This is clearly a DoD play. The federal government as a whole is thirsty for cloud services and having a services provider like Amazon literally at their doorstep is going to win them a lot of work. If they do bring good experts to government work instead of what the typical government contractors in the area provide this will be a good thing for taxpayers.
People keep saying this and I really don't follow. Why does the DoD care where the headquarters of the parent company of their contractor is located? Are they gonna pop in and ask questions about the Amazon retail site?
Sure AWS needs a sales office in the region. And a datacenter. And a lobbying shop too. Pretty sure they got all that covered already.
It's got a mediocre quality of life compared to other tech centers, extremely high cost of living, horrific traffic, and has a talent pool that is inflated on paper due to the misaligned incentives of the Federal government workforce (Federal government workers are promoted and hired based on arbitrary checkmarks like Masters degree: yes/no, etc) which cause people to pursue worthless graduate degrees for pay bumps. This is why there are so many diploma mill type schools with campuses there. Add in the incredible over-staffing of Federal projects (both gov't and contractor) and you get incredibly mediocre talent where a "full stack web developer" produces very little over 3 years and has an atrophied skill set. Forced me to hire based on side projects and active Github projects to weed out the huge amount of mediocrity.
Bezos has political aspirations, and honestly, this makes sense from the perspective of already having massive data center presence there. He will now have large numbers of employees added to both Maryland and Virginia, giving him much more influence with Congress since congressman in general kiss the ass of large employers in their districts.
Hopefully, he could have some positive influences on the Federal gov't, by having a contracting wing from Amazon that would help fix the awful, bloated, IBM-like state of the Federal agencies. They used to do great things, but like IBM, they have calcified into jobs programs with dead-sea effect staffing.
100%. My move from SF to DC was mind-blowing in the general expectations set on developers. Without hyperbole, a year of output at most gov't contracts is a couple weeks worth of work at a typical startup.
That plus it’s so much cheaper in DC. As someone who lives in the Bay Area but has to travel to DC a decent amount the complaints about DC housing costs are nothing compared to Palo Alto.
If Amazon is putting their campus there you should buy everything you can.
I’m in pretty much the reverse position, and also bought a house recently. Any time I was feeling frustrated about the housing market here, I just pulled up a search of Bay Area properties, or talked to my California colleagues about their struggles with real estate, and I felt a lot better.
This is not a cheap area by any means, but it’s far from the rarified heights of the more usual Big Tech areas.
Wait why would Congress care about employees near DC, aside from the reps for VA and MD? I could believe Bezos wants to be near the political action... but DC doesn’t really have much pull in. National politics
Or: Amazon is going to heavily recruit former-DoD and government workers, luring them from low pay rates to high paying jobs. Reduce hiring friction: you don't need to convince them to uproot their families to move. They already live in the area, hell, their commute doesn't even change.
Are you more likely to award contracts to AWS if you work at the DoD knowing that in two years you can move over and suddenly quintuple your salary?
The Federal government pays incredibly well, but has few technology workers. They instead primarily act as managers for embedded contractors, who themselves are paid far above average for a given role.
Additionally, AWS already has a DoD presence.
Source: Lived in DC area for 8 years, worked on numerous federal contracts, witnessed highly overpaid, lazy shitbags who were so incompetent that government shutdowns forcing them to stay home sped up work on contracts.
Amazes me how the "government workers are underpaid" meme is so strong in people who haven't spent time in DC area.
I grew up in an impoverished rural part of Virginia 6 hours from DC. Going home and seeing my hard working relatives scrape by and do without after paying taxes, then going back to DC and seeing people who arrived at work at 9, left at 3:30, and yapped half the day made me transform from Leslie Knope to Ron Swanson.
I always tell people this:
The US political parties have it wrong. One thinks gov't is always bad and shouldn't exist. The other thinks it is fine, but just needs more money.
The reality is that it is a broken organization that used to be amazing, but has rotted, and the last thing it needs is more money. It needs to be radically reformed and reinvented. End rant.
How could the federal government possibly pay "incredibly well" in the context of software? ~185k is the current cap on salaries. That's not the bottom or the median, it's the top, a place most people will not reach in their whole careers, and there are rigid rules around how to get there. As far as I know, pretty much everyone is on something equivalent to the GS? Even contractors are on a proxy version of it, based on my experience in the space (it's why I left). I know people talk about 18f a lot on HN and I was under the impression they had to get an ultra-special allowance of some kind for even their salaries. What makes the pay so good, I really don't get it? There are benefits, sure, but I am under the impression that pensions aren't what they used to be, and a FAANG is going to give you health insurance as a dev. What am I missing?
Maybe they pay the people in question too much for their skills, motivation, or work product, but that is not "incredibly well" for a software developer in the USA. DC isn't that cheap, though certainly not like SF. If you are a good developer who doesn't show up at 9 and leave at 3:30 and don't want to, who can make it to a decent pay band at a FAANG, or have a specialization that demands high income, I just don't see how the government could be a good choice economically.
You are vastly, vastly discounting the value of the benefits. THE most secure pension in the world (you cannot buy one that good on the private market), incredible health benefits, incredible vacation policies, lax work policies for most jobs, great holiday schedule, Gov will pay to train you, you effectively cannot get laid off (try downloading porn at most corporations for hours and hours and see what happens), etc.
Obviously that doesn't look quite as good right now (pretty much only for the software engineering field), but during the next recession? Best deal in the world. Heck, you even get free holidays every now and then during government shutdowns. (The employees have always been back paid for these if I recall correctly -- maybe there was one time they weren't? Very rare.)
You are vastly, vastly mischaracterizing government shutdowns as “free holidays.” Shutdowns due to lapses in appropriations by congress are extremely traumatic for ordinary government workers. It’s not as though you can just go on a trip while you wait for the government to re-open, as you must be ready to report the next day if appropriations are made. There is absolutely zero guarantee that back pay will be paid, despite what might have happened previously. Even if you wanted to work pro bono, you are forbidden from doing any sort of official work, even checking email, during a shutdown. In all, it’s stressful and morale crushing, and incredibly wasteful, as huge amounts of time are spent preparing for a shutdown and then spinning back up from it. To give just one example, at government science labs, experiments must be stopped, and any field work must cease and everyone must come home, which can ruin a big experiment that may have been years in the making. Calling it a holiday is flat-out false.
And private sector is far, far more stressful. Instead of worrying about whether or not you'll get a week of back-pay, you have to worry about how you're going to feed your family and keep a roof over your head after your job is terminated with no notice and a meaningless severance package.
Cry me a river. Federal jobs have downsides, but this isn't one of them.
My wife works for the feds and I'm in the private sector. I have a better retirement plan, better health benefits (she is on my plan, not vice versa), more paid vacation per year, more flexible work schedule, and more holidays (I get the day after Thanksgiving, she does not). Oh, and I get paid more.
When people are talking about this, they're usually talking about local government positions like teachers, librarians, and social workers. Or the post office. Very rarely are people talking about contractors or white collar bureaucrats.
Maybe the reinvention could get automated? Like, any agency is going to be shut down and rebuilt without previous staff every 30 (or whatever) years after it was originally formed? Hard to see how the transitions from old to new version would be done unless you kept outwardly backwards compatibility, though. At least it could shake things up internally.
Norway is actually doing this a rebuild of one agency. The Government's Road Agency has essentially been deigned ineffectual and FUBAR, so a new agency has been formed (New Roads) with responsibility for all new roads. The old agency has stopped replacing retirees (I think) and will eventually disappear. This is of course never said loudly in plain words. I just wish they would do the same for the railroads agency, which is a peerless shitshow.
I’m more for that mindset toward government projects. Ie repaving highways every X years. Rebuilding buildings every Y years. There’s plenty of capital (buildings, roads, dams, etc) that is old enough that a tear down/rebuild makes sense - and would generate careers. As for people, they often represent institutional knowledge and ability. The people who’ve left the state department will be impossible to replace, for instance.
This comment is hilarious to me. Quintuple your salary? I worked in consulting for 5 years, and I can assure you that Amazon is already paying less for equivalent candidates. I'm not sure what you think happens in government consulting, but it is nothing like government employment.
Edit: The strategy you outline re: government employees is already employed by all of the large government consulting firms. Amazon is late to the game and behind the ball with their lack of awarded contracts. They might be able to catch up, but contracting is one field that has repeatedly shown itself to be resistant to disruption.
Agreed: government employment is not the same as government consulting.
There are generations of future government employees that haven't even graduated high school yet. Amazon is not dumb. Bezos has never played the short game.
If anyone in the consulting field is paying attention - right about now is almost too late to begin going out and lining up a bunch of clearance techies who can be on your secure GovCloud consulting team to provide all the services that the DoD will be needing.
That's not how it works. There are no restrictions on who you can work for, even if you were a CO/COR. The restriction is on representating a firm to the government. This happens very frequently; it's seldom that a flag officer retires without multiple offers from industry.
"""
it might be assumed that a former contracting officer representative could not be hired by the same company whose contract they oversaw as a federal employee. Even though seeking such employment while still in federal service would represent a prohibited conflict of interest, seeking and being hired after federal service ends would be allowed
...
the rules would bar the employee from representing them, such as through a communication or appearance, before a federal employee regarding the specific contract he or she oversaw
"""
https://www.army.mil/article/194019/moving_to_private_sector...
I imagine that it will make it much easier to have face-to-face happy hours, dinners, lunches, and so on. It will also enable people lobbying on behalf of Amazon to do so closer to the mothership and include people from Amazon to further strengthen their abilities. Those types of conversations do have benefit for the people they represent and are why there's a huge lobbyist industry. Those face-to-face meetings and parties and eating together really can make things happen faster than trying to broker deals from across the country through phone or video conference. I presume this is one of the main reasons behind this decision.
Plus when trying to make a sale or negotiate a deal I'm sure it makes people on the other side feel better if someone says "And the people to support you or jump when you say how high are going to be 5 minutes away rather than 2 timezones away." It's almost at the point where subcontracting out is similar to just having all the work done in the same building you're already in. Seems like that would make people feel more comfortable.
As a former government contractor (and employee), I can say having the tech teams nearby is an advantage. Personal relationships should not be underestimated, even when building software for the government. If anything personal relationships are even more important as there’s a high likelihood that non-technical people will be making the decisions on what and how you build the software.
I don't follow this logic either. Boeing has their HQ in Chicago, Raytheon in Massachusetts, UTC in Connecticut. The key thing these companies seem to do is spread their offices into relatively small states so when votes happen Senators have to go against large employees in their districts.
> Why does the DoD care where the headquarters of the parent company of their contractor is located? Are they gonna pop in and ask questions about the Amazon retail site?
