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I feel this choice is a mistake for the company long term, they're putting resources into two very hot housing and real estate markets, that have no real draw (in my opinion) for technical employees. Hew York is high tax (compared to Washington), unpleasant weather, overall high costs, and has a housing shortage, Washington DC, once described has having "Southern Efficiency, and Northern Charm" has similar issues of an overheated housing market, and overall high costs, given the choice of a coequal salary in Seattle, DC, or NYC, I'd pick Seattle - as much as I hate Seattle.

NYC has some advantages for access to capital markets - but Amazon seemingly has no shortage of capital, DC, access to policymakers - but I see no real strategic advantages here.

If I were picking, I would have picked Atlanta and Detroit, or two other lower cost large cities with convenient air travel to Seattle.

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NYC has a lot of developers, more than the valley. It's already a 'draw' of sorts, this is an advantage.

"DC, access to policymakers - but I see no real strategic advantages here."

Amazon is going to become the #1 IT vendor of choice for the biggest government of the world AND reach their tentacles deep into the political arena for all sorts of other benefits.

Military, FBI, CIA, Gov, Fannie/Freddie. All huge.

Also - every bank is becoming a 'tech company' and Amazon will provide them with their infrastructure.

"NYC has a lot of developers, more than the valley" - do you have a source for that? Seems highly unlikely. My quick googling suggests silicon valley has 2x-5x more engineers than NYC.

Living in NY for over a decade and visiting the Bay area often, I have to agree. I'd say the difference is even bigger if you look at Silicon Valley as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio was more like 10:1.

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.

Oh - I'm sorry - I was looking at job openings in a specific software field and there were way more openings in NYC - I confused that with devs.

A summary glance indicates that the Valley and SF may be roughly on par with NYC but that the Bay Area has more than NYC, I stand corrected - though there seems to be scant hard data as it's difficult to define exactly what a developer is ...

Amazon is the new IBM

Sheesh, get with the agreed upon narrative. Microsoft was the new IBM, but then they got rescued by their new ceo Nadella. Then it was Oracle, but well hell, Oracle is still the new ibm. Google is trying hard to be the new ibm but they aren't quite there yet.

I agree that dc makes sense for amazon because of us govt use of the cloud. But I am surprised to hear that nyc has that many developers, more than SF? There are more people in nyc by far, but more advanced software engineers?

Of course there are many advanced software programmers for the financial industries and other major intl companies in nyc. I'm not in the bay area, I'm in a secondary 'leading software city'. Is there a citation for this?

This Quora response uses US Bureau of Labor Statistics to show there are 92,350 programmers in the whole SF Bay area, compared to 62,530 programmers in the entire NYC municipal area.

So about 50% more in the Bay.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-work-in-Si...

You forgot to adjust for the standard NYC ego inflation. Each NYC developer is worth 2x what any other developer is worth so NYC would win with 125k developers.

This guy gets it.

WNYC had a segment about this last week and claimed that there are 110k tech workers in the NYC area.

"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.

These silly New Yorkers, with no sense of anything outside Manhattan.

Put aside government -- which is enormous -- and DC has:

- A long Internet history. MAE-East. UUNet. AOL. Equinix. Network Solutions. Microstrategy.

- Let's not discuss the one of the single largest tech regions in the country: the Dulles Technology Corridor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor

- A huge Big Data industry fed by (besides government) stuff like DC's ginormous genomics and bioinformatics industries, financial regulation groups, you name it. FINRA is in DC. So is Capital One.

- Amazon Web Services is already in DC.

- The three highest income counties in the country.

The first Apple Store was also in Tyson's Corner in Northern Virgina

For some weird reason (in my experience) Amazon employees all seem to want to move to NYC. Like, constantly. Go on Blind and they'll talk about it all day with dubious reasoning.

I don't get it myself (I had a few NYC offers but chose Amazon in Boston instead), but NYC has become "the place" elite for software-focused undergrads these days. Everyone wants to get into FB/Instagram NY or Google NYC.

NYC is more attractive than it used to be, to be fair. But, especially the parts of NYC young tech workers are actually interested in is still urbanization on steroids. I can tolerate and even revel in it for a week or so but it takes a lot of adjusting from most places, even other large cities.

NYC is very urban, but it isn't even the largest or most dense city in North America.

I think you just have a bias against heavy urban areas. Lots of people are comfortable living in large dense cities. Hundreds of millions, if not more, live in cities with similar levels of urbanization as NYC.

