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Why I wonder? While they're gobbling up DT Sea, they only have 1 building in Bellevue. Isn't there room to set up shop in Fremont or Kirkland and poach more e
by libria 9y ago
Why I wonder? While they're gobbling up DT Sea, they only have 1 building in Bellevue. Isn't there room to set up shop in Fremont or Kirkland and poach more engineers from Microsoft/Tableau/Expedia etc and reducing commute times? Not seeing the upside. This is a major management overhead, managing culture between both, all hands, IT infrastructure.
Austin, TX is a good candidate. Very strong engineering university attracting nationwide talent, better cost of living, they already have an office there so they must have some relationship w/ local govt, a good climate contrast to Seattle being much drier (barring the occasional hurricane), a Google Fiber city. $5B buys a lot more there than most places in the US.
- mratzloff 9y agoI think many Seattlites would be OK with Amazon not gobbling up even more of the local economy. As far as some of the outlying areas, I think it comes down to signaling around tax breaks from the governor[1] and available office space inventory. [1] https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/07/07/inslee-vetoes-manufacturer-tax-break-washington.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/07/07/inslee-v...
- passivepinetree 9y agoPerhaps they're working to help recruiting. It might be easier to attract top talent in a different area (for example, if they situated in Pittsburgh as another commenter mentioned, they could more easily recruit CMU grads/professors). It also can't hurt their business to reduce their dependency on a single state/local government's policies.
- jorblumesea 9y agoAmazon is a frugal company and competing with FB/Uber/Snap/Lyft/literally every SV/SF startup was never part of the plan. Seattle used to be the cheap amazing engineering secret. Then everyone caught onto this and moved to the region. Once engineering salaries started to creep up into California territory it was only natural they'd want to leave for cheaper pastures.