Don't underestimate how much of a difference-maker face-to-face is.
I've called and emailed people and the one thing that actually got things moving was just going to their dang office and seeing them in person. I don't think it matters how good the technology gets and how many VR-facetime conference call services develop, there's always going to be something irreplaceable about meeting in person. If there's not much of a significant difference on paper between you and the competition, it really does put you ahead of the competition if those meetings go well and the competition isn't doing it. Same for hosting dinners, etc.
People have some good replies but they are missing a big one. Relationships. The DoD is absolutely who you know. That is a big part of it. You have to be in the area to have skin in that game.
The thing about sales is that at a certain level of client, the clients want to speak to executives, not salespeople.
If you're going to place executives in the area, then their underlings need to be there too, and so on. Putting your HQ where your executives need to be makes sense.
A lot of it is relationships. A lot of it is the kind of workforce you'll get (people already experience with DoD stuff and have the right clearances but don't want to move out of the DC/MD/VA area), and such things.
Amazon's big draw for someone currently doing cleared work is being able to ditch the clearance without taking a pay cut or moving. The people who want to work for Amazon and keep the clearance have already made that move.
Politically there's probably something to be said for having a strong local economic presence. But you're probably right that it can be overstated as a factor.
Cloud services? This is a 2nd headquarters and Amazon is more than cloud services. They could handle the point you are making with simply a large local office. Not the entire company which is involved in a host of things that would make other areas more attractive.
This would effectively double the cost to DoD of any awarded cloud service contract to Amazon. In the form of higher cost of living for federal employees.
Looks like that’s not counting the whole metro area, so it’s kind of misleading. DC is a fairly small chunk of the region as a whole. It’s only the third most populous jurisdiction in the area.
The current locality rate for the DC-ish area (which actually goes halfway to Wilmington and Richmond) is 28.22%; thus, a GS-12-05 salary is $72k in a low-cost-of-living area and $92k in DC. The Federal Salary Council's recommended locality rate is 78.81%, bringing that notional GS-12 to $128k. So there is already somewhat of a disconnect between federal salaries and cost of living.
That aside, it's easy enough for the government to fix the housing problem. They're just too invested in keeping prices high to want that.
There are lots of other good things about the area- good schools, physical room for them to grow and take over a bunch of buildings, lots of engineers and business people in the area already, etc.
I'd be willing to bet Bezos knew with 90% confidence where he'd want HQ2 a year ago and put on this prisoner's dilemma game amongst states to reap the most benefit possible before moving there.
> put on this prisoner's dilemma game amongst states to reap the most benefit possible
It may be just one factor, but it is much more than that let me explain.
Let us say Bezos came to the conclusion that Northern VA is right place long ago as you said and naively announced the place & commitment. What follows next is 65% of the region people cheer at the announcement and 35% protest stating it will cause housing expensive and traffic congestion etc..
After some back and forth negotiations with local govt. Amazon builds it HQ2. By the time HQ2 complete building complete campus (3 years), the unhappy dissident group get more support and "pass local city and state laws" demanding Amazon should pay for some affordable housing projects and some new infrastructure which may run into few billion dollars.
Now with this new bidding game, it is hard for the people of Northern VA to demand Amazon. Even if they do demand few years down the line few billion dollars towards some affordable housing etc. Amazon can happily pack back some of those Billions they got as tax breaks.
One can't build a Trillion dollar consumer retail business without playing on basic human psychology.
Jeff Bezos owns a $23m house in DC. The entire HQ2 process was a farce to get cities to game theory themselves to death in favor of Amazon. HQ2 was always going to be in NOVA.
Just a stones throw away from Washington DC, imagine that. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Amazon is in talks to do billions of dollars worth of work with the DOD and that the ___location choice of the second headquarters might have a lot to do with that.
Scott Galloway was pretty confident that it was always intended to be in Washington, partially because of Jeff Bezos already owning a house there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HyiY_m_YxI&t=542
It's got nothing to do with whether or not Bezos can buy a house in a given ___location. It has to do with examining the existing incentives that led Bezos to buy a home there in the first place, and applying that logic to the requirements of HQ2.
They got a ton of value — in my area they used the dopey package that the local economic development dopes put together to quickly extract concessions for a distribution center.
It seemed like the leader after 3/20 ___location choices were in the DC area (Montgomery County, DC, Northern Virginia). DC and Montgomery were kinda thrown in there to make it look like they could be contenders, but logistically Northern Virginia makes the most sense. It’s near metros, near IAD and Reagan airports, has land available for a large campus, has a lot of offices of other businesses doing work for the government, is a fairly rich suburban commuter area.
JB has had a home there which he’s been renovating to host large Gatsby-esk parties. It wouldn’t be surprising to see HQ2 there. I also foresee a strong potential he’ll turn into a Koch-esk political operative for his political positions; or, He might just make a run for the Presidency in several election cycles from now.
1. As you point out, right next to Pentagon and federal government.
2. Good transportation: right on the Metro and literally across the street from National Airport.
3. If you're going to have 2 headquarters, having them be on opposite coasts makes sense.
4. And I think another one that is pretty unique to Crystal City is that Amazon and their employees definitely want to be in a downtown, urban environment. However, most of the other cities on the list were either extremely crowded downtown, available sites were actually more out in the 'burbs, or the cities were far down in what a lot of people would consider "2nd tier" (or 3rd tier) cities. Crystal City is basically an urban suburb of DC that you could easily see having a great "vibe" for an HQ2, but still has room for Amazon to build out.
Another major advantage of Crystal City is that it is full of empty real estate. It was built up to house major federal agencies and their contractors, but all the agencies have moved out, and so have most of the contractors.
The Patent and Trademark Office had 5 huge buildings; they moved to Alexandria. The Dept of Defense is moving a lot of its employees to Fort Belvoir, and the contractors are following.
It's really kind of crazy to have such a major business district so deep in a major metropolitan area, with such low average occupancy.
I do believe they have said they want some folks working out of HQ2 in 2019, so that means using existing buildings, at least at first.
The USPTO buildings have a lot going for them: pretty close to Metro, dedicated parking garages, and a great view out over the airport. I had occasion to work in one of them in 2011 and it was in fine shape.
But even if Amazon does choose Crystal City, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll go after those USPTO buildings specifically. There are plenty of empty floors and buildings in CC to choose from.
>Also, some nyt writer that’d never been there called it the Brooklyn of DC which was hilarious.
Meanwhile, Columbia Heights and Eastern Market will probably see their gentrification rapidly accelerate since they're a short Blue or Yellow line ride away on WMATA. H street will probably be safe since Washingtonians seems to have a pathological fear or switching lines during their commute and it's closest to a Red line station (Union Station).
> H street will probably be safe since Washingtonians seems to have a pathological fear or switching lines during their commute and it's closest to a Red line station (Union Station).
What if the gentrification spreads out from Union Market?
I think the poster above meant to be a little facetious. I tend to read “millennial ready” as building out a supply of tiny, $2000/mo studios with loads of flashy amenities and terrible quality construction.
Honestly the city just felt very superficial in a lot of ways. I was there almost a decade and a half, and in that span of time I came to appreciate different things about the city for what they were, but that pervading sense that there wasn't really much substance beneath the surface ever left, and the direction of the city just stopped aligning with my long term personal goals of buying a house.
Once I went from "passively thinking about buying a house" to "making a five year plan to buy a house" I sat long and hard and thought about if I wanted to make central Texas my home. It's gorgeous here, the weather is great, yes The Lege absolutely sucks but find me someone who can't find some gripe about their state government and I'll find you the next Buddha.
I decided to leave and return to the midwest.
Adler's City council fought the state on bathroom bills and bag bans, many teeth were gnashed, garments ripped and sackcloth torn-but aside from a few annoyed editorials and longform pieces from the usual local columnists, when city council abandoned CodeNEXT (a critically needed rewrite of city zoning laws and building codes that would have allowed for greater density and eased pressure on a stunted housing market) once again caving to neighborhood associations that could give a damn about anything outside of their borough and continue to hold council hostage at the expense of development and well design urban planning, I threw up my hands and left.
I’m actually in the Midwest right now and has Austin at the top of my places to move to. However, I do want to buy a house in the next 5 years, so this is making me have second thoughts.
Look don't take my word for it, okay? You can still buy a house there, if your personal finances allow and still really, thoroughly enjoy yourself. Austin is great for that, I will definitely go back for ACL Fest and sxsw (becoming one of THOSE people heh) because at its heart it is a very fun city. My personal priorities just changed as I grew older.
I was someone who got to Austin in the very early 2000's after leaving the military up the road at Ft. Hood, enjoyed it for a few years, and slowly watched it evolve into something that just didn't excite me anymore. My experience shouldn't sour yours.
(But seriously, if you're gonna buy a house, and want to actually enjoy having a bit of land, but still be close enough to Austin to do Austin-y things, Pflugerville, Round Rock and Georgetown to the North are blowing up, as are Buda, Kyle and San Marcos to the south, with Bastrop to the east. To the west is where Michael Dell and probably Lance Armstrong lives. That's all I'll say about that)
p.s. if you absolutely feel like you have to have Franklin BBQ, don't be a rube and stand in line for 4 hours. Get some friends over, pool your money together and call in, they'll do pick up orders for anything over $40 I think and you can skip the line-or call my buddy Mark, his brisket is better anyway :P
Seattle is soulless according to you? I’ve lived in Seattle and worked for Amazon when the headquarters was in a creepy old hospital up on beacon hill, and yes there has been change in Seattle, most of it for the better.
Anyone that tells you South Lake Union neighborhood was better pre Amazon is full of it. It was a bunch of warehouses and run down.
Do you have experience of Seattle over the past decade, or are you just repeating platitudes?
You only have the stresses of major homelessness and an extremely large heroin/meth problem, directly due to the endless growth Amazon and other large companies had on this city, with the "top minds" of Seattle having absolutely no clue how to solve it. I've seen multiple people die since I got here, and I've seen people with guns to their heads over drugs outside of my Capitol Hill apartment. Seattle's population willfully ignores everything wrong with the city too.
I live in Seattle. Things like the Showbox reportedly in serious danger of being demolished for luxury condo's are just showing how soulless this city is becoming in the name of 'growth'. The entire city population has been replaced by tech bros and their significant others, tech bro culture, ubers, the food is boring and most restaurants are over-hyped, costs are insane, the people are selfish and rude, there's nothing to do except drink and ride a bike to look at Puget Sound yet again, there's little culture or diversity, and the politicians work entirely in Amazon's favor. I have a decent stable job here, but I'd move if the opportunity was to arise.