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.

Mexico City density: 6,000/km2 New York City density: 11,000/km2

Wikipedia

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.

New York is "the place" for just about every industry.

Banking, ads, modeling. Not tech. No Fry’s.

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

Also 269 Canal Street. Not just another Chinatown jewelry shop.

https://makezine.com/2008/03/01/269-electronics-canal-str/

I hope they're still there, that link is a decade old. Once I went there and bought a cable or adapter (I forget) - the guy tested it with a multimeter before selling it to me to confirm it worked. Loved that.

Once went to a Chinatown repair shop for drive mounting rails and screws. Guy shrugged and gave 'em to me free.

It’s not that hard to imagine why someone would want to move from a mid-size tech city where you are often hated for where you work, to NYC.

People in Seattle don't hate amazon employees. I think engineers in Seattle feel sorry for them a little bit - it used to be a thing that no one knew anyone who had worked there more than 2 years (when the initial hire on bonus to cover the lower salary ran out and ended the clawbacks). Seattle has its pluses and minuses but it's got some serious differences than nyc.

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.

One of the great parts of being in NYC is having friends who aren’t “in tech”. Tech is an industry here, and there’s a massive network where you’re not tying yourself to one company though your move, but it doesn’t define the culture of the city.

I don't think this can be understated. My friends and I don't even TALK about tech because not all of my friends are in tech. I have friends that are in completely different industries, like media, theater, urban planning, education, finance, journalism, etc. You meet people who are making it as artists or going for their PhD. There's a vibrant Meetup scene. And if you live near a friend, you can literally just walk to their apartment and hang out.

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.

You end up chewing on ideas you never would have considered, learning about industries you don't work in, and going places you never would have thought to go. It adds a nice splash of unexpectedness that life wouldn't have otherwise.

I was one of those people. I moved to NYC in May. In a lot of adult sports leagues I'm meeting a surprisingly high number of developers who moved from the Bay Area to NYC. All for similar reasons. Its way more fun to spend your 20s in NY than it is in SF. Within my social circle, many more are planning on moving from SF to NY. This might be anecdata, but Google and Amazon might have recruiting data about candidates' location preferences.

“Fun” must be a bizarre elite perspective I’ve never understood either. The same stuff is available in Seattle as it is in NYC or Boston, just with an order of magnitude more people. Whenever I ask people about this they just talk about nightlife or something that I can’t relate to at all.

I don’t know, maybe it’s because I didn’t hobnob with the well connected in college or “have fun” in college 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?

In my experience, only the elites (the HYPSM+ types) are able to have "fun" like this because they didn't have anything to prove. When I was in undergrad I worked and studied (and got the same or less than they did for it in the end).

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.

NYC is a very fun place to live. Recent grads who are making a good income have every reason to want to live there.

> I feel this choice is a mistake for the company long term, they're putting resources into two very hot housing and real estate markets, that have no real draw (in my opinion) for technical employees.

The goal was never to optimize for employee housing or quality of life. The goal was to get concessions from already urban areas where 25000 engineers might want to live.

>If I were picking, I would have picked Atlanta and Detroit

Atlanta and Detroit have arguably lesser draw than NYC or DC.

I'd suspect the choice of NYC has more to do with the available talent pool there. At this moment, with the scarcity of available engineering talent and the scale at which Amazon needs it, there might not be a city outside of SF that better fits their needs.

If available talent pool were the #1 determinant, they'd be opening up in the Bay Area.

New York in particular is a very expensive talent pool with a lot of competition. Given Amazon's extremely strong brand, it's reasonable to think that they could benefit by opening almost anywhere else and then drawing talent in. Not only would those people get a lot more for their money, but Amazon would have relatively little competition, reducing turnover and wage inflation.

>unpleasant weather

I mean I've visited both Austin and San Francisco so I understand the appeal of temperate climates but plenty of people not only tolerate but enjoy less temperate climates, myself included

nyc is a terrible place to live for a lot of people. i personally can not stand it. dirty city, terrible weather, and rude people.

Obviously nowhere is going to be ideal for everyone. But judging by the number of people living in NYC, plenty are very happy with it.

Can you give me an example of the rudeness? I have visited New York city regulator from the last 35 years. I completely agree with the dirty part, and I suppose I agree with the weather part, but I have found that the people surprisingly open and hopeful for my entire life.

