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Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

nytimes.com

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Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#181

Post by JPKab »

tzs wrote: post #161

> At this point, though, we’re going to eliminate Portland, because it makes little sense for the company to put a second headquarters so close to Seattle. Nonsense. Most or all of the reasons people have speculated on for why they want a second headquarters work as long as it is not in the same state as Seattle. Portland is only three hours from Seattle by car. That's close enough that it is not unreasonable for som…

I live between Denver and Boulder. My brother lives in Portland.

I think Portland is great, but I think it would be a mistake.

1) The lack of sunlight in Portland is the same as Seattle. There are a ton of people who just won't live in places like this. It's actually allowed my company to easily recruit people from places like LA who won't consider cloudy, rainy places due to Seasonal Affective Disorder.

2) Portland has bad traffic. Shockingly bad for it's size.

3) The airport is nice, but small. Flights aren't often direct.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#182

Post by JPKab »

rdtsc wrote: post #8

Not sure if Washington, DC includes Northern Virginia (Ashburn, Herndon, Reston). AWS is already here. And a ridiculous amount of fiber seems to out through this area. I see new data centers popping up quite often. And prices are crazy expensive but probably still cheaper than the city itself. So I would pick this area if I was them. Though not sure how I'd personally feel about prices and traffic going up even highe…

I currently live between Denver and Boulder. Lived in the DC area for 8 years.

It's an AWFUL place to build an HQ, but Amazon might do it anyway.

1) Salaries are artificially inflated by competition from the Govt and Govt contractors.

2) Traffic is nightmarishly bad.

3) Housing is incredibly expensive

4) Tech skills aren't as high as the stats indicate. The gov't and contractors have an amazing way of creating people whose titles indicate they know what they're doing, but they don't. See healthcare.gov fiasco for an illustration. A senior data engineer in DC is someone who knows SQL and Informatica, as opposed to someone that can actually do real tech. The intelligence agencies have awesome talent, but they have enormous salaries inflated by their security clearances and you're not going to get them.

5) Weather fucking sucks. I lived there 8 years, it sucks.

6) Quality of life just isn't good. Average commute times and cultural amenities are bad.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#183

Post by JPKab »

hiram112 wrote: post #139
rdtsc wrote: post #8

Not sure if Washington, DC includes Northern Virginia (Ashburn, Herndon, Reston). AWS is already here. And a ridiculous amount of fiber seems to out through this area. I see new data centers popping up quite often. And prices are crazy expensive but probably still cheaper than the city itself. So I would pick this area if I was them. Though not sure how I'd personally feel about prices and traffic going up even highe…

I think the area around Reston / Dulles would make a great pick. The Silver Line will be finished soon, and there is plenty of room to build it up in the style of Arlington's Orange Line or Old Town's Blue. Dulles being 10 minutes away would be a huge advantage, especially compared to Denver where the airport is a long ways from both the tech corridor and the Boulder area. Traffic is still a nightmare and housing cos…

Bad place for an HQ. The tech talent is a mix of actual tech talent vs. "I have all of the Microsoft and Cisco certs that XY Agency requires".

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#184

Post by JPKab »

vitus wrote: post #165
technofiend wrote: post #77

Actually I would challenge the idea Houston doesn't have enough of the professionals required. Houston was eliminated as not having enough white collar workers. Yet they left in Austin which is far smaller because at least 12.5 % base of their base has the right skills. It makes sense to compare desired jobs versus the general population but not without context. Seriously with six million+ people here, do you really…

Off the top of my head, two main points for why Austin is better-suited than Houston for a tech HQ: - UT (@Austin) means a large pool of fresh grads from a top-10 CS program they can recruit. - Existing presence of both Amazon itself and other tech companies (Google, FB, MS, etc) means they don't have to relocate workers, and it's a lot easier to convince SDEs from other companies to jump ship.

Gay employees can't marry. That's all you need to say no.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#185

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

JPKab wrote: post #177
virtuallynathan wrote: post #17

I'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 pla…

The Philly burbs are pretty nice.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#186

Post by peatmoss »

heimdall wrote: post #112
conorgil145 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Denver for the past 2 years and agree with this assessment as well. The light rail has expanded lines in recent years to the airport and I have read that the plan is for that expansion to continue to eventually link Denver and Boulder. Amazon could build their huge complex anywhere in that area and workers could take public transportation to the office.

I graduated from CU-Boulder in 2009 and have lived in the Denver-metro area ever since. I could very easily see Amazon drawn to the Boulder-Longmont-Lafayette triangle if not in Denver proper. Lots of growth here in the last 5 years especially. Many long-time locals are complaining about the cost-of-living going up, though.

Having been in Seattle for nearly a decade now, Denver is one place that I'd absolutely consider at some point. I love mountains and sunshine, which Denver gets in spades. Having grown up in MT, the mountains around Seattle are beautiful, but never feel quite right to me—mountains should be dry!

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#187

Post by amorphid »

pj_mukh wrote: post #49
amorphid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking only for myself, "fairly close" is basically as far away as really far away. If I have to move, there's not much of a difference between moving 100 miles and 3,000 miles. If I were planning to operate in one city because it was fairly close to another city, I'd probably just go to the fairly close city instead (or somewhere else altogether).

If I work in Detroit, I can visit my family in Southern Ontario or Michigan over the weekend. This makes a huge difference.

I used to do that, but I got really sick of making long drives in traffic.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#188

Post by nether »

rmason wrote: post #2

This 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…

But nobody wants to move there. I loved my four years in Ann Arbor, but any other metro area just blows it out of the water.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#189

Post by seanmcdirmid »

JPKab wrote: post #180
blinkingled wrote: post #11

> 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 a…

> gay employees can't get married

Is this still true? I thought the Supreme Court decision applied to the whole country?

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#190

Post by gtCameron »

JPKab wrote: post #184
vitus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head, two main points for why Austin is better-suited than Houston for a tech HQ: - UT (@Austin) means a large pool of fresh grads from a top-10 CS program they can recruit. - Existing presence of both Amazon itself and other tech companies (Google, FB, MS, etc) means they don't have to relocate workers, and it's a lot easier to convince SDEs from other companies to jump ship.

Gay employees can't marry. That's all you need to say no.

Gay marriage has been legal in all 50 states for 2 years now
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