Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you at? So today I thought we could revisit something that really happened just a few years ago. In fact, I actually did an episode of tech Stuff about this back in the fall of twenty eighteen. But a lot has changed since then, including the COVID nineteen out break, which would throw an enormous monkey wrench into the whole thing. And it's all about the controversial Amazon HQ two decision and how everything kind of unfolded from the moment when Amazon announced a request for proposal. So let's get to it. And as I said, there's an episode in twenty eighteen about this, and it's so funny because obviously a lot, a lot would change from then to now, including one of the locations picked for HQ two would be dismissed between then and now. At the time, I didn't know that was gonna happen, all right, So let's get some background before we jump into all this. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in Bellevue, Washington, way back in nineteen ninety four, which means it celebrated its thirtieth birthday this year. And like a lot of famous tech companies, Amazon got its start in a garage. Now. Back then, Amazon's business was all about books. You remember, books. You would pop onto Amazon dot Com. Actually before it was Cadabra as an abracadabra, but it became Amazon. But you would pop on Amazon and you would order a book that you wanted. You know, maybe it was a book it was just hard to track down in your neck of the woods, Like maybe there was a limited printing of those books and no one near you had it, or maybe you live someplace that wasn't close to a bookshop, so you go on to Amazon, you'd place your order and you wait for a while for Amazon to ship the book to you. It was a pretty humble start to a business, and it gave no indication that the company would grow into one of the largest wealthiest organizations in the world, propelling Jeff Bezos to be in the running for richest person on Earth. And it would also end up being a company that would hoard enormous amounts of customer information, mostly to put to the use of selling stuff to you more effectively than it had before. Well, I'm not going to do a full rundown on the history of Amazon. I have done episodes about that in the past, and even though a lot has happened since the last of those, we're just focusing on really one element to it. But I will hit a few high points just to kind of mark the passing of time. So, unlike lots of other web based businesses that were founded in the nineties, Amazon was actually one of the few that weathered the insane storm that was the dot com bubble burst, as well as the tragedy of the terrorist attacks in the United States on nine to eleven. In fact, Amazon ultimately posted its first ever profitable quarter at the end of two thousand and one. Like many other internet startups, the company operated at a loss for the first several years of its existence. It required regular investment rounds in order to stay afloat, so it was generating more and more revenue. Like things were moving in the right direction, The losses were coming down, the revenues were coming up, but you were still operating mostly in the red. Amazon was still losing money year over year, and finally made a profitable quarter at the end of two thousand and one one, which was an interesting thing to have happened, considering that that was in the wake of the September eleventh terrorist attacks, so Amazon wouldn't have its first profitable year until two thousand and three. That year, it earned thirty five million dollars, as opposed to the previous year in which it lost nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars. So yeah, Amazon was really turning things around. This was kind of like the inflection point for the company, and also Amazon obviously branched out beyond just selling books. They started selling all sorts of stuff. In fact, books would just become one of millions of different items carried by Amazon over the following years, and it would also experiment in other areas as well, such as in digital streaming many years later, so Amazon kind of got its hands into everything. But two thousand and three was a big year. That was also the year that Amazon introduced Amazon webs Services, at least in full. The company had already been dipping its toe in those waters in previous years, but two thousand and three was really where that became a thing, and the average person is probably much more familiar with Amazon's online storefront, but it's really Amazon's Web Services that brings in big bucks. Or to be more precise, actually, Amazon Web Services doesn't make the most money out of all of Amazon's divisions. I think it's closer to like between fifteen and twenty percent on average, so not the most, but it's the most profitable division within Amazon because the amount of money it's bringing in versus how much it costs to operate the division, there's a much larger profit margin there. When you're looking at Amazon's other businesses, the cost of doing business is so high comparatively speaking, that less profit is generated from that revenue. So AWS is Amazon's business to business service. They offer cloud computing and online development platforms to their various clients, and these days that includes providing compute power for startup AI companies, but you know, that's another story for another episode. The company introduced Amazon Prime in two thousand and five, so at the time, for seventy nine bucks a year, customers could sign up and receive unlimited two day shipping on their orders. Amazon was busy building out distribution centers around the world in order to make this a possibility. So the company was hard at work streamlining supply chains and making sure that goods were really close to where they would be needed. And knowing so much about customers through the process of like data mining and stuff, Amazon could actually anticipate the sorts of things that were needed in different areas and move things to where they needed to be proactively and be able to deliver on that two day promise in lots of different regions. So we have this big company that's based out of Washington State, and it has distribution centers and data centers all over the place. It is huge. By twenty seventeen, the company employed more than half a million people. Now, of course, only a fraction of those were working at the corporate headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Many people were working in things like warehouses and stuff like that. But the company's growth was insane, and the higher ups decided that what