Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters

10:1 seems a bit too much, but yeah, I'm not sure where GP got the idea that NYC has more engineers than SFBay.

NYC was not historically focused on engineering or tech. Media, advertising, and of course - finance, banking, and investment banking.

Pure engineering or software work? Not very much.

This guy gets it.

"Tech workers" != programmers.

In fact, if there are only 110k tech workers, I doubt there are 92,350 actual programmers in NYC. They are counting all Product Managers, designers, beta testers, etc, as well as probably sales and administrative assistants in outfits like Google.

It's the second largest and the second densest behind Mexico City. Somehow I don't think Mexico City was in the running for HQ2.

I think you're misinterpreting me. I'm literally sitting in NYC at the moment. I enjoy visiting it. I've lived here (briefly). I also travel throughout the US and elsewhere. I don't know how anyone else could seriously suggest that the sheer volume of blaring horns and crush of humanity is not at least somewhat unique in North America.

In my experience, Chicago comes closest.

LA is quite different.

I totally appreciate people are comfortable living in cities like this. I probably wouldn't be. But, if you are, more power to you. (Personally I live in the country.)

To be fair, NYC density statistics are skewed by Staten Island, which is large, suburban (by NYC metro region standards) in development patterns, and peripheral to the city in many ways. If you stick to the other four boroughs, my understanding is that it’s far and away the densest in the hemisphere.

They have Microcenter and B&H, what more could you need?

Have you been into a Fred Meyer or QFC wearing Amazon branded attire? There are many people who would gleefully help kill Amazon in Seattle, especially those who are seeing their jobs ripped away from them and replaced with non-unionized work for lower pay in an abusive environment.

I always thought that was such a strange reason. Never really got the obsession with having friends in other industries, which isn’t that hard to have in Seattle or Boston or Raleigh either.

Seattle is a tech monoculture. Chances are, all your friends will be working in Tech. By comparison, NYC is much more diverse professionally. If you have esoteric hobbies, orders of magnitude matter.

What makes you think its elitist?

Dating is another big reason. SF & Seattle is gender imbalanced in a bad way for hetrosexual men in their 20s and 30s, NYC is the opposite.

As someone who grew up in NYC, has lived in LA, SF and now Seattle. Seattle absolutely does not have the same sorts of things NYC has.

The mega cities have far more going on in terms of diversity of options on any given night than smaller ones do. Additionally, there are far more ethnic groups represented in these mega regions as well.

The Pacific Northwest absolutely has it's perks, but it's not nearly as thrilling as NYC or LA.

In a large American city like Boston, Seattle, or even Chicago, I have access to a nice night life, good food, and plenty of nice museums. They're all great cities. When you consider them regionally.

In an internationally large city like NYC or Tokyo, I have all the access to local places that compete on the city and regional level, but with way more choices in that regard. But on top of that I have places that are competing internationally, as well as a large selection of the best other cities have to offer since there are so many people that move there from other places.

Its hard to get a sense for how amazingly convenient and awesome that is if you visit for a weekend or a week and haven't actually lived in a place like that.

Just going with food, maybe if you're ticking off a box that Seattle has a good ramen place you like somewhere in the city and NYC has one place you found that is as good. But theres a good chance there will be multiple places as good or better scattered all over the city in NYC vs the couple good places you like in Seattle.

Is there a new food trend somewhere else in the world? Its going to land pretty soon in Tokyo and if its more than just a flash trend you'll have a number of places competing that will be as good or even better soon enough. When I'm in Tokyo so long as I do a cursory look at the reviews, I know I'm going to get something good without having to go out my way, since the rents tend to put mediocre places out of business pretty fast unless they have a special circumstance surrounding them. If I am making a special trip for a restaurant in NYC, there's a really good chance I am getting something that can be considered some of the best in the world.

An hour is too much. Ain't nobody got time for one hour commuting each way.

2h of commute per day to get a backyard maybe good life quality for some. But not for everyone.

So does the state of New York.

