It really does feel like Amazon successfully played a lot of municipalities against each other to try and extract the biggest concessions, knowing all along that it didn't make sense to try and hire 50000 people in a decade in any one location.
I know that's how the game is played, but it's still feels a little disingenuous.
Not quite.
Amazon has satellite offices, that employ an order of magnitude fewer employees.
At 25k/branch, the term "regional headquarters" can be considered justified.
They did game the system though. Feels like they negotiated tax benefits with 50k employees in mind, and kept the same benefits while only giving locations 25k each.
This is good for tech in the east coast. Fin-tech firms WILL HAVE TO compete against Amazon for (supposed) west coast wages, and could help build a much stronger tech industry than NYC has atm.
Cornell tech much be so happy with their choice to open office on Roosevelt island. I can see them being the biggest winners out of this whole set of events. NYU is probably also happy, having acquired NYU poly a few years ago.
Those fin-tech companies almost certainly pay more than Amazon already. IIRC amazon has a cap of 275k for base pay, which means even if you're James Gosling that's the most you're getting, the rest has to come from RSUs which amazon also has a terrible vesting structure for. Amazon is regarded as a top-tier tech company, but their pay is not on par with any of the other companies (Google, FB, Uber, etc).
More tech presence is good, but I don't think big name companies are going to be too worried about their employees leaving to get paid less and have fewer benefits.
The reason top tech generally kept out of NYC until recently is that they had trouble competing against investment bank salaries.
This only changed as top tech (especially FAANG) comp increased to catch up.
The less charitable interpretation is that top tech found itself compelled to pay more and more due to the talent crunch, until after all the increases it finally caught up with average NYC pay. Now, since it already pays at NYC-competitive levels, it might as well open offices in NYC and enjoy the talent pool there.
Sure, Google and FB pay more and so do top investment banks / hedge funds in math/stat/algo positions . However, those simply are not the bulk of fintech employees.
The majority of fintech SDEs at GS,Morgan,etc. are working on software engineering and maintenance work. These roles pay closer to the $100k number than Amazon's quoted $150k. At least for new hires.
My Amazon comp has been more than competitive with FB, Uber, Google.
[Disclaimer/Source: work at Amazon]
Can you expound on this?
If that's what happened, that's poor negotiation by the cities. If they made an offer based on employee counts, they could have required employee targets in return for the benefits being offered.
And if Amazon refuses to make firm employee count guarantees in return for the benefits being offered, then that's a pretty strong signal that you shouldn't rely on their promises.
If you have your politicians pitching the public on this huge 50k jobs deal, then they’re going to accept fewer jobs in the end rather than lose out altogether. Once a city commits itself to being in the Amazon race, losing is a huge political liability. Cities lose all leverage.
So creating half the jobs results in half the tax benefits.
I think you have that backwards. When I worked for Netflix I got an offer from a fin-tech firm that was double my already top of market Netflix salary. I chose to stay at Netflix because the fin-tech work sounded utterly soul crushing (and the work at Netflix was still great) and my wife didn't want to move to NYC. But had I taken it I would have made a lot more than any job here on the west coast.
Amazon will represent a tiny portion of NYC's tech industry. Just a drop in the bucket. It won't move the dial much. Also fin-tech firms already compete with tech companies and they pay very well ( better than amazon ).
> Cornell tech much be so happy with their choice to open office on Roosevelt island. I can see them being the biggest winners out of this whole set of events. NYU is probably also happy, having acquired NYU poly a few years ago.
Neither cornell nor NYU needs amazon. It won't make a difference. The biggest winner will be amazon as they gain more political influence. That's what this move is about after all. Political influence in the two most important political centers of the US and the world.
They could be divisional HQs, as in Alexa HQ'd in NYC and AWS in DC.
How?
Note the geographically oriented split.
Also, the whole point of the new offices is to aid recruitment. Limiting particular offices to just one skillset goes totally against that.
No, these offices will be smaller than the Seattle HQ, but at half the size, you can expect them to be quite diverse.
They will not be a "single project" office.
Clearing your throat in preparation, you reach for the first sheet of paper and begin to read the list of words:
"Alacksah... Alicksah... Alorksah... Alucksah"
You think to yourself: for $15/hour, you've had worse jobs.
Just wondering out loud...