was needed was a second corporate HQ, potentially one on the opposite side of the United States of America. So on September seventh, twenty seventeen, Amazon released a statement alerting the world that the company was looking to establish a secondary headquarters HQ two, and this would be equivalent to the home operations in Seattle, Washington. The company issued an RFP that stands for request for proposal, and essentially this was Amazon saying, hey, y'all, we're looking to build ourselves away real nice operation someplace. It surely will bring a whole message jobs to your doorstep, and getting us on your map is certain to put a big old feather in your political cap. So if you're interested, send us your thoughts, hugs, and kisses. Amazon. Clearly I'm paraphrasing here. USA Today's Elizabeth Weiss wrote that at the time of Amazon's announcement, the Seattle HQ was the workplace for around forty thousand people. Now that's hard for me to even imagine. I have only ever worked in offices where there were fewer than two hundred people there, and usually most of those offices it was actually fewer than one hundred people. Why said the Amazon's workforce took up nearly twenty percent of all the office space in the city of Seattle. So imagine that. Imagine you live in a city and you run into someone who's dressed up in say, business attire, and you figure there's a one out of five chance they work for Amazon. That's crazy. Anyway, everyone seemed to take it at face value that Amazon of course needed to build a secondary corporate HQ. The operations of the company had grown so large and so complex that there was really no doubt that expansion was required and that it made more sense to move away from Seattle, not because Seattle is not a good location, but because Seattle was getting tapped out for things like talent, So you wanted to locate this partly because it would also mean if you say, had a location on the East Coast, you would have operating hours that would span more of the day, right because the East coast of the United States is three hours ahead of the West coast. So that seemed like that was a good idea. But who was going to get this and in fact, who was going to throw their proverbial hat into the ring for consideration. Well, actually, let's answer that second question first, like who got involved, because, as it would turn out, the answer was a whole bunch of cities and various other regions that were begging for consideration. In fact, Amazon received two hundred thirty eight submissions to their RFP. That's a lot of responses, and the applicants included cities in the United States as well as in Canada. From October nineteenth, twenty seventeen, to January eighteenth, twenty eighteen, the team at Amazon began to whittle the list down to a group of just twenty finalists, and I'm going to tell you what they were. So the finalists for Amazon's HQ two, in alphabetical order, They included Atlanta, Georgia, which is my hometown, Austin, Texas, Boston, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, Columbus, Ohio, Dallas, Texas, Denver, Colorado, Indianapolis, Indiana, Los Angeles, California, Miami, Florida, Montgomery County, and Maryland. As they say in seventeen seventy six, Nashville, Tennessee, Newark, New Jersey, New York City, New York State, a region in northern Virginia called Arlington County, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Raleigh, North Carolina, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC. Those were the contenders who would win. Well, that would be something of a surprise. I'll talk more about that, but first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, before the break, I mentioned a list of twenty regions that had kind of made the short list for Amazon. But even before that list was announced, there was this crazy period in which various cities and regions that were trying to pull out all the stops in an effort to cox Amazon into choosing them for the location for HQ two. And it got pretty absurd and more than a little gross, or at least it was gross if you find some aspects of capitalism to be icky, you know, like how some cities will spend way more money in an effort to lure businesses into them than they would spend to do stuff like, I don't know, address infrastructure problems, or fund schools or address housing crises. And yeah, we'll have more to say about that later because that becomes a big critical point when we talk about New York City. So through the first half of twenty eighteen or so, you would occasionally see news about some city or another making outlandish promises or ridiculous public displays in an effort to stand out among the other candidates. For example, the city of Tucson, Arizona, which I'm sure you'll notice was not on that list of twenty on the short list, Tucson sent a plant to Jeff Bezos. Not just any plant. It was a twenty one foot tall saguaro cactus. Amazon News responded to this, saying the company was not allowed to accept gifts, so instead it had donated the cactus to a desert museum in Birmingham, Alabama. The city put up three giant Amazon delivery boxes around town and encouraged citizens to go out and take selfies with the boxes, and then to tweet their selfies using the hashtag that read bring a to b which is cute, but in the end it didn't really move the needle. Here in Georgia, to our great embarrassment, the city of stone Crest was vying to become the new home of Amazon HQ. This was seen as a long shot, as stone Crest itself is not a very large city. It's actually kind of in the metro Atlanta area. It's outside the perimeter. The perimeter, by the way, for those not in Atlanta, that's a highway called two eighty five, and two eighty five encircles all of the city of Atlanta and some of the outlying metro areas. Stonecrest is outside of that. It's a little less than a half hour drive from downtown Atlanta. The traffic's not bad, but anyway, Stonecrest's proposal included the chance for Amazon to essentially have its own city within Stonecrest itself. Stonecrest would continue to exist, but the city of Amazon would be carved out from a space within Stonecrest's holdings, with Stonecrest apparently handling all the utilities and municipal things that would be required for Amazon to operate. But people figured that Stonecrest didn't really have a chance because Atlanta had its own proposal into Amazon, and as we would see on that short list, Atlanta would end up making it on the list, Stonecrest did not. Now, other places were taking a less gimmicky approach, but no less effective. New Jersey offered tax breaks amounting to around five billion