How did Amazon cause the heroin problem in Seattle? There's been a growing heroin and homelessness problem all over the country. Did it cause this too?
"In the early 1990s, the rise of the grunge alternative rock music and subculture in Seattle brought media attention to the use of heroin by prominent grunge artists. In the 1990s, the media focused on the use of heroin by musicians in the Seattle grunge scene, with a 1992 New York Times article listing the city's "three principal drugs" as "espresso, beer and heroin" [4] and a 1996 article calling Seattle's grunge scene the "...subculture that has most strongly embraced heroin".[5] Tim Jonze from The Guardian states that "...heroin had blighted the [grunge] scene ever since its inception in the mid-80s" and he argues that the "...involvement of heroin mirrors the self-hating, nihilistic aspect to the music"; in addition to the heroin deaths, Jonze points out that Stone Temple Pilots' Scott Weiland, as well as Courtney Love, Mark Lanegan and Evan Dando "...all had their run-ins with the drug, but lived to tell the tale."[6] A 2014 book stated that whereas in the 1980s, people used the "stimulant" cocaine to socialize and "...celebrate good times", in the 1990s grunge scene, the "depressant" heroin was used to "retreat" into a "cocoon" and be "...sheltered from a harsh and unforgiving world which offered...few prospects for...change or hope."[7]
Leading grunge band Alice in Chains had a song "God Smack", which included the line "stick your arm for some real fun", a reference to injecting heroin.[5] Seattle grunge musicians known to use heroin included Kurt Cobain, who was using "heroin when he shot himself in the head"; "Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone [, who] overdosed on heroin in 1990"; "Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch[, who] died of an overdose of the same opiate in 1992...[and] Layne Staley of Alice in Chains [who] publicly detailed his battles with heroin...".[8] Mike Starr of Alice in Chains [7] and Jonathan Melvoin from The Smashing Pumpkins also died from heroin. After Cobain's death, his "...widow, singer Courtney Love, characterized Seattle as a drug mecca, where heroin is easier to get than in San Francisco or Los Angeles."[8]"
It's been culturally significant since 1939 and still is. There are still packed shows there almost every night. Music is one of the few places Seattle really has culture.
>Founded in 1939,[4] the Showbox has hosted a diverse offering of music over the decades. From the Jazz Age to the Grunge Era, the ballroom has featured shows by Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters and the Ramones — as well as local artists such as burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee, and grunge bands Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, TAD and Screaming Trees.[5]
>Other acts to perform at The Showbox have included Al Jolson, Mae West, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante and Dizzy Gillespie, The Police, XTC, X, Blondie, Gang of Four, Iggy Pop, Devo, Dead Kennedys and Jerry Cantrell.[7][8] More recent performers include The Weeknd, Snoop Dogg, Dave Matthews, Kanye West, Lorde, Robbie Williams, Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, Public Enemy, PJ Harvey, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, Daft Punk, Kasabian, Old 97's, Elliott Smith, Peter Murphy, Guided By Voices, Built To Spill, Billy Idol, David Bazan, Bebel Gilberto, Cat Power, Spiritualized, Sleater-Kinney, Minus the Bear, Coldplay, Bright Eyes, The Roots, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Dita Von Teese, Maroon 5, The Shins, The Melvins, My Morning Jacket, LL Cool J, DJ Shadow, Scissor Sisters, TV On The Radio, Ke$ha, Kimbra, Marina and the Diamonds, B-52's, Lady Gaga, Ice Cube, Paul Simon, Macklemore, JoJo, (Kpop group) A.C.E and many more.[9][5]
> However, most of the other cities on the list were either extremely crowded downtown, available sites were actually more out in the 'burbs, or the cities were far down in what a lot of people would consider "2nd tier" (or 3rd tier) cities.
Yeah, in Boston for example (where Amazon is actually doing some fairly heavy building and hiring in the Seaport anyway), the proposed HQ2 site was Suffolk Downs. That's not out in the burbs exactly but it is adjacent to old working class towns a little ways north. It's not what your typical techie would consider being in Boston.
I think Raleigh was somewhere out in industrial parks a decent way outside the city with no transit.
Etc.
We'll see if this story pans out but the DC area always had to seen as a leading contender. Yes, it's probably a bit pricey but one wonders how much latitude Amazon would have had anyway to pick a cheap ___location and provide much lower compensation than HQ1 to reflect that.
Even if the area doesn't check all the boxes, it checks a lot of them--including the fact that there's a ton of local tech talent and DC is, if not everyone's idea of a dream ___location to live and work, is at least considered tolerable by many.
And to its credit, Crystal City is actually pretty rad. It’s full of highly educated people who can’t say where they work or what they do. But they do have good taste in restaurants.
My biggest complaint about crystal city is that the restaurants are pretty bad. One one's above the Crystal City Shops are mostly chains you find wherever business hotels. And the ones on 23rd street are just mostly bad.
If I were going to work in HQ2, I'd live in Del Ray, though its more single-family focused. But it has some nice local restaurants.
I don't know. Compared to other areas around the country maybe. But with NoVA there are just better places. I remember going there twice maybe and just never had a reason to go back Crystal City.
Tons of empty office space for sure though. I think proximity to DC itself is probably the main selling point.
It's debatable whether Metro will be able to handle another few tens of thousands of daily commuters going through the downtown core to get to Crystal City. The system's already crammed up at rush hour and nobody has the budget for capital improvements to start to put more tracks through Gallery Place, Metro Center, and L'Enfant Plaza.
It would be interesting though, if Amazon was prepared to invest in capital improvements for Metro...
Judging from Seattle's experience, Amazon is not really prepared to do anything other than garner support from the business community and support a token streetcar. And Metro's capital needs are probably much bigger than Seattle's and are politically more complicated due to three jurisdictions that are frenemies in the best of times.
It's worth noting that Seattle and DC have vastly different representations on their boards. In DC this is two representatives picked by the governments of DC, VA, MD, and the feds each, and in some cases not even appointed by elected officials. In Seattle, this is a board consisting almost entirely of elected officials of counties and municipalities.
Seattle's method works because the responsibility of elected officials is quite clear and their voting records are transparent, whereas a diffuse chain of responsibility via appointment is not.
Metro rideship is down from its peak, overall. The system handles over 600,000 rides per day now; it handled around 750,000 per day between 2008 and 2012.
Riders commuting from downtown DC to Crystal City would be going against the prevailing flow into the city. Plenty of room on those trains in the morning.
Riders in MD would have a hard time, but a person would have to be pretty dumb to move to MD for a job in Crystal City.
Because Metro's reputation suffered when operations couldn't keep up with rising ridership. What will prevent Metro's operations from suffering again when an influx of Amazon employees stresses the system again? Would it be better if those workers got onto the already-jammed freeways?
> against the prevailing flow
Only if they board the trains between the downtown core and Crystal City. Odds are, if they're boarding from the northwest or from newly gentrified neighborhoods, they need to pass through the downtown core to get to Crystal City, which puts them on the same trains as people commuting in from the suburbs. They may get on pretty close to where the suburban commuters get off, but there's still an overlap. Not to mention the overcrowding on the downtown core platforms themselves. Keep in mind as well that Crystal City-bound trains from the downtown core stop at the Pentagon first, which has its own non-negligible share of commuters - those trains may not be full, but they sure aren't empty.
Surely, you jest. Yeah, it's on a metro line, but hardly anyone lives near a metro line. That area is consistently rated as the #1 or #2 worst traffic in the country for years.
Metro serves a tiny fraction of N. VA. Sure, if you're in DC and commuting out, it's probably ok, but people don't tend to stay in DC very long. Once they have kids and realize there is no hope of reasonable public education there, they move.
Your comment about "nobody lives near a metro line" though - I mean, come on! With the orange line and silver line extension there are lots of places in NoVa near the metro. Yes, the car traffic is horrible, but the car traffic is horrible in SF, LA, Boston, NY, Austin...
As another commenter pointed out, there is actually a ton of empty real estate in Crystal City itself and no doubt a ton of it will be built up as apartments/condos now.
That would make sense if urban planners were the ones telling people not to live near transit stations, but it's generally existing residents opposing new housing.
Though, perhaps to your point, I also am not a fan of almost all planning. The nicest places to live, walk, etc. tend to be ones that arose before planning was widespread. Of course, they existed before the car, too.
Bezos obviously knows how to run a company, but the only "brand" he has is (I think unfairly) "exploitative capitalism". If Bloomberg can't be president Bezos probably can't either. And probably wouldn't want to, to be honest.
Zuckerberg might want to, but he's universally despised on both sides of American politics, so no chance there.
(Not to mention that VP picks are normally used to broaden the ticket's appeal, not double down on it...)
I don't really see "exploitative capitalism" as being a problem for Bezos. As our current president has pointed out, it's just smart business. In our current political climate that will probably be lapped up by someone.
Aargh, I wish ONE tech company would put a HQ somewhere in the South. I currently live in the Bay Area working at a company I love, but I'll have to move back at some point (my wife wants to be closer to family).
Crystal City, VA is still an 8 hour drive from the part of the South I'm from. Atlanta, Raleigh, and Nashville have so much potential... I think if just one of FANG put a HQ there (or even an office), the others would quickly follow.
I feel like the South has a long way to come before the average tech worker would want to live and work there. You couldn't pay me enough (literally since comp is so low out there, but also kind of metaphorically as well) to go work and live in any Southern state. Maybe you need a critical mass?
- fellow Bay Area tech worker
The politics and culture (which are intertwined). Even if one area or city is more liberal, you're still dealing with a conservative, and possibly racist, sexist and homophobic, state government.
Agreed. State government in Texas is constantly overturning city ordinances in Austin: the whole bathroom bill BS, requiring local police to hold suspects for ICE, even overturning the plastic bag ban.
All of the current political ads are pretty nauseating. Regardless of where you stand on the issue of managing immigration (and IMO there are lots of fair points on both sides that I think unfortunately get drowned out by extremists), the tone of the current set of ads is clearly "Evil brown gang members are coming to sell your kids drugs and murder your family." Makes Willy Horton look quaint.
Having lived in Alabama, this would be rather offensive if it weren’t so endearing; Sounds like a child who’s so certain that the closet hides a monster, that they’re too scared to go learn that the noise is just an air vent.
At perfect equilibrium for gay men in the south, with a pseudo-osmotic filter allowing only hardy gay men. Meanwhile the wimpy gay men who fled are invading the rest of the country, leaving behind a trail of well-kept neighborhoods with lots of tasteful little galleries.
