My point is that Amazon's making some place "a somewhere" is never going to be on the scale of NYC.
They want to attract talent and the way to do that is to go where the talent is or wants to be. The bay area is such a place. Seattle is such a place. New York is such a place. But they couldn't turn Mt Tinroof Springs into a world centre no matter what they did.
How does Exxon attract talent to Houston? How about FedEx attracting talent to Memphis? Weird how only software engineers seem to only be attracted to NYC or Silicon Valley (to hear us talk about it.) A desirable company can attract talent no matter where they are. Startups have to leach from the existing community because they don’t have the clout to attract talent to Amarillo, Texas. But Google or Apple certainly could. A Silicon Valley salary in a cheaper place: half of the Valley would jump on that chance. I live inMountain View and I certainly don’t see a huge value to being here outside of work. It’s basically one continuous traffic jam. Los Angeles is a heck of a lot more fun. I came here because my company is in the area. I certainly wouldn’t have picked this place as a first choice: more restaurants per capita in Houston, better weather in Los Angeles, better mountains in Colorado, lower taxes and cheaper gas almost everywhere else. Visiting San Francisco occasionally is certainly fun, but then again so is Miami, Austin, New Orleans. The only thing uniquely special about SV is the proximity of VC money — something that has no relevance to the Amazons of the world.
> How does Exxon attract talent to Houston? How about FedEx attracting talent to Memphis?
Two big differences:
1. The talent crunch for Exxon and FedEx isn't nearly as bad as the crunch for engineering talent that Amazon is facing. Simply put, engineers that can get offers from Amazon have many options, and moving to Buttfuck, Nowhere won't be the best of them.
2. Exxon and FedEx employees, especially the senior, harder-to-secure talent, tend to be older folks with families. The talent Amazon would typically go after is much younger, often recent graduates.
> The talent crunch for Exxon and FedEx isn't nearly as bad as the crunch for engineering talent that Amazon is facing.
Not accurate (IMO).
1. ExxonMobil is now, and has been for years, hurting for petroleum engineers. It's a discipline that isn't taught at many universities, so the supply is rather constrained. In recent years new grad petroleum and chemical engineers have been pulling in offers that rival FANG offers.
2. If Amazon, or any other FANG, was really hurting for talent they would do something about their false negative problem in interviews. That they aren't indicates to me that they are either passing enough people or just being choosing beggars.
1. ExxonMobil was established in Houston many decades ago, back when it was a crucial area for an oil company. It's not going to relocate a huge campus even if it did calculate that it can help recruitment somewhat.
Amazon on the other hand is opening a new campus, so they are more flexible to locate it in the most advantageous area.
Moreover, not sure how many petroleum engineers Exxon is hiring, but guessing it's far fewer than the amount of software engineers Amazon is looking to hire, which is in the tens of thousands.
Recruitment is a much bigger factor for Amazon. The article says basically the entire reason for opening not one but two new big offices is to tap into more talent.
2. FAANGs don't agree that they have a "false negative" problem. They think they are accepting and rejecting the right people. Right or wrong, this is their position.
> ExxonMobil was established in Houston many decades ago, back when it was a crucial area for an oil company. It's not going to relocate a huge campus even if it did calculate that it can help recruitment somewhat.
Houston is still a crucial area for an oil company, and will continue to be so until the Gulf Coast fields stop producing. Their "huge, now-misplaced campus it won't relocate" is their headquarters in Irving/Las Colinas (since Dallas is no longer very important to the industry). In fact, Chevron is moving their headquarters operations to Houston.
Also, the original point was about the perceived difficulty of getting highly-paid, highly-educated people to move to "uncool" places. This is only relevant if you think ExxonMobil would have chosen a different location if they got a free do-over again today.
> Moreover, not sure how many petroleum engineers Exxon is hiring,
As many as UT, TA&M, OU, and the few other schools that graduate them can pump out. I'd have to bug my wife for numbers, but I think it is in the thousands (if they can get them).
> guessing it's far fewer than the amount of software engineers Amazon is looking to hire, which is in the tens of thousands
You think Amazon is looking to increase their SWE head count by 50% or more in a short period of time? I question the "tens of thousands" assertion, as that is a fair description of the entire size of Google's software engineering population, and larger than Facebook's. Are you actually claiming Amazon is looking to hire multiple Facebooks worth of software engineers in a short period of time?
> FAANGs don't agree that they have a "false negative" problem. They think they are accepting and rejecting the right people. Right or wrong, this is their position.
Assuming your statement is correct, I would classify them as choosing beggars.
FWIW, the party line I hear from their engineers is that they know they have a problem with false negatives, but that it is OK because it is worth it to keep out the false positives. They also (sometimes) claim they have more qualified applicants than they have head count.
> You think Amazon is looking to increase their SWE head count by 50% or more in a short period of time?
Every article about the HQ2 project says it's an effort to recruit tech talent. Amazon is hiring 50K new employees for these offices. Assuming a very conservative 25% of them are going to be engineers, that's already over 10,000 engineers.
> Assuming your statement is correct, I would classify them as choosing beggars.
If FAANGs thought their recruiting practices are broken, they would fix them.
Also, while we're all aware of how much bargaining power top software engineers have in this market, it doesn't seem right to call a bunch of companies worth the better part of a trillion dollar each "beggars".
> If you can't find anything fun to do in the bay area but visit SF that doesn't require sitting in traffic on the weekends because everyone else had the same idea
Sure, the traffic does suck but you run into the same issue in any big metropolis. LA has way worse traffic and places that have good public transportation still have way too many people trying to do the same things - so you might get there quicker but you'll just wait in a longer line.
I actually wonder a bit about NYC in that regard. It's a distinctive place that definitely isn't for everyone. Obviously a lot of people want to live there. I know folks who could never imagine living someplace else. But NYC has improved (if you have money). So maybe it is a place it's easy to attract people to live in.
My view is you should live in places that create strong feelings. Living in a place that feels like the aftermath of a cosmic shrug isn't good for the soul. I grew up in Darwin and I still love it. I live in NYC and I love it. I've also lived in Perth and felt ... nothing.
For some strange reason, Perth feels much more isolated than Darwin. Even though they are both outposts, Perth is so far away from any other city or culture.
