Does the tech industry ruin cities?

[mhays]

That's not what I meant. I'm asking whether Miami has mature techs that employ that many people.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by mhays

That's not what I meant. I'm asking whether Miami has mature techs that employ that many people.

Gotcha.

[cabasse]

Originally Posted by mhays

That's not what I meant. I'm asking whether Miami has mature techs that employ that many people.

there's one that kinda flies under the radar - citrix. (hq in fort lauderdale)

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by mhays

That's not what I meant. I'm asking whether Miami has mature techs that employ that many people.

Miami is not a huge outpost for Big Tech but neither is Atlanta.

[cabasse]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Miami is not a huge outpost for Big Tech but neither is Atlanta.

atlanta has a pretty sizeable tech presence - probably one of the main things that helped the city get out of the rut it found itself in after the 2008 crisis and losing so many of its homegrown companies in the 2000s.

there's lots of fairly big regional offices for some of the most well known companies with lots of programming related roles. microsoft pulled away from its massive west midtown campus, but they do still have a couple of large buildings in atlantic station, along with meta. google has taken half a million sq feet at a new building in midtown. my husband works for micron who opened a memory design center in midtown. NCR has their HQ in midtown, salesforce has a large regional office in buckhead. there are definitely more, but those are the main ones off the top of my head.

i was a contingent worker dev myself a few years back for about 16mo, working on helping fixing various integration issues with salesforce and law firms used for immigration processing, among other things. i never actually made it into the office but i do have my DE teams tshirt, lol.

[mhays]

Seattle's claims are usually specific to "engineering" rather than total employment. The latter can include manufacturing, content creation, call centers, back-office functions, etc. None of those are strong suits for Seattle or San Francisco due to cost.

I don't know how we rank under any definition other than the links people are providing, but for engineering I've heard #2 for a lot of companies. Apple has a 600,000 sf office in South Lake Union (edge of Downtown Seattle) and is was rumored to be looking for a third building that was recently vacated by Meta.

[Gordo]

Originally Posted by mhays

Seattle's claims are usually specific to "engineering" rather than total employment. The latter can include manufacturing, content creation, call centers, back-office functions, etc. None of those are strong suits for Seattle or San Francisco due to cost.

I don't know how we rank under any definition other than the links people are providing, but for engineering I've heard #2 for a lot of companies. Apple has a 600,000 sf office in South Lake Union (edge of Downtown Seattle) and is was rumored to be looking for a third building that was recently vacated by Meta.

Yes, this is true. I was referring to engineering offices rather than overall headcount. If we're talking about highly paid tech employees, that's either going to be engineering or core HQ functions like marketing and finance. If you start looking for jobs with any of the big five it's pretty clear where the two big locations are (though like I mentioned the second largest engineering office for many of these will be in Ireland or India).

[austlar1]

Here's a hastily assembled short list of Austin tech employers based on number of local employees.

Dell- 13,000
IBM- 6,000
Apple- 6,000
Oracle- 4,200 and still hiring and expanding campus in spite of HQ move to Nashville
Samsung- 4,500 and growing rapidly with new fab in Taylor
AMD- 2,500
Applied Materials 2,400
Intel- 2,000
Google- 1,500 and so far refusing to put a new and completely empty 700,000 square foot downtown office tower on the sublease market indicating what?? Who knows?
Meta- 1,200 with a new huge empty downtown office building on sublease market
Cisco Systems- 1,200
TikTok/ByteDance- approx 1,000 and hiring
Indeed- 1,600

I'm sure I've left another dozen or so off this list who employ anywhere between a few hundred to well over a thousand local employees. These companies include Microsoft, Cirrus Logic, Adobe, WP Engine, National Instruments, etc. Austin is either HQ or a major branch office for a whole lot of tech related employers including a fair share of start-ups.

Intentionally left Tesla and Amazon off list although both employee many thousands locally. The 20,000 plus Tesla jobs are mosty manufacturing, and Amazon doesn't break down roles for their 7,000 or so local employees. I suspect most of them are related to distribution centers and delivery.