30 miles outside Atlanta things were not so rosy for brown people right after 9/11 when I lived there. And now, 17 years after 9/11, Georgia is doing everything it possibly can to suppress and purge voters who might shift the state away from staunch conservatism [1]. Please don't pretend there aren't massive issues in the south preventing it from being appealing to west coasters.
I guess you never spent much time in the hills just an hour or so from Atlanta in almost any direction, in any of a good number of towns where “a brown guy” would have a hard time finding a restaurant willing to take his money for food.
One of my college buddies lived in Douglas, three hours south of Atlanta in south georgia. Never had anyone be anything short of incredibly polite and hospitable. Heck, I’ve been in rural Illinois, rural VA, and rural GA quite a bit and everyone’s been great. I don’t know (or much care) about peoples’ politics but I’ve always been treated respectfully.
Another brown guy checking in. My aunt and uncle practiced medicine in Murphy, NC for many years and only ever had a problem when the feds thought Eric Rudolph might be hiding in their backyard.
Having lived in Alabama as a Catholic yankee I was met with at best extreme ignorance about my then beliefs and at worst outright harassment and discrimination for having the wrong accent and wrong Christian denomination. Within the first week of moving there, we had a Klan rally in town.
Most of the other local Catholic families, if they could afford it, moved their children to private school to escape.
The schools had corporal punishment, and demanded that we call our teachers sir or ma'am, a custom that I was not used to and have encountered nowhere else. Failing to do so landed me in detention within the first month or so.
I was there for the original Roy Moore saga.
This was 15+ years ago and in a rural community with dirt roads, so I'm sure things have changed a bit and do not apply to the whole state, but checking the school website corporal punishment is still alive and well and Alabama nearly elected Roy Moore yet again.
I would never live there so long as the current toxic blend of religion and politics dominates the Southern political scene.
3. The HB2 saga demonstrates how strong the Christian right is in the state. As does a candidate in a race too close to call insisting there will never be peace in Jerusalem until Jews acknowledge the divinity of Christ: https://forward.com/fast-forward/413488/gop-candidate-no-pea...
So for some context I’m a black male, early 20s who just moved to NC from CT.
I’ll address 1,4, and 5 out of order and point out I don’t see their relevance to moving.
If NC had particularly egregious holes in its gun laws or something, I’d understand 4, but it doesn’t. It just doesn’t have notably strong gun laws, which puts it in the majority of states.
The other two are pretty inconsequential if you’re talking about the average person considering upending their entire existence to move somewhere, not a weekend romp
Now the other two...
That tweet was so egregious I had to look for context. It’s not a good context but it’s more of the gerrymandering conversations that have gone on around the country and it’s a technicality that they had to use that language.
Now if you think attempts to exclude blacks from politics is a southern problem, you must be out of touch with the rest of the US...
But of course it hurts to admit this is such a systemic issue that it’s not unsurprising to see a state grappling with it.
On the other hand, it’s also not going to fix itself by avoiding the many states it happens in.
I don’t believe in just sitting on my hands and waiting for change. I gladly moved to NC knowing of it’s troubled politics because they’ve been moving in the right direction.
It feels like what you’re saying is “NC is not SoCal” and in a way you’re implying “why would an average tech worker want to move to somewhere that isn’t a spitting image of California and SV culture?” (bringing up MJ legalization is a dead giveaway...)
The reality is places won’t change until people of other cultures join them.
My criteria for moving to NC wasn’t “will there be fewer religion nuts per square mile”, it was “is this a place where I can feel accepted without bending over backwards and changing who I am”.
And so far it has. I have gone on weekend trips to “the middle of nowhere” and wondered if I was getting looks because of the small black sports car in tractor-and-pickup-land, or because of the black person inside, but immediately felt ashamed when I entered a gas station or a store and had nothing but hospitality shown to me. (A friendly reminder, you can be woefully out of touch with Israel and Judaism, obsessed with religion [by our outsider standards] and still not be a fundamentally bad person)
Expecting other places to coddle your tastes and expectations to the point you’re complaining you have to buy certain types of liquor in a special store when bringing up blockers for people living somewhere... it doesn’t scream awareness of how the world at large works.
> It feels like what you’re saying is ... “why would an average tech worker want to move to somewhere that isn’t a spitting image of California and SV culture?” ... Expecting other places to coddle your tastes and expectations
I mean, this was the topic at hand. I recognize it hurts to hear one's chosen home disparaged, but when you're trying to recruit candidates into a ___location, you can't exactly demand they put up or shut up. You're not just competing with LA, you're also competing with SF, Portland, and Seattle, as well as Denver and other cities in Colorado. The 'blue bastion in a red state' pitch for specific cities basically relies on the supreme court to protect blue cities from their state governments, and well, we probably need to see a term or two of today's Supreme Court before we understand the full ramifications of recent appointments.
On the other hand, Amazon's HQ2 strategy seems to be 'let's find a lower CoL city to house all the accountants and HR specialists', so nationwide recruiting may not be an actual concern.
You’re not “disparaging my chosen home” (again strongly implying to me you have a pretty narrow experience with living in different places, once you’ve lived in varied enough places you embrace the fact nowhere is perfect)
If anything you’re whining that the US isn’t a white SV techie monoculture, and it’s music to my ears...
I don’t want NC to put for or put up with SV yuppies, I want NC to grow it’s own culture that is different than its current culture, but also different from what a coddled liberal wants apparently.
There’s a difference.
This thread wasn’t “where in the South can SV run it’s Xerox machine and make San Francisco 2”.
It’s where the would an average tech worker, who FYI is not a stereotypical FAANG employee, want to settle down.
There’s plenty appealing about NC, and plenty of other places that don’t fit your narrow minded, and frankly conceited view of how the world works.
> (again strongly implying to me you have a pretty narrow experience with living in different places, once you’ve lived in varied enough places you embrace the fact nowhere is perfect)
Heh, I actually did live briefly in NC as a child. And Texas, and Georgia, and Kansas, because my father was a contract software consultant. And I've spent my career in three different states. When I chat with my former colleagues from Kansas City about recruiting, there is always a tone of defensiveness about why none of my student employees consider their companies.
> If anything you’re whining that the US isn’t a white SV techie monoculture, and it’s music to my ears...It’s where the would an average tech worker, who FYI is not a stereotypical FAANG employee, want to settle down.
Eh, it's just the uphill battle you face in recruiting. And we haven't even really touched the subject of recruiting foreign nationals. I don't particularly care much about most of the items I posted, I just wanted to offer perspective to the 'we don't need to change to recruit, the recruits need to change' crowd seen here and elsewhere.
If you want my personal justification for not moving to NC or further south, it's pretty easy: Fire Ants.
You lived in all of these places but apparently it didn’t affect your development. Living in a place doesn’t need mean you let it change or affect you, I’ve lived in Ghana, Canada, various Western European countries and a few states, and the important part has always been being open to the culture of a place, not just being there (at a young enough age you don’t control that, but you don’t have to be that old to become more of a passive observer of your surrounding culture than an active participant)
I say that because you’re just doubling down on my point. Why do FAANG employees come into recruiting an average tech worker? In a sentence... “who needs them?”.
You seem to be in this, again, somewhat conceited, line of thought that the rest of the US combined does so little that the SV microcosm is the average of US tech and to change that you need to include the whole world (foreign nationals).
It screams this “oh what they do doesn’t count” or “you need that stereotypical FAANG guy” mentality that I see so much in trendy tech.
The average recruits don’t have to change to come to places like NC, or really places that aren’t don’t have Sillicon in their name (Sillicon Alley, Sillicon Mountsin, etc. included). All they need is an open mind.
Not the “Open to everyone in my hive mind, everyone else is not even worth communicating with” mind that I’ve seen grow strong in “trendy tech”
The recruits who think they’re being asked to change only think so because of closed minded thoughts almost all of the time.
They become so attached to this idea of an “open monoculture” that anything that isn’t their existing culture is an attack on it instead.
“How dare you try and make it change which monoculture I follow”.
NC would be a terrible place if it worked like SV because everyone would be the people who support the guy want Jews to accept Christ and repel anyone who felt differently and try and change you for not agreeing. That would be a close race, it’d be a won race.
And people who are in that “open monoculture” mindset immediately try and apply their lens to NC and see that.
At the end of the day people are coming to NC, and NC has accepted them. It’s not the place these people would project it as
(Replace NC with literally any “off the beaten path but somewhat up and coming locale that’s not a traditional ultraliberal playground)
Not sure if you've lived in NC... but there are a few things to that that I think you may have missed:
1. Yes, the fact that this is uniformly a control state, that is a problem. (Given how they are, I wish they had some special exclusion areas) However, a lot of the east coast operates in the same manner. The early hour for last call is bad as well.
2. Politics that you're talking about have very little to do with the tech sector. Despite what silicon valley would have you believe, you can be a conservative and be a productive member of the industry.
3. This sounds like you're pushing a political agenda here. I think a more succinct way to put this would be: Given the demographic that the tech industry attracts, the bible belt would not be favourable to their lifestyle.
4. (Also see #3)
There are reasons for doing tech in NC and it does have a small tech sector.
on #3, based on my 21 years in the south, i'd say non-white non-mail non-christian should seriously consider before moving there, especially if not in a million person city.
The North Carolina government is in the hands of the Republican party, with the exception of the governor's office, which is one of the weakest executive branches in the country and due to get weaker with some of the constitutional amendments on the ballot this year.
NC has some potential to improve its standing, but so far the gerrymandering has proven insurmountable as even when the courts rule the districts to be illegal, they allow them to continue to be used because the next election is always "too soon".
How is this tolerated as acceptable comment ? No way this would be tolerated if similar sentiment was said of SF but the South is fair game on HN. Everyone in the South particularly Texas is a bigot except the tech elite who are fleeing the high taxes and cost of living of California and other states for the abundant jobs in TX.
I suppose the culture, politics, and traditions. Bay Area is generally quite liberal and tolerant, even if it is not the most diverse. Tech workers tend to be highly educated, well traveled, and open to new ideas. In contrast, I feel like the South is more xeno/homophobic, resistant to change, conservative etc. I have well educated family members in the South who are low-key racist. As a single data point, most young people I know/work with in California who comes from the South does not want to return for these specific reasons. That, combined with a lack of the kind of critical mass that provides Bay Area tech workers with a thriving job market / safety net, precludes (to me) the possibility of tech ever truly thriving in the South.
I realize how pretentious this probably sounds. Take is as a single anecdote, based off my own personal experience.
I would love to be proven wrong, and will gladly eat my words for dinner.
The Bay has a kind of a specific moral view, which is sometimes applied in a fairly authoritarian manner.
It's not very Liberal, and arguably not hugely tolerant either.
