Does the tech industry ruin cities?

[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).

[Gordo]

Originally Posted by ATXboom

Site sources. Not beliefs. Apple says otherwise.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/...of%20Cupertino.

Times are changing. It ain’t 2010.

That's from 2018, before Apple completed the move of their cloud engineering teams to Seattle.

[Gordo]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I believe NYC has the second largest worker presence for both Google and Meta. I think NYC is also Microsoft's third largest worker presence outside of Seattle and the Bay Area. LinkedIn alone has a huge office in the Empire State Building, and Microsoft has long held most of the space in 11 Times Square.

That's certainly possible if you include sales for all three. NYC is clearly the ad sales center of the world (even when talking things like search ads). The agency ecosystem that surrounds the ad offerings from these three companies has centralized in NYC even more than it was pre-digital.

[austlar1]

Originally Posted by Gordo

This definitely isn't true for Meta or Google or Apple, who all have their second largest presence in Seattle. Similarly, Amazon and Microsoft have their second largest presence in the Bay Area. In Amazon's case it's through many smaller companies that they've bought over the years + regular Amazon offices. In Microsoft's case it's LinkedIn, GitHub, and a very large Silicon Valley campus that dates from the 90s.

And really, if we're looking at true second largest presence for most of them it'll be Ireland or India.

According to this Apple website, Austin is second largest employment site with over 6,000 employees on their north Austin campus.

https://www.apple.com/job-creation/

[Gordo]

Originally Posted by austlar1

According to this Apple website, Austin is second largest employment site with over 6,000 employees on their north Austin campus.

https://www.apple.com/job-creation/

Fair enough - doesn't really match my day to day, but I'm much more focused on engineering roles. Not sure what they've got in Austin.

[austlar1]

Originally Posted by Gordo

Fair enough - doesn't really match my day to day, but I'm much more focused on engineering roles. Not sure what they've got in Austin.

Based on current Apple job openings in Austin, it looks like engineering is a thing. https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?...tin-AST&page=2

[The ATX]

Originally Posted by austlar1

Based on current Apple job openings in Austin, it looks like engineering is a thing. https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?...tin-AST&page=2

Based on an ABJ article earlier this year, all of Apple's divisions are represented in Austin. That info came out when a San Diego operation was moved to Austin earlier this year. But I don't remember what their function was.

[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.

[austlar1]

Hard to get a handle on exactly what Amazon does in Austin under their own banner or under the Whole Foods banner. I searched for Amazon tech related job openings in Austin and came up with 237 job openings at the Indeed web site. There seems to be quite a lot of variety. https://www.indeed.com/q-technology-...72dae5a6dfb6b7

[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 DCReid

Or did Nashville become a tech foothold

I was told what I posted above by a VP in one of the Ingram companies. The companies are all still owned by the family and they generally eschew publicity (except for John Ingram, who recently sparked a lot of controversy in his private development of the publicly-owned Nashville fairgrounds for the soccer team) which is why the stuff is not well-known.

because of all of the health care companies established in the region? I read that it is home to about 500 health care companies including HCA.

As a former resident of Nashville in the 1990s and early 2000s, it's safe to say that the city suddenly being known as a healthcare hub is just like how the hot chicken came out of thin air. It's just more silly PR from the people who got Nashville on all of the home renovation shows that portray it as some sort of cutesy place when in reality it's an auto-oriented, vapid hell-hole.

[badrunner]

E-commerce has certainly "ruined" a lot of places by decimating brick and mortar retail. Mostly small towns and smaller cities though, not the tech hubs themselves.

[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.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by badrunner

E-commerce has certainly "ruined" a lot of places by decimating brick and mortar retail. Mostly small towns and smaller cities though, not the tech hubs themselves.

E-commerce merely finished off what Wal-Mart started 30 years ago and malls 50-60 years before that when it came to killing off vibrant downtowns.

[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.