[The ATX]

Originally Posted by austlar1

Here's a hastily assembled short list of Austin tech employers based on number of local employees.

Dell- 13,000
IBM- 6,000
Apple- 6,000
Oracle- 4,200 and still hiring and expanding campus in spite of HQ move to Nashville
Samsung- 4,500 and growing rapidly with new fab in Taylor
AMD- 2,500
Applied Materials 2,400
Google- 1,500 and so far refusing to put a new and completely empty 700,000 square foot downtown office tower on the sublease market indicating what?? Who knows?
Meta- 1,200 with a new huge empty downtown office building on sublease market
Cisco Systems- 1,200
TikTok/ByteDance- approx 1,000 and hiring
Indeed- 1,600

I'm sure I've left another dozen or so off this list who employ anywhere between a few hundred to well over a thousand local employees. These companies include Cirrus Logic, Silicon Labs, National Instruments, etc. Austin is either HQ or a major branch office for a whole lot of tech related employers including a fair share of start-ups.

And Tesla still has over 20k despite the recent layoffs. Amazon has over 10K too since we seem to be including them in this thread. Flex recently moved their HQ here, and they are a global 500 company and assemble Apple's iMacs here. Apple probably has much more than 6K, but they are very secretive with employee counts. They have two large campuses in Austin as well as two office buildings not located on one of their campuses.

[austlar1]

Originally Posted by The ATX

And Tesla still has over 20k despite the recent layoffs. Amazon has over 10K too since we seem to be including them in this thread. Flex recently moved their HQ here, and they are a global 500 company and assemble Apple's iMacs here. Apple probably has much more than 6K, but they are very secretive with employee counts. They have two large campuses in Austin as well as two office buildings not located on one of their campuses.

You beat me to the punch. I added this while you were posting:

Intentionally left Tesla and Amazon off list although both employee many thousands locally. The 20,000 plus Tesla jobs are mostly manufacturing, and Amazon doesn't break down roles for their 7,000 or so local employees. I suspect most of them are related to distribution centers and delivery.

[The ATX]

Originally Posted by austlar1

You beat me to the punch. I added this while you were posting:

Intentionally left Tesla and Amazon off list although both employee many thousands locally. The 20,000 plus Tesla jobs are mostly manufacturing, and Amazon doesn't break down roles for their 7,000 or so local employees. I suspect most of them are related to distribution centers and delivery.

I don't think the 7K Amazon count includes Whole Foods. A big chunk of Amazon's local workforce (5K?) are Whole Foods employees since they kept their HQ here, and the Whole Foods HQ has been expanding. But I'm not sure if we can count organic veggie procurement as a Tech job

[mhays]

Austin seems to be the one "tech" city that can do both engineering and manufacturing / call centers / back of house on a large scale. Others are mostly in one camp or the other, though even they will claim some engineering offices.

[Crawford]

I cannot imagine WF has 5,000 HQ workers. Retail isn't something that usually requires massive centralized headcount. A HQ like Starbucks or Gap or Kroger doesn't have a huge HQ operation.

Kroger has a HQ count of like 1,500, and they have around 500,000 total employees (all in U.S.) compared to WF 90,000 globally.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I cannot imagine WF has 5,000 HQ workers. Retail isn't something that usually requires massive centralized headcount. A HQ like Starbucks or Gap or Kroger doesn't have a huge HQ operation.

Kroger has a HQ count of like 1,500, and they have around 500,000 total employees (all in U.S.) compared to WF 90,000 globally.

Starbucks might have around 4,000-5,000, or they once did. My former employer built most of their headquarters offices. I don't recall excactly but they might have over a million square feet at Starbucks Center, a giant former Sears store/warehouse with the typical signature tower.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I
Kroger has a HQ count of like 1,500, and they have around 500,000 total employees (all in U.S.) compared to WF 90,000 globally.

