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Comment by sudosteph | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure about that. I actually know two people who moved from NY to SEA for Amazon, in part b/c NY is so incredibly expensive. Both were actually disappointed that neither HQ2 announcements were for places with significantly lower COL than SEA. These were millenials starting their career + families though, not people who had established NYC salaries and a condo or co-op.

That said, it does definitely make sense to get a piece of the NY talent pie for a company with as much growth + turnover as Amazon. I understand that choice much better than the NoVa choice.

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Apart from the state/city taxes, there’s little difference in NYC and Seattle any more. My rent has barely moved in the last three years; my friends in Seattle are complaining about ridiculous rent increases. I visited a year ago and did not see a massive difference in prices for every day goods and services. Unsure about housing market though.

> Apart from the state/city taxes

That’s a pretty big difference though! I suppose with NYC you don’t have the cost of owning and operating a car, though.

You can live car free in Seattle. It depends on who you work for and where they are, but it is doable. People carpool and such to go hiking and to events, and Lyft/Uber is pretty good.

I second this, as someone actually doing this thing. :) And with light rail extensions and transit expansions it's getting better all the time.

As someone who did the move a year ago:

Rent is comparable, but the apartments would be very different. 1BD 10 min walk away from work in SLU can be found for $1500/mo with in-unit washer dryer, secured package room, etc. To get the same level of amenity would require going further out into the boroughs and being subject to the whims of the MTA.

Goods and eating out are more expensive, but that's because Seattle has its min wage at 16/hr already, and unlike New York businesses do actually pay their workers the minimum wage. (Paying under the table is rampant at minority-owned businesses; those cheap supermarkets in NY Chinatown didn't get there through mystic eastern business practices.)

Oh definitely you do get much more for the same amount in Seattle today, but it was ~1200 three years ago. Meanwhile rents in NY have pretty much stayed the same (except for minor increases) for me and my peers.

I hear that prices have flatlined /fallen recently; let’s hope it stays that way.

Amazonian who has lived in Manhattan the past decade. The two neighborhoods I've lived in over the past 5 years have seen 20-30% increases: Chelsea and Upper East Side. Not sure that folks are seeing minor in Brooklyn either.

$1500!? The place I was in was $2.2k for all of that on Dexter.

Now I pay $2.6k...so

A lot of apartment buildings have opened on Dexter. I used to live there and got a renewal for significantly cheaper after paying $2200. (I ended up moving anyways because SLU is a giant dead zone.)

Everybody was offering not only cheaper rent, but concessions (1-3 months free). Supply has finally outpaced demand.

NoVa makes a lot of sense for the large US government markets Amazon is pursuing.

Absolutely - this seems to have been the biggest driver in this decision. If you're mere steps from the Department of Defense and the alphabet soup of agencies, you're well positioned to lobby them on your products and services. Crystal City is akin to MV and San Francisco 30 years ago.

It's about to blow up.

DC has a stronger IT job market than possibly Silicon Valley and New York. DC has been a top city for IT talent and is probably the best of the three due a significantly lower cost of living.

Interesting, I always heard the nice parts of DC are about as expensive as Seattle, and the traffic is even worse. I've known a few people to take software gigs for government contractors in that area, but none of them stayed around very long - said the salaries were not great and that they weren't getting any of the perks of tech culture that are common elsewhere (no casual dress code, were micro-managed, lots of lazy coworkers). I imagine it was just the specific body shops that hired them that were the problem though.

Northern VA - McLean/Tysons is the third wealthiest zipcode in the country currently. Houses are a million plus for 3 bed 2 bath ramblers.

As far as the traffic, it's the worst in the country just about, usually fluctuates between the worst or 2nd worst.

Most major tech companies have some presence in DC and those that don't are coming here everyday it seems.

>Houses are a million plus for 3 bed 2 bath ramblers

In the Bay Area, that's a heck of a deal.

Maybe, but salaries around DC are WAY below SV or NYC. The pay and perqs of gov't/DoD contracting can never compete with SV startups or NYC finance; not even close.

Unfortunately, all of the programming jobs here are either in publishing (low pay) or government contracting (bureaucratic headaches).

And while the cost of living is less than NYC and SF, it ain't exactly cheap either.

Amazon's decision to come to Crystal City makes sense to me because there are a bunch of young college grads and no competition from the other FAANG companies.

If you're a young, ambitious, programmer trying to decide where to start your career though, I'd suggest going to SF/SV, NYC, Seattle, or Boston because those places provide more options.

That’s funny because everyone I know at Google or Facebook in SEA is trying to move to NYC!

Yeah, I live in SEA and have at a job with a little bit of mobility. When my rent in SEA became comparable to NYC, I seriously thought about just doing NYC instead. But then I realized I would probably still be renting forever without much savings if I wanted to live to my standards of comfort, and I probably wouldn't actually use many of the cool things NYC offers - so I decided to move to Raleigh instead.

I worked pretty hard (IMO) to get out of Raleigh so that’s funny to hear.

Hah, small world. I lived there for a while before Seattle and only left b/c I wanted faster career growth. But now I've got FAANG creds that let me work remote for the same salary, so it's a game changer. I will be so happy to have Bojangles and Cookout back in my life.

I’d like to do that someday.

Took me 4 years since graduating from the same school you went to, but I've received multiple offers now for remote work that pays doubles my new-grad salary in Raleigh (which was actually pretty decent as far as Raleigh salaries goes). So don't undersell yourself, seems like you're on a good path. Hit me up (this username at gmail) if you seriously think about coming back to Raleigh in the future or switching to remote work, the place I work is usually hiring.

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