For example, all sorts of activities which are common and normal in the rest of America and the world are either frowned upon, or considered fully uncool in the Bay. Things like fishing. Hunting. Most sports. Talking about sports. Twangy accents. Country music. This is a long list.
For example, promoting vegetarianism, and frowning upon those who are not (or forbidding it) as is now the case at 'We Work' - isn't remotely liberal. (Can you imagine if Texas Oil required their employees to be meat eaters?)
Though most of that won't get you in trouble in the Bay, it puts you in the 'out club' in much the same way that being a little bit to colourful or effete might put you in the 'out club' in Texas.
FYI - Having lived both in Texas and The Bay, I'm confident in saying that in the vast, vast majority of Texas you have nothing to worry about if you don't fit the Texas profile though in some legal cases it might be tricky. You just won't be 'cool' in their sense. There are tons of out gay people in Texas, working in all sorts of industries. It's not as good as the Bay, surely, but it's not hell on earth.
When I was in Texas, the ladies in the office would not have it that a young single man would be alone for Thanksgiving. They put myself and the other ex-pats into homes for the holiday dinner.
In Cali, nobody really cared about Thanksgiving, and certainly did not think to care that some people might be alone during this festive time.
Both areas have a general view of how things ought to be, and that view is applied sometimes in an authoritarian manner, and neither of them are hugely tolerant or Liberal. They have 'their ways'.
The Bay has a kind of a specific moral view, which is sometimes applied in a fairly authoritarian manner.
...
For example, all sorts of activities which are common and normal in the rest of America and the world are either frowned upon, or considered fully uncool in the Bay. Things like fishing. Hunting. Most sports. Talking about sports. Twangy accents. Country music. This is a long list.
To be fair, pro sports are an obvious waste of valuable time and attention.
Personally, I’d rather actually connect with someone (or not) than use such mindlessness as a social crutch. I don’t find the extremely common phenomenon of people who don’t like sports forcing themselves to pretend they do for career-related reasons to be particularly healthy, either.
"To be fair, pro sports are an obvious waste of valuable time and attention."
Ha ha ha - this is so funny.
If this comment is not satire, then I think I just made my point!
I hope that readers here realize how fairly uncommon (and elitist, i.e. everyone is obviously wasting their time) this kind of statement is. Surely, a lot of people don't like pro-sports, but most are not so antagonist about it.
My gosh, if you want to connect with people from anywhere, the first thing you can do is talk about sports!
I only wish I cared about sports, it would be so much easier on sales calls and hanging out with regular people!
Netflix and video games don’t directly promote tribal bullshit, and they generally don’t infect the workplace with career-impacting social expectations. I have seen the latter in various workplaces, indeed nearly all of my prior workplaces. The former is just patently true.
I’ll believe this when I see riots in the streets where the local clan win a championship, and/or when spectators with no relationship to the players routinely come to blows over which clan is better.
I come to my disdain for pro sports honestly, it’s not an intellectual virtue signal. I played baseball, basketball, and (later) American football from childhood (~5yrs old on) through high school. I think the sports themselves to be great, with the exception of some obvious problems with football. They help build so many hard and soft skills, and in their best forms they really help build character.
All that said, pro sports culture is basically a social cancer for various reasons, including some that are illuminated directly in that article. The “but how will you relate to the working class” argument is weak, and gives the reader permission to use social crutches rather than useful, generalizable social tools. Indeed, the idea of “becoming” a pro sports fan to be able to socialize with a certain class of people is rather condescending.
> In Cali, nobody really cared about Thanksgiving, and certainly did not think to care that some people might be alone during this festive time.
So true. The west coast in general seems it would rather spend a holiday alone with the internet rather than with other people.
Being west coaster, I almost didn’t know what to do when strangers would start a random conversation with me. I’m only used to homeless people doing that here.
"""It's not very Liberal, and arguably not hugely tolerant either.
For example, all sorts of activities which are common and normal in the rest of America and the world are either frowned upon, or considered fully uncool in the Bay. Things like fishing. Hunting. Most sports. Talking about sports. Twangy accents. Country music. This is a long list."""
Sorry, this isn't the kind of tolerance I was talking about. You're missing my point if you thought that I meant the Bay Area is a bunch an unopinionated amoeba. The Bay Area is just as entitled to not prefer country music as the South is to prefer it. I don't think liking country music in the Bay Area will cause any sane, reasonable person to treat you differently or not be your friend.
(also, the statement "the Bay Area is not very liberal" may be changing slowly from an attitudinal perspective, but certainly that statement does not bear out in the polls)
Your point is well taken though. You're right that both areas have general views about how things ought to be. The main difference that I think most Californians/PNWs really care about are the differences in views relating to social issues, human rights, and tolerance from a governmental and legal perspective. Thinking that fishing is not cool is a little different than your government trying to ban same sex marriage, for example. And thinking hunting is not cool is different than living somewhere that witch hunts immigrants.
" I don't think liking country music in the Bay Area will cause any sane, reasonable person to treat you differently or not be your friend."
It absolutely will.
If you hunt, or own a gun or into 'gun sports' it will 100% affect who your friends are. Did you hear about the employee outrage when Zuck killed is own lamb for passover (or whichever festival it was, I'm not knowledgable). Do you really think that being a 'hunter' won't affect your status at 'WeWork' - a company that enforces vegetarianism? Among a whole bunch of other values?
Listening to Country Music and driving a pickup? Not cool in the Bay - unless it's hipster/ironic. If you are 'openly' Christian, it will likely affect who your friends are as well.
These are not so much conscious thoughts people make, or outright judgements (in some cases they are) - but it will lose you a lot of points on the spectrum of social hierarchy.
I interviewed at a FANG once and the interviewer was interested in the band that I played in and asked what kind of music we played. It was a very long time ago ... and I suppose my answers were not hip enough for him because he obviously was not impressed.
Social circles, companies/startups, clubs, interests - these are all very intermixed as sad as it may be, we make judgements on these thing in life and in business.
""the Bay Area is not very liberal" may be changing slowly from an attitudinal perspective, but certainly that statement does not bear out in the polls""
I mean liberal by classical definition. You seem to be referring to the American pop-culture political definition of 'Liberal' - which frankly has very little meaning, or more like 'left wing'.
So yes, of course the Valley and Cali are fairly 'Liberal' in the pop-culture political sense and will be forever, but they are not very 'liberal' in the classical sense (though the valley has a history of being a little libertarian, which is a little more like classical liberalism, but still different).
In Texas, they really don't care who you are overall. But if you are gay, or effete, or a little weird, you might not be in the cool club. If you were the QB on your high school team, you get bonus points. If you 'never miss Church' it might get you a few bonus points in some places.
In Cali, sure, you can do or be as you please, pretty much. If you drive a big truck, speak with a twang, talk about football or fishing a lot ... you're not going to be in the cool club. Being a vegan, or having a really humbling 'rags-to-riches ethnic minority from another country story' ... will give you big empathetic bonus points. If you belong to a 'Social Justice Cause', or 'attend burning man' - it might get you some bonus points.
In both Cali and Texas - people feel a weird need to push those behaviours on others, maybe as a function of virtue signalling, and to also shame a little bit people that don't follow suit, i.e. 'if you don't support my SJW cause/attend Church you must be immoral'.
Everywhere in the world is like this to some extent, but this is slightly more common in America I think than the rest of the world, particularly bolder, more aspirational regions that are a little 'newer' and have a stronger sense of ideological identity - like Texas and Cali!
I guess we just have different experiences man. The people I know, love, and associate with don't give a fuck if you fish, hunt, or own guns. Plenty of people own trucks, not everyone is vegan, tons of people love sports including football.
I’ve had no trouble finding fishing and hunting partners in SV. I’ve never personally felt anyone hugely opposed to hunting either, unless it some how conflicted with how they feed themselves. I do find it interesting thatduck hunting during season can be done just a maybe a mile from the Yahoo/Google Cloud buildings in north Sunnyvale. I have frequently seen full camo duck hunters carrying shotguns from the water treatment center walking out to the duck blinds.
As far as sports, your average engineer isn’t typically consumed by them, but half the engineers I’ve worked with from the bay seem to be fans of whichever team is doing great at the moment (warriors or giants or often the sharks).
I’ve also done more sport fishing and crabbing here than anywhere else I’ve lived.
I think the huge numbers of foreign residents have a large impact on the overall culture compared to say rural Texas, but it doesn’t seem too far off imho.
One other point is just how many super packed country concerts there are at shoreline.
Tl;dr San Jose/SV is just as country music/sports obsessed /game and fish oriented as the rest of the country (if you don’t surround yourself with non-North American engineers for eg).
Protip if anybody wants to talk sports at a tech company and is finding the technical teams lacking, head on over to the Go-to-Market teams; knowing what's going on in whatever sport is in season is basically in their job description.
Contrary to what seems to be popular perception, Texas is not “the South”. The South is the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, and _maybe_ the Virginias and Kentucky.
The best history book I ever read on The South indicated that extensive research found that some definitions included Texas, some didn't. Some included Florida, and some didn't. Etc.
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and a few others were consistently included in all definitions of The South. "Edge" states for the region varied tremendously.
Geographically, sure. However, "the South" can mean a lot of different things. e.g. "the South" culturally does not apply to much of Virginia, Texas, or Florida.
> most young people I know/work with in California who comes from the South does not want to return for these specific reasons
I lived in the City of St. Louis† for 13 years (and in the County for 6 before that) before moving to NYC. What I find is that young folks here who say they're from, say, Cleveland or St. Louis or similar cities in the South and whose experiences since moving have led them to believe that nothing they've found here exists back home, are often from the exurbs of those places and don't actually know what it's like to live in the center of a Midwestern or Southern city.††
I suspect they wouldn't much like the exurbs of New York, either.
We like to talk about red states vs. blue states, but the reality is that blue cities give way to purple and then red counties pretty quickly, even in liberal strongholds like New York.
Now, look, that's not to say that there are no differences in culture between, say, Atlanta and San Francisco. Obviously there are big ones! But when you dig into what people actually know about living in this or that part of the country, there's often not a lot there. Or, more charitably, individual experiences vary wildly (even within a single metro area).
† Not the South, but I think the point I'm trying to make here still holds.
†† It also seems worth noting that the experience of living in a big, new city in your early 20s (with all the new freedoms that come with that) as compared to wherever you happened to be when you were 14 is -- well, let's just say there are important perception-shifting factors.
While this is true about the urban areas, the reality of life in a southern city is that the rural areas dominate the political environment and that hamstrings municipalities in various ways.