This might be wrong currently but about 10 years ago Kroger started (or maybe bought out) an analytics company called Dunhumby. Originally they were tasked mainly with analyzing the Kroger Plus Card data (this is where Kroger trades you $3.57~ for your data). Maybe they have more data points now - I don't know.

I talked to a girl at a bar around 2015 who worked for them who said they wasted a lot of time throughout the week tracking which Kroger HQ employees were buying condoms, then looking them up on Facebook and trying to figure out who they were dating.

[ColDayMan]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Kroger has a HQ count of like 1,500, and they have around 500,000 total employees (all in U.S.) compared to WF 90,000 globally.

Kroger's HQ count in downtown Cincinnati is 5,800 as of 2023.

[DCReid]

It's kind of interesting that this thread was started in a skyscraper forum. I would bet that people would be celebrating techs if they put up signature HQ skyscrapers in their HQ and regional cities like JPMC is doing in NYC, or like the banks used to do in the 1970s and 1980s. It seems that every big city had a major skyscraper or even several that was the HQ for the big banks. The 80s Texas bank building boom was impressive and Houston was supposed to get one of the tallest buildings in the world, Bank of the Southwest by Helmut Jahn (the design of which Philly got instead). The techs certainly have the money to do so, but it seems that most prefer their suburban type campuses.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by DCReid

It's kind of interesting that this thread was started in a skyscraper forum. I would bet that people would be celebrating techs if they put up signature HQ skyscrapers in their HQ and regional cities like JPMC is doing in NYC, or like the banks used to do in the 1970s and 1980s. It seems that every big city had a major skyscraper or even several that was the HQ for the big banks. The 80s Texas bank building boom was impressive and Houston was supposed to get one of the tallest buildings in the world, Bank of the Southwest by Helmut Jahn (the design of which Philly got instead). The techs certainly have the money to do so, but it seems that most prefer their suburban type campuses.

A lot of tech companies in NYC are located in office towers. Meta had offices in a couple of different towers in NYC before consolidating. Spotify and a few other tech companies are located in the World Trade Center. Salesforce has towers in NYC and many other cities.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

A lot of tech companies in NYC are located in office towers. Meta had offices in a couple of different towers in NYC before consolidating. Spotify and a few other tech companies are located in the World Trade Center. Salesforce has towers in NYC and many other cities.

There is no alternative but to lease in office towers in NYC but they tend to be in existing/ already developed buildings. Meta for example, has (or had) a sizable presence here. I was envious of my co-workers who worked out of this location.

[hipster duck]

To answer the OP: no, tech by itself doesn't ruin cities.

I get the correlation. The biggest tech hubs - notably San Francisco and Seattle - have very visible social problems in their downtown, and it got worse as big tech gained ascendancy in both cities.

There are two things going on: the first is that the cities of the west coast - where two biggest tech hubs happen to be located - have always had a large homeless population that uses drugs, and now it's amplified because we're in the midst of a continent-wide opioid epidemic.

The second is that tech pays higher salaries and the workforce is younger, but the housing stock in these places favors older homeowners. So on top of rental prices rising because there's more money sloshing around, rental prices rise further because the supply isn't meeting the demand.

There are smaller "tech centers" where you're not seeing the same issues - or at least not nearly to the same extent. Kitchener-Waterloo in Canada isn't nearly in the same league as the Bay Area or Seattle for tech, but it's also a much smaller metro. It's still a place where tech has a big presence and pays high salaries relative to what other locals are making. There is an affordability problem, but not any more so than similar sized cities in Southern Ontario that aren't heavy on tech. There are homeless people and there is a drug epidemic but, again, not any more so than similar cities in Ontario (this is arguably worse in places that are 'cheap' and don't have good economic prospects, particularly in the north). Waterloo region has done a fairly good job building new rental supply. It was also never the kind of place that homeless people would gravitate to, unlike SF and Seattle in their pre-tech days.