The "rude" thing seems like more of a meme than a reality. I find New Yorkers to be remarkably pleasant, much more so than the grumps in my Midwestern hometown where everybody has a chip on their shoulder and basically nobody is excited to be there.

The D.C. Metro area has pretty much the most highly educated workforce in the country and something like half of the top-25 highest income counties in the U.S. IIR, the D.C. Metro is something like 3rd or 4th in the country for total software engineers after SV, NYC and maybe Seattle and is fed by "nearby" Virginia Tech, CMU, UMD, Johns Hopkins, UVA, NCState, and GMU (among others) which are all highly ranked CS and CE schools.

Silicon Valley East is basically the 30 mile stretch from D.C. to Dulles and it's basically an unbroken chain of tech and engineering companies, mostly fed contractors, but chock full of people clawing at the walls to work for non-fed tech businesses.

D.C.'s main issues are traffic and absolutely abysmal weather. But other than that it's an absolute no-brainer of a location even if you subtract all the political co-location and lobbying factors.

NYC makes sense for different, but some similar reasons...it's also chock full of people wanting to work for tech companies that aren't fintech and LIC has long been an underdeveloped part of the city that's just a bridge hop away from basically everything you'd ever want in Manhattan. If you can stomach living 20-30 minutes east, housing prices become much more affordable even if the inventory is uninspiring.

New York is literally the greatest city in the history of world civilization and the planetary capital of finance, media, business, fashion and culture. It’s easily the largest city in the country, and iconic globally.

But you’re finding it hard to understand why people might want to live here?

I’d post more but my New York life is veritable cornucopia of novel and enriching experiences and I’d better get back to it. Enjoy your stripmalls.

Saying things like, "Enjoy your stripmalls", actually hurts your argument by indicating a lot of insecurity.

The west has a lot of strip malls.

So does the state of New York.

New York doesn’t put Michelin star restaurants in strip malls.

It's really quite jarring just how many of them there are. sure the east has strip malls, but they just don't seem to take up that much space.

Show me a single Michelin Star restaurant in the entire United States located in a strip mall. And besides, if they put Michelin Star restaurants in strip malls, they probably wouldn't be the marker of not much going on that they currently are.

It didn't even occur to you to simply Google "michelin star" "strip mall"?

Of course there are starred restuarants in strip malls.

I searched Michelin Star restaurants in the US and looked through them and couldn't find any, then posed the challenge. So, yeah, no I didn't actually Google that and I should have.

There's even a three-star in a strip mall if you consider all of Los Gatos a strip mall. (Hey-o!)

One of the best restaurants in Silicon Valley, Alexander’s in Cupertino is effectively in a strip mall next to a Target and it’s far better than most of the good restaurants in “character-filled” San Francisco locations.

It’s so snobby and inaccurate to suggest a strip mall restaurant is “bad.” With the economics of restaurants, a strip mall location is often a great idea.

There are only Michelin guides for NYC, Chicago, San Francisco & DC.

You’d have a huge amount of Michelin stars in strip malls if LA even had the opportunity.

Even with that built in bias there are of course stars in strip malls.

There is a bib gourmand in a strip mall less than 3 blocks from where I sit.

No, but it does put them in plenty of of places that are just as unprestigious. As do plenty of other of cities.

Not all starred chefs are about chasing the high rent look or fine dining aesthetic. You don't have to be 11MP to get a star, or even three. Ko has two and is down an alley!

Assuming a restaurant can even survive in the first place to earn that star.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/dining/restaurant-economi...

So does Queens.

No, it might be lived experience. I've been to NYC, I live in the bay area. The south bay is surprisingly run down and boring for what it is, it's redeeming qualities being tech, the weather and some nearby nature. The stripmalls exist there and it's a bit strange how shabby everything is compared to the rent. SF is nicer and worse in someways than san jose, and NYC is definitely better from a livability and interesting-ness perspective.

Even LA has more culture :p

I don't know why the person you're replying to thinks their viewpoint is representative of a wide swath of people?

I love NYC, if I was looking for a job this would be a draw for me.

> New York is literally the greatest city in the history of world civilization

Someone (I forget who) once said that New York’s real specialty is convincing twentysomethings that it is the center of the universe.

It certainly seemed that way to me for a long time.

that partially explains why young people that grow up in NYC don't have driver's licences.