So does Queens.

I think that food, on average, in NYC is worse than average.

There is so much foot traffic in the city that mediocre and bad restaurants can survive, even with high rents.

Don't get me wrong, NYC has some amazing food, but my experience has been pretty bad with most restaurants.

got it :)

>The average salary for these employees will be many x greater than the average NYC resident

This isn't just an office for software developers so that's not likely to be true.

And NYC gives a tax deal to the corporation, while the workers get to pay city income tax, state income tax and federal income tax, high property and sales taxes, while also having one of the highest costs of living of most cities. Not great for the future workers at all while Amazon gets to cash in on tax incentives. Amazon could have gotten great tax benefits elsewhere in places that don’t tax their employees so damned much. Unless you are single, New York City isn’t much of a draw due to either a long commute or excessively high housing costs. Amazon could literally locate in Mobile, Alabama and be able to recruit just fine. A $200k salary in Mobile is worth $600 in NYC.

> The average salary for these employees will be many x greater than the average NYC resident - you need to compare the relative size of the +25k employees to the ~200k subset of residents that make $200k+ in NY, not the entire 8M pop.

NYC isn't known for small salaries, partly because it's not easy to live in Manhattan on a small salary.

A major industry in Manhattan is banking, and folks in investment banks pull salaries that easily rival engineers, even fresh out of school.

In fact that's a big reason that tech stayed out of NYC for a long time. It used to be that even senior engineers made half of what a junior investment banker would get.

Not all among these 25k employees will be paid over $200k. Not even among engineers. Amazon doesn't pay that well, for a FAANG.

This isn't the Bay, where if you're not an engineer, you're a starving artist. More than anywhere else in the US, engineers who think of themselves as "handsomely paid" will be up for a rude awakening in Manhattan.

For the sake of argument, let's say 5,000 of the new employees will be making $200k+. That means that their effect will be less than 15,000 employees making about $80k each, which I bet is about average for Manhattan.

Not a ton of effect.

> And yet they still submitted a bid, even while Mayor de Blasio was badmouthing the company

It would be outrageous if they didn't. Even 100 well paying jobs should be enough for the mayor to try to court them. He's a public servant, and these jobs serve the public.

Moreover, this will help establish NYC as a tech hub, something it's been striving for for quite a while, generally without great success.

Finally, I bet the incentive package isn't as aggressive as others that were submitted. Amazon wants to be in NYC quite as much as NYC wants Amazon.

It's a Taiwanese company but who knows about Taiwan's status going into the future.

Sure, but he has lived in Seattle for a long time, what makes you think he wants to move to NYC?

The office in NYC is going to be nothing more than a big satellite office compared to the huge HQ in Seattle, so it's not like he's actually moving Amazon's HQ and himself to NYC. In fact I doubt he'd spend that much time there. Given his duties, he'll probably be in Seattle most of the time.

Also, I very much doubt the office in DC is there because Bezos is just dying to spend more time in DC ;-)

It seems like I'm the resident Dallas apologist on these Amazon pieces, but Bezos is no stranger to Dallas. He has spoken fondly of Dallas many a time, just had the honor of speaking at SMU's Business Conference and offered personal anecdotes of why he likes Dallas, and, as Dallas Morning News has reported by tracking his flight records, been to Dallas many a time this year alone.

Sure, maybe he doesn't own property in Dallas, but it also seems like it's more of a place he'd like to spend time in over Austin, or Atlanta, or Pittsburgh, or a whole bunch of other cities.

The fact that Amazon was in late stage talks with Dallas also makes me think Dallas will be one of the cities to get "other major Amazon facilities as well" as this WSJ article mentions.

I think they could meet those needs elsewhere but they can be choosey so why not.

Hundreds is a stretch. When you get down to the hundredth-largest city you’re at Des Moines, population 217k. At that point, if the company were to say “zero our taxes or we leave”, the city would do as told.

How small can a city be and have a healthy relationship with an employer of 25,000?