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Comment by edoo | Hacker News Reader

Going to New York is a political move. They could have set up in the midwest, paid everyone 75% as much as the going rate in NY or silicon valley, and the employees would have 50% more expendable income than they are used to. This wasn't for the employees.

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You say that as if spoiled tech workers are just going to line up to move to Columbus, Ohio where the only company operating at that scale is Amazon.

That is, you are going to be locked into working for Amazon to maintain your income level.

Not everyone is that mercenary about optimizing their income.

Amazon's hiring pool would be limited to midwestern Universities (e.g. Ohio State) + people looking to reduce their cost of living while working for Amazon + some people that prefer the scenery. Less people are optimizing purely based on compensation - CoL than you think.

To me, that's why these locales were never really in the running. I'm a native midwesterner and I feel bad for anyone trying to recruit a national audience for a midwestern role. You have to have really good sales skills.

> They could have set up in the midwest, paid everyone 75% as much as the going rate in NY or silicon valley, and the employees would have 50% more expendable income than they are used to. This wasn't for the employees.

SDE's in Detroit, Madison, and Twin Cities are paid exactly the same as the SDEs in Seattle.

That is hardly true except for a small select few. Where are you getting your numbers?

I'm an Amazon new grad. We only have 2 standard salary bands in the US - one for premium regions and one for everywhere else. I know this only because I explicitly asked recruiting and they brought it up in the midpoint intern brown-bag.

They will match Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon/Google's 110k salary + bonus + stock that you can get in Seattle (As a college grad)?

Even smaller firms are giving away jobs for 150k salary for just a couple years of experience.

I'm talking specifically about Amazon, which has a presence in all 3 of the cities I mentioned. Also yes, $145.5k total compensation at Amazon with a Bachelors (I'm not sure if this is competitive though)

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