I think Ottawa, Canada would fit the bill too.
Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
171–180 of 253 posts
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#172I know they eliminated Pittsburgh right out of the gate, but I think it has a bunch of things going for it. It's one of the few places where housing is cheap (but a pretty beautiful downtown) but young tech workers would love to live: tons of stuff to do but lots of knowledge workers with CMU. Biggest obvious issue is no direct flights to Seattle, but if Amazon built a headquarters there it seems like it would be eas…
Yeah, I'm a bit surprised at this. Pittsburgh is probably really close to ideal. I can't really think of much of a downside. It has a lot of universities, and the programmers are quite good (the ex-CTO of Modcloth? had a video where he pointed out that the Pittsburgh office was quite a bit better than the SV office). Your factory workers will be out toward the airport and your knowledge workers will be downtown. It's…
Winters in Pittsburgh aren't that bad, especially the past few. There's a major storm here and there, but very rarely is anything major shutdown.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#173This is such a terrible way to make a decision like this. The types of filters they used were completely arbitrary,the filtering level for each type of filter was arbitrary, and the number of filters they used was arbitrary. Plus, they didn't even include Toronto, who is probably a very strong contender.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#174This really burns me. The Times compared the metro population of Grand Rapids (1 million) to Detroit's population (670,000) in order to disqualify the city in their first round. But metro Detroit has a population of 4.5 million so the Times either was sloppy with their criteria or they deliberately snubbed Detroit. Detroit may be a dark horse in this competition but with Dan Gilbert going all out to win I don't think…
Well, Boston also has a population of only 600K, so they must have used some other criteria to include the metro areas of the cities.
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Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I noticed that people pushing Philadelphia never mention its bad crime rate. Amazon might not be explicitly mentioning that in the criteria, but I'm sure it can't help.
I lived there for five years, five years ago. We used to joke that drunk driving was a minor league sport and that "It's Always Sunny..." is actually a documentary. Literally half the people I knew had at least one DUI on their records, and the rest all had a scare-story where the cop let them go. "Imagine a town in which everyone has at least a little larceny in their hearts," elicits a few proud chuckles from my fr…
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#176I'm surprised to see Philadelphia eliminated so quickly, it ticks almost all of the boxes, and has a very large number of engineering schools (UPenn, Penn State, Drexel, Temple, Princeton, Rutgers, etc). It's transit is better than many of the other cities, and it has 2 major development plots in the city with existing full tax abatements. Not to mention its proximity to NYC and Washington, DC via Amtrak (~1h20m to N…
Philly was dropped by the "job growth is strong" rule, which is also drops many other cities which would otherwise be fully qualified. So the question really is why would Amazon have that rule and how willing are they to bend in it. Why would Amazon want that rule? Wouldn't it just mean there's more competition for employees? It strikes me as the type of rule put in to ensure their secret favorite gets chosen.
Amazon is hiring at a pretty good clip, to the point that they really do have trouble finding enough qualified applicants to fill their interviews.
Amazon would rather pay a higher salary for someone with experience than train someone.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#177I'm surprised to see Philadelphia eliminated so quickly, it ticks almost all of the boxes, and has a very large number of engineering schools (UPenn, Penn State, Drexel, Temple, Princeton, Rutgers, etc). It's transit is better than many of the other cities, and it has 2 major development plots in the city with existing full tax abatements. Not to mention its proximity to NYC and Washington, DC via Amtrak (~1h20m to N…
I live in Colorado and work at a software company. I have a crew of people here who relocated from Philly.
I've been hearing a ton about this because this crew has been steadily recruiting from there to Denver.
The comments they say when they are doing this:
Philly has worse crime by far. The weather (measured in number of sunny days) is obviously worse. Outdoor activities are limited. Yeah, you can get to pretty places, but it's a few hours drive for the beach or mountains. Culturally, it's not a place that jumps out on the radar. Denver wasn't either, but the weed legalization kind of helped highlight that this place is a tolerant, open-minded location to people who automatically thought of a redneck mountain town.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#178This is such a terrible way to make a decision like this. The types of filters they used were completely arbitrary,the filtering level for each type of filter was arbitrary, and the number of filters they used was arbitrary. Plus, they didn't even include Toronto, who is probably a very strong contender.
I agree, there is strong factors to consider a location outside of the US. Despite the NYT analysis, I think this is going to end up in Boston. I don't buy the "there is no room for the location" argument. It is like they've never been to Boston. Sure you can't drop it in the downtown but there are lots of areas in need of redevelopment very near by. I also think that Boston has a huge advantage in terms of talent pool. Look at all the top schools in Boston, Amazon needs the talent more than the money.
Additionally, I think this is a game. They've already decided where, they just want leverage to get a better deal there. This isn't like the Giga factory where they just need manual labor so anywhere would work. I'll be interested to see where it ends up though.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#179This really burns me. The Times compared the metro population of Grand Rapids (1 million) to Detroit's population (670,000) in order to disqualify the city in their first round. But metro Detroit has a population of 4.5 million so the Times either was sloppy with their criteria or they deliberately snubbed Detroit. Detroit may be a dark horse in this competition but with Dan Gilbert going all out to win I don't think…
I work at a software company between Boulder and Denver.
It's easy to recruit people here. You fly them out (at any time of year, even winter) and the weather is typically sunny and pleasant. (yes, in the winter, it's usually sunny, dry, and mild temps)
Good luck doing that in Detroit.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#180> We asked the economist David Albouy to rank these metro areas for us with an index he uses to measure how much people would be willing to sacrifice, in terms of housing costs and commutes, to live in desirable places. On that basis, we cut Charlotte, N.C. My experience being that neither housing costs nor commute times being horribly bad around CLT - this bums me out. It's actually a great city with lots of nature…
Denver based software guy here:
I used to live in North Carolina. My son was born there, and it's where I met my wife.
Charlotte is a terrible place for Amazon.
The weather isn't remarkably good, gay employees can't get married, the public schools are shit thanks to the state, the traffic is bad, and it's culturally not noteworthy. Sorry. It's just not a good location. Raleigh could do it, but isn't big enough, and again, not a culturally attractive spot.
In fact, I think the lack of gay marriage rights kill both Austin and Charlotte.