I live in and am from North Carolina and find it barely tolerable despite now living in the most "progressive" part of the state (Durham). Every attempt a city makes to move things forward is faced with obstruction and preemption by state representatives from rural areas who resent the progressive population centers. Investment in infrastructure is especially seldom possible, so we have little public transit, few sidewalks, and lots of traffic.
There are things to recommend the south, but it's sure to be a culture shock for anybody who moves from a major metro.
As an aside, I think the transit situation alone makes this sort of area a non starter for somebody like Amazon and indeed I'm glad they did not select this region. This is an area which grows through sprawl and additional roads. The extra traffic combined with an unwillingness to spend money on public transit would have caused major issues.
It’s less pretentious and more that you’re just missing out on what the south has to offer. The south definitely has these negative aspects, but I argue that letting bad apples define a whole region of American is missing the forest for the trees. I likewise read headlines of mobs attacking FAANG charter busses, out of control office and apartment rents and employees living out of their cars, pervasive homelessness, and high local taxes, and I wonder why these educated, open and well travelled people put up with it.
If Tim Cook opened a research center or similar in an SEC college town like Auburn, AL, as an example, they could 1) totally dominate the university’s research pipeline relatively free from other corporate competitors, like create a custom departments silicon, materials, sensors, AI, whatever else 2) high quality of life for employees and their families with good public schools and high quality cheap housing, 3) win over the school’s board of trustees via major partnerships and get the university to do a lot to work for you for free, 4) abundant land for cheap office space 5) a high quality transit system 6) 1 hr from Atlanta’s enormous international airport plus a high quality general airport big enough for large private jets.
It just seems like a win-win, yet I don’t see anyone doing it (and maybe there are great reasons why!)
The south is definitely more xeno/homophobic, and that's unfortunate, and there's really good reasons why that might be a reason that people might not want to live there. There's also good reasons to live in the big southern cities. To compare with Northern VA, for example--growing up there, I didn't know a single black person. The area is almost exclusively white and Asian, with Hispanic people occupying a different economic tier and being quite segregated socially (and quite a bit of political tension as a result). Atlanta, by contrast, is far more integrated, with wealthy black communities, black professionals, athletes, media personalities, politicians, etc. You're almost certainly more likely to encounter racists in Atlanta, but much more likely to encounter the sort of integrated society liberals profess to want.
Northern Virginia has plenty of black folks. Look at Alexandria. But having grown up attending predominantly black schools in a rural past of the state, you are 100 percent right about the integrated nature of the South compared to the rest of the country. It was highly unusual for any wedding, funeral, or BBQ where I grew up to not be a mix of black and white. Most white people in the rest of the country have never eaten at a black person's house let alone spent the night. A child in the rural south almost certainly has. Hell, my best friend's mom made me go to church as well if I spent the night on a Saturday. Same when my buddies spent the night at my house.
Reading through the comments in response to my question, I am always blown away at the stereotyping, arrogance, and general disdain for the south coming out of these sorts of discussions. “The average tech worker” can get along absolutely fine in the south. I don’t know if it’s elitism, ignorance, or just the reverberating sounding board of popular media, but the south is actually quite nice, and I am confident that tech companies could save serious money moving workers out of incredibly high cost areas into better value areas in the south.
I'm from the south, in that it's a state that lost the civil war, had active kkk presence when I was a kid, had the national guard called out to protect black people, had racist governor in living memory, just had an article in the nytimes about racist police.
Yes there are many good people there. But the public schools I went to have really changed as most of the white people went to private schools. There aren't many minorities, there's lots of implicit racism. I guess country clubs let black people in now (unlike when I was a kid). It's really a different world.
The average (Bay Area?) tech worker likely sees the thinly veiled threat when the very first question their new neighbors ask is “have you found a church yet”?
It’s a generalization, sure. It’s also generally true. As far as bigotry goes, I think you knew it was silly to make that claim as you wrote it. I’ll go ahead and dismiss it out of hand, because the example I gave is real and extremely prevalent.
I'm a transgender woman. I use the women's bathroom. Should I move to the South? It's not bigoted to call out bigots. It's not bigoted to prefer to live somewhere without bigoted local government.
The original statement paints an entire region of people as though they all fit one stereotype. It’s just ironic to me that many people who otherwise laud tolerance, open-mindedness, multiculturalism etc. have no problem stereotyping an entire region of the country as “a basket of deplorables,” as if that region is not full of all different kinds of people, just like any place else.
I'm not convinced this is really true in a lot of the "actually desirable to young tech people" areas of southern cities. I just checked rent prices in Franklin, TN for a contract project opportunity and found newish apartments are going for $1300+. Trendy parts of Raleigh are renting apartments for $1100+. Meanwhile, it's very difficult to live in the South without a car, and salaries are far lower than $24k under a Bay Area tech comp structure (assuming you rent at the $3k level there).
I will grant you that if you have a family it's way cheaper due to availability of real houses in the burbs combined with cheaper daycare/nanny/housekeeping/etc., but a young, successful tech worker is probably better off on the west coast despite the higher cost of living.
I hear this often. I would like to see an analysis, breakdown, or a real life comparison that suggests this, and for which tier of engineers this is true. I think two things;
1) non bay area tech workers severely underestimate the total comps that bay area workers are earning right now.
2) many renters in the Bay Area may actually have more in their pocket. If you are willing to rent a room (i.e not have a studio or 1BR apartment), you're probably paying 1-1.5k more per month. The salary delta for Bay Area techies is way more than 12months*1.5k/month per year. Have some basic financial responsibility and you can really save a lot out here.
You need to apply the marginal tax rate for California workers, which would typically be ~41% (24% federal + 9.3% state + 7.65% Social Security + Medicare), to figure out how much more is needed on a pre-tax basis. You need an extra $2.5k/month ($30k/year) pre-tax to make up a $1.5k/month difference in rent, or $3.4k/month ($40k/year) pre-tax to make up a $2k/month difference in rent, which is more realistic if you want your own apartment.
And that's just looking at the difference in rent. The number goes up further if you account for the fact that everything else is also more expensive in the Bay Area, and if you add in the additional money you need to save for a down payment, assuming you want to buy at some point. I wouldn't be surprised if that $40k/year difference ends up in the $60k-$70k range if you factor those in.
I don't doubt that a $60k-$70k difference in total comp is achievable at FANG. At startups, you probably don't get there without counting equity, which is riskier and far less liquid than equity comp at FANG.
Note that your marginal tax as a tech worker should NOT include 7.65% for FICA. Tech worker’s marginal taxes are, perversely and regressively, lower than not-quite-six-figures earners, because social security cuts out well before marginal tax rates go up.
I don't think you have anywhere near of a clue how much it cost for housing in the south. Although I am talking mostly about Houston.
My mortgage on a 5 bedroom 3 bath house (3k sqfeet) in the population center of Houston is $1500 a month...
That being said the most I have ever paid for a apartment was $2100 a month for a 2 bedroom in the riches part of town with views of the city skyline and spiraling biking and jogging ways. Awesome food everywhere.
$800 or less and you can still live in a nice area with more food options and awesome public parks and public transpiration.
And if you are on a budget -- you can still get 1 bedroom apartments for $500 to $600 a month --- from my understanding you can't even get near that in the Bay Area, you would break the bake at 1k for a single room.
This isn't true for a lot tech workers. It's part of the reason why I moved from the south to the Bay Area. I pay as much in rent, taxes, and other California fees as I made in my entire salary in the South (which was roughly $110k), and I still have way more left over to save for retirement after all of that. Not to mention the health insurance here saves another $10k per year.
Not exactly. I work with some people who are huntin' fishin' rednecks from rural areas all over the country and are in the Bay Area because really, where else can they make $450K writing code that ships to 500 million people? They'd love a way to do that in hillbilly country and spend their weekends firing shotguns and driving pickups.
Technically there are plenty of tech company HQ in the south. Just off the top of my head, RedHat, SAS and Epic Games are all in Raleigh.
As for the giant FAANG companies, I think the south is better off without them. They skew the market so much that it’s very economically disruptive, and since US cities are generally very resistant to building housing, I suspect that you’d see the big company offices would mess up the housing market anywhere they went the same way they have in SF and Seattle.
Google embarked on a long mission to consolidate in the Bay Area and close small engineering offices. When Larry was the CEO he expressed his desire to have millions of engineers at Google, all in Mountain View. I can only attribute this strange desire to the fact that billionaires don’t notice housing crises and don’t have to sit in traffic. Sundar isn’t as much of a space cadet as Larry but he continues to consolidate. Some offices are established enough to survive, like Seattle and Chicago and New York, and others have to be kept open to attract specific people, but the company is really centered in Mountain View (and now Sunnyvale because obviously Mountain View is too small to contain the company).
Even San Francisco is to some degree a backwater office for engineers. Many projects have been “defragged” out of there, which is a term that means the project is given to some engineers in Mountain View and the original developers have a choice of finding a new project or moving there.
If by FULL OF you mean less than a half a percent of the population, then maybe you are right.
Seriously, this is offensive and inaccurate and wrong. It is just as bad as saying all Muslims are terrorists.
Only people who have never been to the South, and let New York media and Hollywood caricatures inform them ACTUALLY believe this.
It is terrible that CNN and MSNBC have followed the Fox News model of peddling fear, but for the opposite side. It leads to this kind of ignorance.
FYI:. I am proud of the fact that I helped two Indian co-workers get green cards and become fellow citizens. I did this at a company in Arkansas. I no longer live there, but they both remain and love it. They are now huge football fans as well.
There’s a statue of a confederate soldier right in front of the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock. If you think it’s still standing because of the efforts of only .5% of the citizens of that state, that suggests that those few citizens wield disproportionate power, although the more likely explanation is that your estimate is very low. In fact the state of Arkansas has a systemic racism problem that begins at the Capitol and extends to every Robert E. Lee school building around the state. If you can’t see the racism right in front of you, literally cast in concrete and carved in marble, then I just can’t help you.
There is a street in Chicago named for Italo Balbo. Sometimes things are complicated, but sometimes it's just inertia, and when Chicago eventually removes the name of a (literal) Fascist leader from it's street, we'll all wonder, what the fuck was wrong with us for so many decades that we let that go?
Northern Virginia was obviously the center of the rebellion. There are hundreds of confederate monuments all over that state. I don’t let them off the hook either.
I'm from arkansas and I saw common attitudes that blacks were a "problem" ie racism when I was a kid. I left in my early 20s. There was just an article in the nytimes about how horrible the LRPD is and how they have acted towards black people. Not everyone is that way, but plenty of people are.
The ___location in Crystal City where they are putting the HQ is adjacent to Jefferson Davis highway. I guess Crystal City is also filled with white nationalists....