This is both arrogant and ignorant at the same time. New York, I'm sure, is a great city, but it is not the end all be all of everything. The next time you sit down at one of your fancy Manhattan restaurants I would encourage you to humbly thank the people from where there are "stripmalls" who made it and most other things in NYC possible. Food, the literal materials for the buildings, the energy renewable or otherwise, basically all the support resources and services that make cities like NYC even possible come from the parts of the world you seem to hold in contempt. No wonder middle America hates the "coastal elites" with an attitude like this.

Also the food in NYC is fine but not head and shoulders above other cities. Especially when you factor in the bill.

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.

> "greatest city in the history of world civilization"

Woah, hold on your horses. There are plenty of contestants there. Rome. Tenochtitlan. Cairo. Babylon. Etc.

Also London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong for some modern contenders. Paris is a close runner up.

>New York is literally the greatest city in the history of world civilization and the planetary capital of finance, media, business, fashion and culture. It’s easily the largest city in the country, and iconic globally.

So, I mean, I generally agree with your point, and if you said the American, or maybe even Western, I might agree with you completely. But, uh, there's some pretty amazing cities out there. There's not much I like better in NYC to Tokyo, for example. And hell, with how much better the Tokyo metro and JR lines are than the NYC subway system, you can live cheaper and still get into the heart of the city faster.

haha greatest city in the history of the world? You obviously don't get out much at all.

The person you're talking to didn't say they were having trouble understanding "why people might want to live" there. They said they thought it was a bad choice on Amazon's part for cogent reasons, all of which you ignore in this reply.

I don't think people get you are being sarcastic.

Indeed.

This has to be a parody..

It's the greatest city, currently, in the USA for sure. In the history of the world, that's impossible to say.

Amsterdam is pretty dope for example.

Lol someone’s defensive. I believe this is called being insecure.

Yeah, it is greater than Ancient Rome, with a richer history than Paris, and more people than Tokyo

I'd go into a long drawn out reply, but I'd rather relax on my deck with a cup of coffee in a bathrobe and enjoy the sights and sounds of nature. Enjoy being crammed into a loud, noxious sea of concrete and steel with 20 million other people.

> that have no real draw (in my opinion) for technical employees

3rd in tech patents after San Francisco and San Jose. 2nd or 3rd in total tech jobs after San Francisco and Seattle. This comment seems like its coming from some one who doesn't know a thing about NYC Tech scene.

> unpleasant weather,

8.6 Million people like here and lot of people prefer 4 season cycle.

I feel like these are the safest choices. DC is the capital; NYC is the unofficial capital - not at all with "no real draw." If you want to live in a city, there's no comparison with New York anywhere else in the country.

>> "Southern Efficiency, and Northern Charm"

and don't forget "Amazon Humidity" and "Mexico City Traffic"

>Atlanta and Detroit, or two other lower cost large cities with convenient air travel to Seattle...

???

I think planners at Amazon were thinking more long term. I'm thinking that convenient and multi-modal access to the Europe-Africa side of the world played a big part here. East coast and west coast HQ's just make sense for a global behemoth like Amazon.

> Washington DC, once described has having "Southern Efficiency, and Northern Charm"

This is so great.

Are you sure, this sounds reversed - Northern efficiency, and Southern Charm?

No, the implication is that everyone in DC is an asshole with the slow pace of folks in the south.

got it :)

Generally credited to John F. Kennedy, but he prefaced it with "somebody said" (original source unknown).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2006/06/04/a...

Implying that these "HQs" are going to be more than 10k employees. Both cities can easily absorb another few thousand highly paid engineers/business/lobbyists.

[retracted]

NYC is a very mixed bag on quality of life. It depends on what your priorities are.

For some quality of life means being able to get a drink at 3AM. For others - house with a backyard.

Good point. Right now it's nearly impractical to have a family in the Bay area. I'd personally like to see a lot of improvement on the supply side in the form of high-density housing in urban centers.

You can literally have a house with a backyard and a less than 1 hour commute from Manhattan.

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

I agree. An hour is considered a slightly above average commute in the Bay Area. However in NYC its considered way above average. When I was interviewing there, I was low key shocked that the interviewers considered 30 minutes to be a 'long' commute. Thats when I knew I was in the right place. Density + transit is the way to go.

I feel you, man. My commute is 25 min door to door and most of that is walking. That’s about the limit I’d accept.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people commute more than an hour into Manhattan every day.

Just about everyone taking the LIRR or Metro North is commuting at least an hour and if they say they aren't, they're kidding themselves.

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

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