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Google didn't need any dog and pony show or significant forms of corporate welfare (that we know of) to announce a doubling of their presence in New York. http

• akhilcacharya 8y ago
  Doubling their office there still pales in comparison to the headcount projected for LIC. 7K max vs. 25k targeted for Amazon. Amazon already has a presence in NYC.
  • taude 8y ago
    Would be interesting to know how many employees Amazon currently has in NY. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's already in the thousands.
    • chimeracoder 8y ago
      > Would be interesting to know how many employees Amazon currently has in NY. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's already in the thousands. Amazon already has an office in New York City, as well as a sizeable presence in New Jersey just outside the city limits (within commuting distance), split between two New Jersey offices, last I checked.
    • aaronbrethorst 8y ago
      2,000 salaried and 3,000 warehouse at the end of 2017: https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2017/09/21/amazon-bringing-2-000-employees-to-new-york-city.html https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2017/09/21/amazon-b...
    • WaltPurvis 8y ago
      Uh, the statement itself says: "There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and we plan to continue growing these teams."
    • NathanKP 8y ago
      It is in the Amazon statement: "There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and we plan to continue growing these teams." Disclaimer, I'm one of those 5k. Currently I work from home 99% of the time because the office spaces Amazon has in NY aren't fantastic. It would have been nice to have a new headquarters building, but I'll still be enjoying working from home now I guess.
      • taude 8y ago
        Thanks, I missed that (I stopped after a couple paragraphs). I did do a quick Google Search after I searched for how many Googlers are in NYC. (Was verifying there's actually 7K.) It's pretty amazing how large some of the non-home offices are at these mega tech companies.
      • badfrog 8y ago
        > There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island How many of those are working in tech? When I interviewed at Amazon NYC in 2016, I think there were only around 100 software engineers there. Has it grown a lot since then?
  • walrus01 8y ago
    Worth noting that Google owns all of 111 8th in NYC. They're slowly not renewing leases for existing tenants and taking over the whole building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue 111 8th is a major internet traffic exchange point. It's also gargantuan, it's 2.9 million square feet and occupies a whole city block. One of the interesting things about 111 8th is that it was designed for much higher than normal pounds per square foot floor loading. Which means that Google could convert the entire thing to datacenter space if they really wanted to. Already a significant portion of it is conditioned datacenter/telecom space run by tenants.
    • CydeWeys 8y ago
      And Chelsea Market too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Market These real estate acquisitions were so large that they explicitly needed to be called out on the quarterly earnings calls to explain why CapEx exploded for that quarter.
    • pastor_elm 8y ago
      I imagine they're getting decent bang for their buck when hiring in NYC. Really the COL adjusted wages in NYC are some of the lowest for all American tech cities.
      • akhilcacharya 8y ago
        ...except (at least for Amazon) they pay more in NYC, and of all companies Google doesn't exactly exercise frugality wrt compensation.
      • gipp 8y ago
        If levels.fyi is any indication, Google NYC comp is only marginally lower than SV, if at all.
      • sjjshvuiajhz 8y ago
        Why would they care about getting a good bargain in “COL adjusted wages”? Even in NYC there is not a currency exchange Google can go to to turn $100k Florida dollars into $200k New York dollars.
  • puzzle 8y ago
    I think that 7K is just employees: "employs more than...". That is a deliberate distinction from "workers". I wouldn't be surprised if the count passed 10K once you considered contractors. They're mostly in non-engineering roles: cafe staff, recruiters, marketing, physical security (did those get converted to employees like they were doing in Mountain View?), facilities, etc.
  • bogomipz 8y ago
    How do actual numbers pale in comparison to a number that was nothing more than projected for some hazy undetermined future date? That 25K number was only ever qualified as "over the next decade." Google on the other hand bought 111 8th ave 8 years ago(houses 7K employees) and now they are opening a new space in the same area that will house an additional 12K more employees[1]. That will bring their total to 19K employees in a 10 year time frame. And this was all done without extracting corporate subsidies and without all the pageantry. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-plans-large-new-york-city-expansion-1541636579 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-plans-large-new-york-cit...
• Alex3917 8y ago
  Google's expansion doesn't require its employees to live in a part of the city that lacks adequate schools and parks. Whereas if you work in LIC it's not like you can really commute into the city from New Jersey or Stamford.
  • ng12 8y ago
    What are you talking about? LIC has lots of schools and parks. It's a very residential neighborhood. > Whereas if you work in LIC it's not like you can really commute into the city from New Jersey or Stamford. Why not? Take the Path to the E or the metro north to the 7.
    • CydeWeys 8y ago
      I suspect Alex can't envision living anywhere except in the suburbs.
      • dang 8y ago
        No personal swipes in HN comments, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • Pimpus 8y ago
          > No personal swipes Yeah, this isn't Tinder!