I'm sure you derive immense satisfaction from your moral superiority, but your view of history lacks nuance and is self righteous beyond belief.
You work at Google, right? If so, you are complicit in a monopoly helping the authoritarian Chinese government spy on it's citizens. In typical Google fashion, they protest an executive harassment scandal while ignoring the aid of a human rights violating government. Cuz that would cost money. Quit your job and then feel free to preach morality.
A generalization of the people or a generalization of southern capitols? The OP specifically mentioned Raleigh, where the decision to keep the confederate monuments on the capitol was re-ratified as recently as a few weeks ago. It is by any objective measure a place that celebrates its history of violent white supremacy.
DCA is slot controlled so the slot owners are going to have to weigh the revenue of SEA/DCA vs all the other markets they’re currently using those slots for. One business often isn’t going to bring enough revenue to compete with a market like BOS/DCA or NYC/DCA which consumes an enormous amount of the slots.
DCA also has a "perimeter rule" in place, which forbids flights between DCA and airports more than 1,250 miles away, unless a specific exception is made.
Originally, it was to put regional routes in the regional airport, and long-distance routes in the long-distance airport. (As told to me by an urban studies professor I picked up at Dulles when I was a chauffeur in college.)
Similar to how in New York, LaGuardia was supposed to be for domestic flights, Kennedy for international flights, and Newark for freight. But that didn't fully work out. (Same source.)
Ever since Dulles was built, there’s been a struggle to actually get people to use it. DCA is just so much more convenient. I’ve heard from people who were around at the time that it was virtually a ghost town when it opened, and was a great place to fly small planes since there wasn’t much commercial traffic. Even today, the two airports serve about the same number of passengers per year, despite Dulles being approximately eleven thousand times larger.
Personally, I use DCA whenever I can. It usually takes me about fifteen minutes from car to gate. Dulles takes ages and ages, since everything is so far away.
A lot of the rules are just trying to get people to use that big expensive airport more.
Most members of Congress don't care about the perimeter rule (if they are inside the perimeter) or hate it (if they are outside the perimeter). That's why there are exceptions now.
The rule still exists because local jurisdictions really really want to keep it, and getting rid of it is just not worth the fight for anyone else.
> "The company may be having similar discussions with other finalists."
The article sounds very speculative. I don't know anything about this place, but if it's expensive like people here say it is, then I don't see the point of Amazon moving there. I think a place like downtown Chicago would make more sense. (if only the winter was not as cold and better public schools...)
I used to live in Crystal city until 2011. Back then it was $1700 a month for one bedroom. Now it’s around $2200 a month for one bedroom. Putting their headquarters there will turn Crystal city into a very, very expensive parking lot.
Denver still makes the most sense to me. Single hop to Beijing & Shanghai, real estate and wages aren't at DC, Seattle, Bay Area rates quite. Lots of amenities (open space, good beer, close to skiing) that Amazon doesn't actually have to pay for. Decent tech scene (Google, Facebook, Uber campuses, as well as an ever growing Amazon dev presence). Large downtown property looking for a buyer and is probably underrated (Elitch Gardens). Decent public transit that's trending really well (new light rail within the past couple of years, and more coming out soon).
DC never made sense to me. The other defense contractors manage to not have HQs in DC.
I think this story is exactly what they'd leak if they were trying to buy real estate somewhere else.
Denver has some great things going for it, like easy access to mountains and outdoor space. But I must say its downtown is pretty unappealing. Many weirdos (similar to Seattle...) and chain restaurants. I enjoyed my trip to Colorado, but Denver was the most boring part of it.
The tourist part is always weirdos and chain restaurants. That's like saying there's nothing in New York because you went to Times Square and it was just a tourist trap.
Because they explicitly don't want the HQs to specialize.
And the thought is that at some point there's going to be two Internets, US and China. There's a pretty good chance that China is going to run Africa's Internet access. Europe has been a also ran against the US as far as the Internet is concerned, and the Middle East is projected to lose their economic momentum in the coming decades.
That's a pretty piss-poor reason for Denver to be considered geographically favorable.
The main advantage you get from geographical proximity is the fact that you can build closer networking opportunities to other businesses and entities in the area. (A secondary advantage is timezone alignment). Denver's not exactly close to any other major cities; by contrast, it's only a half day of travel between Chicago and the Northeast, and it's even possible to commute between NYC and Boston or DC for a day.
For siting a second major HQ, Denver is just too close to Seattle. You don't get the benefits of having people 3 hours ahead (and more aligned with Europe, for example). The marginal costs of extra travel time to Asia from the east coast versus the west coast just aren't going to be a major factor in determining whether or not travel can happen--your employees have already lost a day or two of travel. Move the site to the east coast, and now you can open up more travel opportunities because it's only a half-day (or less!) of travel.
That was my first thought as well, that they would have a hard time finding a more expensive place for every metric, from real estate* to salaries.
However I don't see Amazon and Chicago being a good match, culturally, if that makes sense, nor do I think there are compelling strategic reasons for basing this ___location there.
*edit: Based on snowwrestler's comment it sounds like Crystal City has seem some large occupants move out, so real estate prices may be trending down. However it's still a fair premium to pay to be next to the airport, compared to farther out (where you also have a high concentration of software developers.)
Not too familiar with that, but from what I read they took it pretty seriously and offered some nice tax benefits. They also offered a ___location in south loop, which is a really nice area of downtown Chicago and still very affordable. It's also a short ride on the train to Midway airpot (not an international airpot like O'hare but much nicer to travel from and to). It's also very close to 3 universities.
Chicago's preferred Amazon ___location is Goose Island, part of the newly expanded downtown skyscraper district.[1]
The city recently approved 18 new skyscrapers for downtown, including 12 for the proposed Amazon site, with an included professional soccer stadium.[2]
Interesting. I see it's near Lincoln Park, also a very nice ___location with easy access to O'hare via the blue line. Maybe even better than south loop. I assume it's a bit safer (unfortunately crime rates are still very high in many places across Chicago).
Same weather, even worse schools, way less infrastructure, almost no public transportation, the Chicago area has over twice the population to draw employees from
Amazon is not interested in altruistically revitalizing a once great city. They want to make money and will make their choice solely based on that factor (although there is certainly some nuance that goes into that decision - talent aquisition, politics, etc).
Amazing the amount of people here who takes this as some kind of truth instead of just a story that could have even been leaked for another purpose (perhaps even to gain more leverage with the area that they actually want to go to).
This is also the epitome of infotainment something that in the end won't even matter unless it actually happens other than to discuss the 'inside baseball' of the entire event.
How sure is anyone of this? Sure enough to go and snap up real estate (say residential) knowing that if it is correct that real estate will inflate in value well over whatever it is right now (already inflated).
Also I still am not seeing the advantage to Amazon (as long as everyone is speculating) of going into such a dense and expensive area to begin with. Jeff is all about efficiency and paying as little as possible. What possible advantage does he have but located in such an expensive area that is sure to get even more expensive.
I live in the DC area and this is entirely expected. Bezos owns the Washington Post and a very expensive DC home. Amazon's got data centers in Northern Virginia. We would've all been shocked if it went somewhere else.
I don't follow this line of reasoning. Jeff Bezos decides where to put Amazon's new HQ based on how quickly he can get home? Demand for his time is probably already spread all over the globe, I'd imagine many of his important meetings happen over phone/conference daily.
But the entire point of the exercise wasn't to make Jeff happier and shorten his commute, it was to find a way to continue to grow without overloading Seattle any more than it already is.
HQ2 needs to be somewhere that people want to live, with the room for lots of them.
I really was hoping HQ2 would go somewhere more conservative politically. There's plenty of people who would work for Amazon but aren't really excited by Seattle (I'm not one of them, but I know some).
Detroit specifically would have been perfect- low cost of living, lots of space to grow, great airport, lots of robotic/mechanical industry leaking from the failing car industry, plus UofM nearby. I don't know how they didn't make the finalists.
I thought the point of the exercises was to get as many local government concessions as possible before making a decision whose outcome was fairly predictable in advance.
> [T]he best way to make it is you collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data, but then [throw all that data away and decide based on personal whim]
There was an old study that made the rounds, which I cannot find at the moment, that corporation headquarter moves overwhelming move towards the CEO's home. They do lots of studies and analysis and claims of doing what's best for the company, but in the end the primary driving force is the convenience of a single person (and everyone who reports to that person weighting and biasing to favor the desired outcome).
"Go with your gut" is code word for "which HQ2 city offered the greatest tax exemptions" ;-)
Oregon gave Intel a 30 year property tax exemption, worth $2B, to establish their their HQ2 fabs near Hillsboro. Wouldn't be surprised if Amazon is asking for similar.
That’s sounds worse than it is. I think a better phrasing would be “read as much information as you can, and then sleep on it and go with the first option your subconscious tells you to go with”. Or gut, or instinct or ‘feel’. Informed intuition is a wonderful thing.
I think that's exactly backwards. I think you review data to use your intuition to form the hypothesis or question, and then look for empirical data to try to falsify it.
Putting intuition at the end of the decision making process is a pretty solid way to screw the entire thing up.
Falsification is part of the data review - the first step is always to eliminate solutions that obviously ie provably won’t work. The decision making process, both for Amazon HQ is inherently subjective / has too many dimensions to make an objective decision.
i.e. the process is for selecting out of the final 20, that have been fully vetted and feasibility established.
Or for deciding among three finalist engineers who’ve passed all interviews and tests and you can only hire one.
That's how you end up making unconsconably biased decisions though. Oops, accidently hired the candidate who looks the most like me AGAIN, darn the luck
This is no surprise, it was always going to be Virginia, or somewhere else in the east coast tech corridor. The whole "city competition" has been a grand scheme by Amazon to get cities (mostly those in the aforementioned area) to offer incentives to move there. No other states were ever in the running.
Given how wealthy that area already is I'm guessing not as much as other places would have been willing to give us (i.e. IIRC New Jersey and Chicago were offering some of the bigger tax incentives). It would be more because Bezos wants those gov't contracts badly than anything VA was offering.
Makes it easier for Amazon to lobby the feds. Not sure how I feel about this.
Also is this how skynet starts: they get some big government contract, it’s some military A.I. thing and then boom T1000s. I joke but still. I agree with the others that Bezos has this place picked all along. I was hoping he put it in Portland Oregon but the local government would have taxed him a ton or insisted on a union and Amazon wouldn’t have liked that.
Been looking to buy a house in the Northern Virginia area for about five years now, but the prices have climbed almost linearly, and never slowed down. If Amazon does settle here, I'll probably continue renting until I can GTFO. Microsoft also bought a large plot of land around Loudon county, on which they plan to build a campus.
