applicants than they have head count.

> You think Amazon is looking to increase their SWE head count by 50% or more in a short period of time?

Every article about the HQ2 project says it's an effort to recruit tech talent. Amazon is hiring 50K new employees for these offices. Assuming a very conservative 25% of them are going to be engineers, that's already over 10,000 engineers.

> Assuming your statement is correct, I would classify them as choosing beggars.

If FAANGs thought their recruiting practices are broken, they would fix them.

Also, while we're all aware of how much bargaining power top software engineers have in this market, it doesn't seem right to call a bunch of companies worth the better part of a trillion dollar each "beggars".

If you can't find anything fun to do in the bay area but visit SF, you're doing it wrong.

> If you can't find anything fun to do in the bay area but visit SF that doesn't require sitting in traffic on the weekends because everyone else had the same idea

FTFY

Sure, the traffic does suck but you run into the same issue in any big metropolis. LA has way worse traffic and places that have good public transportation still have way too many people trying to do the same things - so you might get there quicker but you'll just wait in a longer line.

Not sure why you were downvoted, other than typical HN myopia.

I actually wonder a bit about NYC in that regard. It's a distinctive place that definitely isn't for everyone. Obviously a lot of people want to live there. I know folks who could never imagine living someplace else. But NYC has improved (if you have money). So maybe it is a place it's easy to attract people to live in.

My view is you should live in places that create strong feelings. Living in a place that feels like the aftermath of a cosmic shrug isn't good for the soul. I grew up in Darwin and I still love it. I live in NYC and I love it. I've also lived in Perth and felt ... nothing.

You grew up in Darwin? Awesome.

You felt nothing in Perth because Perth is just... there. :)

For some strange reason, Perth feels much more isolated than Darwin. Even though they are both outposts, Perth is so far away from any other city or culture.

It was a different life.

>there's plenty of talent that wants to live somewhere other than an urban core

That's true. Although I'm not sure you can build a campus on this scale that doesn't need to function as an urban core in at least some respects. I'm not sure how you plop something like this down on a prairie someplace and expect it to function. (Especially given that employees may not want to live in an urban core but don't necessarily want to live in a company town in the middle of nowhere.)

I agree that, if something like this is as reported, it's sort of a boring outcome in that it was entirely expected and safe.

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