Re:Amazon Asking Cities for Their High Schoolers' SAT Scores
by JibJabLab on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @12:24PM
(#16746272)
Is there an update to that list where you are excluding 12 other cities?
Re:Amazon Asking Cities for Their High Schoolers' SAT Scores
by jcomis on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @12:35PM
(#16746387)
I think Denver is out simply because it's on mountain time. I'd think they'd want a location on EST. It also suffers from a huge divide in talent between Denver and Boulder, which IMO are just far enough apart to make commuting between the two unbearable (even though a lot of people still do).
Re:Amazon Asking Cities for Their High Schoolers' SAT Scores
by cmorgan31 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @12:56PM
(#16746637)
I think their choice will depend on which business units might be housed in the second headquarter. Atlanta has seen an influx of new corporate headquarters and has a major distribution center already which could help its chance at being selected. The downsides are the local education metrics will differ wildly depending on which area they decide to settle in. The northern section of Atlanta does better than the southern and downtown section, but neither perform to the standards of private schools which is where most affluent residents send their children.
Re:Amazon Asking Cities for Their High Schoolers' SAT Scores
by alexc05 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:59AM
(#16745956)
As far as I know, Toronto Canada is still in the running.
Re:Amazon Asking Cities for Their High Schoolers' SAT Scores
by kd5bjo on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:56AM
(#16745918)
Dallas has a sizeable tech workforce, but they're primarily telecom/embedded engineers instead of the webapp engineers you'll find in SV. It also has a major international airport that's halfway between the two coasts of the US.
Re:Amazon Asking Cities for Their High Schoolers' SAT Scores
by sjm-lbm on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @12:17PM
(#16746196)
Dallas also has a sizable amount of really unsexy business process automation-type development jobs - it's the original home if both EDS and Perot Systems, for instance, and DXC and NTT DATA still have sizable facilities there.
Dallas isn't the #1 tech job location or anything, but there's a decent workforce and Amazon would be a fairly unique offering in the Dallas area.
Re:Amazon Asking Cities for Their High Schoolers' SAT Scores
by foobarbazetc on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @12:57PM
(#16746656)
Lots of data centers too...
Not that those jobs are great... but...
Per [1] the list is currently Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Washington DC, and Columbus, Ohio.
Boston has a tech workforce that has a lot in common with SillyValley so it seems like it would be a good culture fit and for a company like Amazon the benefits to being located in the same city and sharing the same workforce as the federal government are innumerable.
Denver is SV-lite. If that's what they were looking for there's a lot of other West coast options that would be on the list.
Dallas and Colombus seem to be the wildcards. They don't have the advantages or workforce or access that Boston or DC do but they're cheap and Amazon might be betting that its size and lack of competition there would let it dominate local politics. They might also be betting that they can tap into the "I'll move but not to CA" demographic" and get a good 5-10yr run as a monopoly on local talent until the tech scene there grows.
Austin, Chicago and Atlanta seem like the middle ground between Boston/DC and Dallas/Columbus.
I don't know enough about local economics in all those places to know how sorting by SAT scores would turn out.
I'm betting DC and Boston are gonna make the next cut. I don't think Denver will make the cut. the other four I have no idea.
[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-reveals-hq2-candidates...
Edit: Not sure why I'm being down-voted here. Is my analysis wrong or is the suggestion that there exists people in tech who don't want to be part of the SV tech scene just that abhorrent?
edit2 If I wanted to evaluate the pros and cons of all 20 cities listed in [1] I'd write a real article about it and post it on HN for internet points. I just evaluated the ones the author highlighted at the top.