If this area is to become the next Seattle, I have no interest in being here.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Instead of looking for a house to buy to live in, look at how you and others can get in on an apartment complex purchase.
Very unlikely it will be Crystal City. Based on parameters that news lifted on qualifiers for HQ2.
1. There isn't sufficient space for a large campus.
2. DCA is a small airport.
Loudoun county has a higher chance than Crystal City based on the above parameters. Of course, the parameters could have been wrong. And I would much prefer Crystal City over Loudoun, too.
I have heard that the HQ2 is supposed to be a kind of "domed city." If it is Crystal City, Amazon HQ2 has started a infrastructure formation using a subscription with a DCaaS.
If “domed city” is the atmosphere they’re looking for, Crystal City is definitely the right choice — the existing buildings there are all connected together by a warren of underground tunnels, which includes an underground shopping mall. Combine that with the Brutalist ‘60s architecture and you get a neighborhood straight out of a bad sci-fi movie.
Please. Don’t. Housing is terribly expensive here, and a second HQ would spike it grossly. Why not choose a place that needs the jobs and development??
Not great, but could be a lot worse. Crystal city is on two of the main subway lines. And has a Virigina regional rail and Amtrak stop. There is a pretty major bus depot there too.
The downside is one of the subway lines only runs every 13 minutes during rush hour. And that cannot be increased without decreasing runs on other lines (because they share a tunnel). Maybe Amazon will convince the governments to run more on that line (and take it away from the other lines).
edit: Forgot to mention that airport access is probably the best place in the entire country. You could basically walk to national airport.
I think Metro hit bottom a couple years ago and is on the way back up. Dedicated funding (finally!) will enable steady improvement. If Amazon comes to town and uses their clout to push for better transportation, that will on accelerate things.
It's already had an impact. The stalled metro stop between DCA and Braddock (next to one of the potential build sites) magically started moving forward again a few months ago.
I think you might actually be understating how convenient the airport is. No need for “basically”: it’s quite doable, and there’s even a trail connecting them.
There is one Metro stop directly in Crystal City, an express bus with dedicated lanes from another close station, and Metro is in the final planning stages to build a new station between those. The VRE, a Virginia light rail system that uses Amtrak tracks, has a stop in Crystal City. There are bus routes too, and bike lanes. And Reagan National Airport is directly adjacent.
Public transit to Crystal City is about as good as it gets. Which is good, because the road traffic sucks.
The metro is trying to improve the safety of the system after some fatal accidents a few years ago. The work force is unmotivated and maintainence reports are falsified. The wait times for the weekend suck and the system shuts down pretty early leading to fans at sports stadiums chanting, “metro sucks.”
Even with all that it’s one of the better transit systems in the US. Not as good as Chicago or NY, but for the size of city it’s good.
metro is somewhere between "incompetence that leads to dead passengers"[1], "shit's on fire, yo"[2] and "meh". Lately the biggest scandal is they turn down ads for the ACLU in favor of Northrup Grumman.
In any event it's generally minimally acceptable at best. Dumping a ton of people onto it will not help matters.
It's super fashionable to bash Metro, but the system today carries over 600,000 riders per day, and that's about a 20-year low. The system is in a hole of deferred maintenance, but attacking it pretty aggressively.
I ride Metro every week day (bus + train) and look: I'm still alive! And on time almost every day. I much prefer it to driving.
Still, there is literally a metro stop right in Crystal City that's on 2 lines, and with all the underground corridors between buildings you can get tons of places without even going above ground. If I was an Amazon employee moving out there, damn straight I'd be finding some place right on a metro stop.
The traffic and congestion is already horrible. The cost of living is excessive. I don't understand why these companies - that can locate anywhere - want to lessen the quality of life for their employees.
Yeah, there are a lot of medium sized midwestern and southern cities that would have had the best of all worlds except 1) presumably a lot of software developers amazon wants to hire don’t want to live in these places and 2) related to 1, there aren’t a lot of software developers already there.
I wish they had considered more cities like Cincinnati, Nashville, or Cleveland. Those are actually fine places and they have low COL (although Nashville’s is getting up there). Plenty of other cities in the US also fit that profile. Even though I’ve heard bad things about working for Amazon and wouldn’t work for them in Seattle or DC, I would seriously consider taking an Amazon SDE salary somewhere that salary could go very far
> 1) presumably a lot of software developers amazon wants to hire don’t want to live in these places and 2) related to 1, there aren’t a lot of software developers already there.
That, in turn, requires the presumption that a lot of software developers want to live near DC.
> And amazon (and many other tech companies) adjust their salary to cost of life in the area.
Which raises costs for everyone and the "___location adjustment" is usually less than what is really needed.
I was expecting it to be a bit further out, like Chantilly/Ashburn/Manassas. Close enough to serve the function but far enough out costs for employees/real estate is lower.
Dc has very good public transport and crystal city is convenient to trains everywhere from ashburn and Dulles all the way around to Springfield. I live in Reston and take the silver line to work every morning.
As a Pittsburgher living in Seattle for the past few years, hearing this gives me hope. I know NIMBY isn't the best philosophy, but I make an exception for Amazon, who I think has done a number on Seattle and its culture.
I wouldn't knock having enough parking, but Seattle has a ridiculous number of single family residences within spitting distance of downtown. The upzoning regulation is a great first step, but is slow to roll out due to difficulties in permitting teardowns.
yeah it just doesn’t make sense to blame economic growth on Seattle’s problems when most of the issues boil down to: things are crowded and rent is high
Some people think that Chinese investment in real estate is also to blame but I’ve never seen any data that actually suggests that. Still, Seattle won’t pass rules to prevent speculation on property because at the end of the day, voters just want their property values to keep going up more than they want to live in a livable city for everyone
Seems like an admission that they have nothing new to do so they are seeking growth through federal contracts.
Northern VA is the poster child of what happens when you have tons of growth over decades, but absolutely no planning, or worse, lots of nimby preventing infrastructure.
Arlington, VA probably did the best job of any post-WWII high growth city in America. The orange line corridor is actually urbanizing what was once pure suburbia. Crystal City/Pentagon city is built pretty densely and has space for even more high rise buildings.
Every other city in America that grew post wwII would have just built strip malls and single-family homes.
There are new high rises going up in Crystal city even as rents stagnated. Can't be too much nimby stuff going on.
Compared to say, silicon valley, they did a good job.
Loudon County did a bad job. Fairfax did a mixed job. They definitely grew in some places--like Tysons, but other parts have just grown without planning.
I have a lot of trouble believing that Tysons was planned at all. The area is nearly unwalkable and is effectively dominated by multi-lane roads. Yes, there's there Silver line, and I won't dispute that the station for Tyson's corner managed to make some considerations for walkers, but as for the rest of the area, I shouldn't have to cross a highway to walk to work!
This is true. There are so many high rises being built along the Wilson-Clarendon corridor, and Arlington and Alexandria actually have a big presence of the so-called missing middle of housing development [1]. This ___location seems like it's pretty well equipped to absorb HQ2
<Basically any popular urban center in the US in the past 50 years> is the poster child of what happens when you have tons of growth over decades, but absolutely no planning, or worse, lots of nimby preventing infrastructure.
I'm of the opinion that every urban planner from the last fifty years in the US should be stripped of their degrees and titles their lands taken and their crops burned.
The US transportation infrastructure even for how good it is compared to some other places is still a joke.
Reston and Ashburn are two fully planned communities. A lot of thought went into Reston particularly. Almost every home is near a walking trail, a pool, and a small shopping center.
I still maintain that not picking Chicago would be a major mistake. I only think this because I want to see them take over most of the Sears Tower and convert it into a delivery drone launch site. A) How bonkers-cool would that look? B) Ideal test site for large scale drone delivery. Less drone power drain, since they would essentially be performing a controlled descent instead of a liftoff and descent. Asymmetric flight paths, like with the drone return around the 2nd-3rd floor, would allow more rapid launches. Grid street layout that makes actual sense, so easier on the AI/ML. Center of the country (ish), so longer distance delivery with solar powered drones might be viable.
Okay, I'll admit it. I just REALLY want to see streams of flying killbots emanating from my home town. The Robot Uprising is coming, people, and I'm hoping early allegiance leads to a nicer brain vat in their biocomputer.
Seriously, though, I would have thought Atlanta, Chicago, and Boston, in that order, would be better. Bi-coastal or geographic center make logistical sense. ATL and BOS have excellent tech resources, but maybe a bit too much competition for talent in BOS. ATL gives a presence in "The South", so could serve as a political/cultural foothold without any major compromises. ATL proved it can easily support a tech boom during the y2k bubble. BOS serves as a great gateway to Europe. CHI is really hungering for more tech influence and would probably bend over backwards to be accommodating. Plus, the most likely site in CHI is actually a great ___location for anyone that likes an urban setting, not just millennials. Amazon is one of the few tech companies that I think CHI could embrace because it has a strong influence on financial markets and doesn't feel as 'magical' as many tech companies (where it's hard for everyday people to understand what they do). And Chicagoans can be fiercely loyal, even to companies. Case in point - The Sears Tower. The only time you hear "Willis Tower" is on the news. And there are a couple dozen other cases of locals refusing to rebrand stuff simply because ownership or naming rights changed.
Being by DC isn't a BAD ___location, but it seems like it would be better to have a strong satellite ___location that can be expanded as needed. I would assume the atmosphere there is more restricted for some of their more ambitious projects involving lots of sensors and physical presence. Every ___location will have red tape, but it seems like there DC would be ordering it in bulk.
Amazon wanted an in-place tech-ready workforce, an environment that could appeal to yuppie urbanites, and a good transportation hub. Empty office space for quick bootstrapping and the ability to wring concessions were also major sweeteners. Bicoastal geography was also strongly suspected to be a major criterion.
That pretty much cut out any second-tier city from the running. When Montgomery County, DC, and Northern VA were all announced as finalists, it ought to have been pretty clear that Amazon was focused on the DC area. Crystal City itself is basically the description of what you're looking for in that list I gave. Atlanta doesn't really have anything when you take out the airport (which is lousily situated anyways). I suspect Chicago, NYC, and Toronto all have too much focus on other industries (and, besides, Illinois is basically broke, so a sweetheart tax deal needs to be discounted on the basis that Illinois could need to find the cash quickly).
Except for the weather, Chicago isn't a terrible choice. The problem is that no matter how great the city makes itself, it's still in "flyover" country. That's a difficult stereotype to break.
Chicago and its mayor worry too much about being a "world class" city. You know what world class cities don't worry about? Whether they're a world class city or not.
