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Comment by akhilcacharya | Hacker News Reader

Doubling their office there still pales in comparison to the headcount projected for LIC. 7K max vs. 25k targeted for Amazon.

Amazon already has a presence in NYC.

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Worth noting that Google owns all of 111 8th in NYC. They're slowly not renewing leases for existing tenants and taking over the whole building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue

111 8th is a major internet traffic exchange point. It's also gargantuan, it's 2.9 million square feet and occupies a whole city block.

One of the interesting things about 111 8th is that it was designed for much higher than normal pounds per square foot floor loading. Which means that Google could convert the entire thing to datacenter space if they really wanted to. Already a significant portion of it is conditioned datacenter/telecom space run by tenants.

And Chelsea Market too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Market

These real estate acquisitions were so large that they explicitly needed to be called out on the quarterly earnings calls to explain why CapEx exploded for that quarter.

I imagine they're getting decent bang for their buck when hiring in NYC. Really the COL adjusted wages in NYC are some of the lowest for all American tech cities.

...except (at least for Amazon) they pay more in NYC, and of all companies Google doesn't exactly exercise frugality wrt compensation.

If levels.fyi is any indication, Google NYC comp is only marginally lower than SV, if at all.

Why would they care about getting a good bargain in “COL adjusted wages”? Even in NYC there is not a currency exchange Google can go to to turn $100k Florida dollars into $200k New York dollars.

Some of the largest colo tenants like Internap already left years ago: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/07/29/inte...

At Google's densities, they would never run a datacenter in Manhattan. POPs, sure, like their peering with https://www.peeringdb.com/fac/16, but that's it.

Internap has never really been relevant as a large scale colo/datacenter provider, if you look at the square footage of their facilities compared to major competition like Equinix and Digital Realty Trust.

They're more of a managed services provider.

I meant tenants in that building.

"The Internap expansion represents approximately 1.3MW of additional critical power in a severely constrained downtown NY market.”

https://www.inap.com/press-release/internap-continues-green-...

That was 34000 sqft. Equinix has 36000.

Edit: they had 75K by the time they left. DRT says they have 110K.

How do actual numbers pale in comparison to a number that was nothing more than projected for some hazy undetermined future date? That 25K number was only ever qualified as "over the next decade."

Google on the other hand bought 111 8th ave 8 years ago(houses 7K employees) and now they are opening a new space in the same area that will house an additional 12K more employees[1]. That will bring their total to 19K employees in a 10 year time frame.

And this was all done without extracting corporate subsidies and without all the pageantry.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-plans-large-new-york-cit...

I think that 7K is just employees: "employs more than...". That is a deliberate distinction from "workers". I wouldn't be surprised if the count passed 10K once you considered contractors. They're mostly in non-engineering roles: cafe staff, recruiters, marketing, physical security (did those get converted to employees like they were doing in Mountain View?), facilities, etc.

Would be interesting to know how many employees Amazon currently has in NY. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's already in the thousands.

> Would be interesting to know how many employees Amazon currently has in NY. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's already in the thousands.

Amazon already has an office in New York City, as well as a sizeable presence in New Jersey just outside the city limits (within commuting distance), split between two New Jersey offices, last I checked.

2,000 salaried and 3,000 warehouse at the end of 2017: https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2017/09/21/amazon-b...

Uh, the statement itself says: "There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and we plan to continue growing these teams."

It is in the Amazon statement: "There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and we plan to continue growing these teams."

Disclaimer, I'm one of those 5k. Currently I work from home 99% of the time because the office spaces Amazon has in NY aren't fantastic. It would have been nice to have a new headquarters building, but I'll still be enjoying working from home now I guess.

Thanks, I missed that (I stopped after a couple paragraphs). I did do a quick Google Search after I searched for how many Googlers are in NYC. (Was verifying there's actually 7K.)

It's pretty amazing how large some of the non-home offices are at these mega tech companies.

> There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island

How many of those are working in tech? When I interviewed at Amazon NYC in 2016, I think there were only around 100 software engineers there. Has it grown a lot since then?

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