Which city (or cities) will Jeff Bezos choose for Amazon’s HQ2?ASSOCIATED PRESS
Amazon may be close to deciding on a location for its second headquarters complex – perhaps two locations, if the Wall Street Journal is correct. The Washington, D.C., suburb of Crystal City, Va., is in advanced discussions with Amazon, according to the Washington Post and the WSJ, and New York and Dallas are in late-stage talks with the company as well, per the WSJ.
They’d be intriguing choices from a talent perspective. All three metro areas have bigger tech labor pools than Seattle, but only in Dallas-Ft. Worth would Amazon likely get much of a discount on wages.
The average tech salary in the Washington, D.C., area as of April 2018 was $111,000, compared to $117,300 in Seattle and $112,600 in New York, according to stats compiled by the commercial real estate firm CBRE. Dallas-Ft. Worth tech workers are more of a bargain, with an average wage of $96,600. (That includes software developers and programmers, computer support and database workers, information systems managers and tech engineering-related jobs.)
If the economy stays strong, Amazon is going to need a deep pool to recruit from wherever it chooses to land and hire 50,000 workers – the tech unemployment rate nationally stood at 2% in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the D.C. area, the tech job count shrank 1.3% from 2012 to 2017 to 248,150 jobs, but that’s still a 70% bigger workforce than Seattle’s (145,100, 19.4% growth). New York’s tech job count expanded 17% over that period to 254,300, and Dallas’ grew 15.3% to 160,800.
No shade on the University of Washington, but all three cities produce more new graduates with tech degrees than Seattle. In Washington, local universities churned out 10,526 new tech grads from 2011-16, compared to 3,300 in Seattle, 12,000 in New York and 5,700 in Dallas.
How about quality of talent? CBRE rates New York and Washington, D.C., ‘very high’ based on the presence of graduates from the top 25 computer science programs, and Dallas ‘high,’ but none hold a candle (or trackpad) to Seattle.
Courtesy of CBRE