I agree with Scott Galloway who has both predicted the outcome and has called this a sham 'contest.' Galloway said that Bezos was always going to pick one of the coastal cities where he has a second/third home. By doing this 'contest' Amazon was able to get cities to compete with each other to provide tax incentives to Amazon and was also able to get valuable private information on the cities that Amazon can use in t…
Can you point us to some links (older than a few weeks) where SG says this. Everyone is a pundit when they know the outcome. Also what valuable private data did they gain from these cities exactly? Their proposed investment/infrastructure plans?? Amazon probably has better/more useful data than any local govt organization.
Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
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Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
New York is literally the greatest city in the history of world civilization and the planetary capital of finance, media, business, fashion and culture. It’s easily the largest city in the country, and iconic globally. But you’re finding it hard to understand why people might want to live here? I’d post more but my New York life is veritable cornucopia of novel and enriching experiences and I’d better get back to it.…
I don't think people get you are being sarcastic.
Indeed.
Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#144Northern Virginia is a hot mess of congestion. If they're smart, they'll go west of Dulles, or at the very least, not go further east than Reston. Better to stay out in Ashburn or something.
The story says Crystal City, which is close to DC but has a lot of nearby residential and transit options. And it has been losing tenants for a while so there is some slack for Amazon to take up.
Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#145I feel this choice is a mistake for the company long term, they're putting resources into two very hot housing and real estate markets, that have no real draw (in my opinion) for technical employees. Hew York is high tax (compared to Washington), unpleasant weather, overall high costs, and has a housing shortage, Washington DC, once described has having "Southern Efficiency, and Northern Charm" has similar issues of…
The D.C. Metro area has pretty much the most highly educated workforce in the country and something like half of the top-25 highest income counties in the U.S. IIR, the D.C. Metro is something like 3rd or 4th in the country for total software engineers after SV, NYC and maybe Seattle and is fed by "nearby" Virginia Tech, CMU, UMD, Johns Hopkins, UVA, NCState, and GMU (among others) which are all highly ranked CS and CE schools.
Silicon Valley East is basically the 30 mile stretch from D.C. to Dulles and it's basically an unbroken chain of tech and engineering companies, mostly fed contractors, but chock full of people clawing at the walls to work for non-fed tech businesses.
D.C.'s main issues are traffic and absolutely abysmal weather. But other than that it's an absolute no-brainer of a location even if you subtract all the political co-location and lobbying factors.
NYC makes sense for different, but some similar reasons...it's also chock full of people wanting to work for tech companies that aren't fintech and LIC has long been an underdeveloped part of the city that's just a bridge hop away from basically everything you'd ever want in Manhattan. If you can stomach living 20-30 minutes east, housing prices become much more affordable even if the inventory is uninspiring.
Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they have massive bargaining power Wouldn't call it "massive" in NYC. The office size is projected to employ 25,000 people in total. Nice number, but not "massive" for a city of 8,623,000 people.
The average salary for these employees will be many x greater than the average NYC resident - you need to compare the relative size of the +25k employees to the ~200k subset of residents that make $200k+ in NY, not the entire 8M pop. Not to mention the knock-on effects of the many jobs the HQ will indirectly create - cleaning, food prep, waste mgmt, facilities, security, transportation, etc. But yes, I agree that NYC…
> The average salary for these employees will be many x greater than the average NYC resident - you need to compare the relative size of the +25k employees to the ~200k subset of residents that make $200k+ in NY, not the entire 8M pop.
NYC isn't known for small salaries, partly because it's not easy to live in Manhattan on a small salary.
A major industry in Manhattan is banking, and folks in investment banks pull salaries that easily rival engineers, even fresh out of school.
In fact that's a big reason that tech stayed out of NYC for a long time. It used to be that even senior engineers made half of what a junior investment banker would get.
Not all among these 25k employees will be paid over $200k. Not even among engineers. Amazon doesn't pay that well, for a FAANG.
This isn't the Bay, where if you're not an engineer, you're a starving artist. More than anywhere else in the US, engineers who think of themselves as "handsomely paid" will be up for a rude awakening in Manhattan.
For the sake of argument, let's say 5,000 of the new employees will be making $200k+. That means that their effect will be less than 15,000 employees making about $80k each, which I bet is about average for Manhattan.
Not a ton of effect.
> And yet they still submitted a bid, even while Mayor de Blasio was badmouthing the company
It would be outrageous if they didn't. Even 100 well paying jobs should be enough for the mayor to try to court them. He's a public servant, and these jobs serve the public.
Moreover, this will help establish NYC as a tech hub, something it's been striving for for quite a while, generally without great success.
Finally, I bet the incentive package isn't as aggressive as others that were submitted. Amazon wants to be in NYC quite as much as NYC wants Amazon.
Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#147In New York, at least, this is going to be quite a mess. Many within the city - politicians included - are against it. But Cuomo, the governor of the state, is all in, and is planning to remove the city council from the decision: http://gothamist.com/2018/11/12/amazon_cuomo_city_council.ph... As if it needed to be said, there are other cities that would be a lot more receptive, and would benefit a lot more. Even just…
I'm normally not in favor of side stepping the processes in place, but I can guarantee you that if the community board was allowed to inject themselves into this process, you would be unlikely to see Amazon in NYC in 2050, let alone this decade. Nimbyism would never let this kind of thing progress.
City council != community boards. I agree with you about community boards, but to sidestep the city entirely feels wrong.
Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doubt it was a factor with Bezos. The guy is rich enough to live anywhere, and has houses everywhere, as you also observed. Somehow the office didn't land in Beverly Hills or the Texas ranch. I expect the fact that he already has homes in NYC and DC is related to the fact they are in fact important locations for his business.
The point isn't that he can't afford houses anywhere (obviously he can), it's that the places he already owns houses in are places he enjoys spending his time in. So he'd want to locate additional offices in those places. He's probably not all that interested in spending time in, e.g., Dallas.
It seems like I'm the resident Dallas apologist on these Amazon pieces, but Bezos is no stranger to Dallas. He has spoken fondly of Dallas many a time, just had the honor of speaking at SMU's Business Conference and offered personal anecdotes of why he likes Dallas, and, as Dallas Morning News has reported by tracking his flight records, been to Dallas many a time this year alone.
Sure, maybe he doesn't own property in Dallas, but it also seems like it's more of a place he'd like to spend time in over Austin, or Atlanta, or Pittsburgh, or a whole bunch of other cities.
The fact that Amazon was in late stage talks with Dallas also makes me think Dallas will be one of the cities to get "other major Amazon facilities as well" as this WSJ article mentions.
Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Washington DC, once described has having "Southern Efficiency, and Northern Charm" This is so great.
Are you sure, this sounds reversed - Northern efficiency, and Southern Charm?
No, the implication is that everyone in DC is an asshole with the slow pace of folks in the south.
Re: Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
New York is literally the greatest city in the history of world civilization and the planetary capital of finance, media, business, fashion and culture. It’s easily the largest city in the country, and iconic globally. But you’re finding it hard to understand why people might want to live here? I’d post more but my New York life is veritable cornucopia of novel and enriching experiences and I’d better get back to it.…
This is both arrogant and ignorant at the same time. New York, I'm sure, is a great city, but it is not the end all be all of everything. The next time you sit down at one of your fancy Manhattan restaurants I would encourage you to humbly thank the people from where there are "stripmalls" who made it and most other things in NYC possible. Food, the literal materials for the buildings, the energy renewable or otherwi…
Also the food in NYC is fine but not head and shoulders above other cities. Especially when you factor in the bill.