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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

"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.

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 ...

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.

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?

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.

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