    • bobthepanda 8y ago
      Another fare and another point of failure in what is probably already a long commute? Sounds unappealing. LIC will never become a second Midtown because its transport connections are so poor.
      • electricslpnsld 8y ago
        > because its transport connections are so poor. In what sense? I used to work in LIC and it was pretty easy to get to. Lots of lines go though Queensboro Plaza.
• specialp 8y ago
  Exactly. The 25k number was just to make a splash and notice they aren't doing that again. Because there aren't really any other areas that could give them 25k skilled employees. They will scale up in Nashville which is expected since it is a growing area, and they will still be in NY due to the talent. The "HQ2" show was primarily to extract large concessions which almost worked. My initial reaction as a NY'er was "well that didn't go well" but now I think it was great that we did not fall for it.
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    I don't even think they're really gonna scale up in Nashville. At least not in any meaningful way. 10 years from now, both Amazon and Google will have right around 25 thousand workers each in NYC. The reality is that NYC is not Wisconsin, they don't need to give out money. EDIT: I'd even go a step further, and predict that both Amazon and Google will also have ludicrously large presences in the DC-NOVA area in 10 years as well. In fact, Amazon's presence in the DC-NOVA area will be even bigger than they initially said it would.
    • bunderbunder 8y ago
      Wisconsin doesn't need to give out money, either. If anything, they need to not give out money. The story of the Foxconn factory, for example, is one of Wisconsin acting as if you can give a bunch of money to a company that smells of technology, and they will plunk a bunch of jobs for highly educated and skilled people in the middle of a region with relatively few highly educated and skilled workers. Which, it never worked that way. It never will work that way. Companies go to places that can fill their staffing needs. Wisconsin, which has been systematically defunding its education system in order to re-route that money toward corporate subsidies, is undercutting its own ability to fill those staffing needs. I don't know that everyone in the state realizes it, but Wisconsin is stumbling all over itself to become the darling dumping ground for companies that are founded[1] in cities and states with the kinds of intellectual and entrepreneurial ferments you get around well-run and well-funded university systems to put their call centers, distribution centers, big boxes mostly full of robots, and other things they don't want to waste money putting in a more affluent area. [1] I think "founded" is a key word, here, too. Supporting local entrepreneurship is the key to prosperity. Which mostly means getting out of the way of your entrepreneurs. If you get into a bidding wars to acquire the office where a company puts all their jobs that didn't merit being located at HQ, not only do you end up overspending - the people deciding what to bid aren't playing with their own money, so what else did you expect? - but you're also draining the talent pool that supports their growth. tl;dr: The cart goes behind the horse.
• boron1006 8y ago
  Manhattan is a very different place than Queens. Most of the subsidies that Amazon was using was only open for businesses in LIC.
• austenallred 8y ago
  Google's NYC office is <1/4 the size of what Amazon's would be (and they're predicting 40k over time).
• tmaly 8y ago
  But as a thought experiment, say they did create 25,000 jobs at an average salary of 100,000. What type of taxes and secondary effects on the economy does this have? Does the city get back more than the 3 billion in concessions and how long does that take?
  • andylei 8y ago
    they estimated about 30B over 10 years
    • tmaly 8y ago
      so they give up 3B and get 30B in return?
  • thomasmeeks 8y ago
    Looking at it from a strictly "benefit to government's tax coffers" standpoint (since that's the argument for the tax breaks): Would those new Amazon jobs cause 25k people to move to NYC? Or is it more likely to just make the local market more competitive? How would other businesses react? Would they move? Embrace remote? If they increase salary across the board and live with unfilled positions, how does that affect tax revenue? Even if those people do move, how does that influx affect people with lower paying jobs? Will they be pushed out? How does that affect tax revenues? Those are the kinds of questions I saw raised by opponents, and it seems like there weren't clear answers to them.
    • tmaly 8y ago
      Would the net effect be to increase demand for those skill sets and by extension increase salaries?
• ctvo 8y ago
  Google announcing they <WANT> to double their presence in New York is not the same as Amazon signing an agreement of understanding with the city and state. Google hasn't committed to anything. Once it does, it will most likely seek the same tax benefits that Amazon did from the pre-existing programs if it qualifies
  • gipp 8y ago
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/12/17/google-to-build-1-billion-nyc-campus.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/newyork/new... ?
    • ctvo 8y ago
      What are we discussing here? Yes, Google wants to hire more people in NYC. In NYC there are are tax incentive plans for relocating and hiring that companies can apply for if they qualify. Just because Google doesn’t include that portion in their announcement does not mean they won’t pursue it if they can. A good article would be one where Google states it won’t take any tax incentives even if it qualifies for it.
      • gipp 8y ago
        I was only responding to the claim that Google had made no real commitments.