buckaroos. That's a princely sum, if ever there was one. Now, this was figured because the deal said that the state would offer up to ten thousand dollars per job created within New Jersey per year for an entire decade. Now, Amazon was pitching the HQ two as a project that would ultimately bring in fifty thousand jobs to whichever area the facility would be located in. So if you take fifty thousand jobs, you multiply that times ten thousand dollars, then you multiply that times ten years, and you get five billion dollars over that ten year period. Other cities offered their own incentives, all eager to convince Amazon to pick their location for HQ two. Now, this would ruffle feathers in more than a few places. There were critics who were arguing that peticians seemed far more eager to cater to one of the world's richest human beings rather than actually use their powers to make the lives of their constituents better and safer. Many people were worried that should their own city actually win the bidding, it would mean a net loss for the region, that whatever benefit Amazon's arrival would bring wouldn't be enough to offset what the area had given up in order to get Amazon there. I feel this distinctly because living in Atlanta, there's still people at least of my age or older who are wincing over the Summer Olympics of nineteen ninety six because Atlanta bent over backward in order to get the Olympics to our city and spent an awful lot of money in order to make that happen. And while many of the facilities that were built were repurposed after the Olympics, so they didn't like just go to waste or anything. There were a lot of questions as to whether or not it ultimately was worth the expense that was paid to get the Olympics there. That's a matter for another time, but I mean this is a common thing, like within cities where you'll hear about cities that are trying to coax a company or other organization into the city, and that sometimes the things they're using to coax the company end up costing more than any benefit you see from the company actually going there. That was a real fear in a lot of places. Now this gets complicated because many times the actual deals that were being proposed were covered by non disclosure agreements, which means they were not public knowledge. People were not allowed to talk about what was actually in the deal. So we had cases where people just didn't know what the cities were agreeing to and you wouldn't know until Amazon made its decision. And if it shows your city, then presumably at least some of the information would become public and maybe you wouldn't agree with it. But at the time you weren't being told anything, which obviously was not helping with trust issues. And you know, some cities were really worried about how Amazon would have a big impact on their communities, like in New York. I mentioned that earlier. In New York City, there were lots of critics who were bringing up questions about this, that Amazon's impact on the city would be so severe and meanwhile, it would be off the hook for paying for that stuff, that all of that burden would go to citizens instead. So in New York that became a huge conversation about how, Yeah, according to the brokers, it's not like they were taking money away from one project and giving it to Amazon. The brokers were saying, we're not doing that. We're not taking money away from anything that's in our budget. We're doing is we're offering incentives to Amazon. But the critics were saying, sure, but if Amazon takes you up on it, and they build this facility and they use that facility, they are going to put more stress on our infrastructure, whether that's in the school systems, in the roads, in the public transportation, whether it's just in all these other things that might or might not be intangible. They're going to put a strain on that. And meanwhile, through these tax incentives, you're not going to require Amazon to pay for them, but it has to be paid. Someone has to pay for that, so that ends up falling on all the other citizens. So what you're essentially doing is giving Amazon a free pass and making New Yorkers pay for it. That was like the big conversation that was happening in New York, And honestly, I think that there's a lot of merit in those criticisms. Now, in some cases, the incentives that were being offered in these deals would turn out to be the ones that didn't have any actual legislative backing. So, in other words, the people who were responsible for putting the proposal together didn't actually have the authority to make the offers they were making. They were doing what some salespeople often do. This is based upon my own personal observations in that some salespeople will make really big promises in order to land a sale, particularly salespeople who were on commission. They will make promises to the moon and back in order to get the ink on the dotted line, and once that ink has dried, they shift to the next deal, and meanwhile someone else is left holding the bag figuring out how do I deliver upon the promises that were made by the salesperson. That stinks. It's not the salesperson's job necessarily to deliver upon those promises. They're already doing something else. It's your job that sucks. I have been that sucker more than once and it is no fun. But yeah, there were cases in which Amazon was dealing with people who did not have the authority to make the deals they were offering. So the next step if Amazon had picked those places would be that the brokers would have to turn to the legislation and say our legislative body rather and say, hey, can we agree to make this a law? Because I already kind of told Amazon it could have a puppy, so we kind of got to get it a puppy. Sorry by then. In the end, Amazon did not choose a single place. It chose two places. However, as we'll get to Amazon would subsequently hit the eject button on one of those two choices and ultimately just go back down to one. Now Further, some would argue that Amazon's choices would reveal that the company had always had its future destinations in mind and had never really seriously considered any other potential location. So this is not, you know, verified, But there are skeptics who said, oh, Amazon always planned for these two locations to be the answer. They just said they were accepting proposals because it created a bidding war. Like if you already know where you're going to move, but you also know that your move is something that a lot of people are going to look at as a desirable thing, like they want you to move into the location, why not create a bidding war so that you get the sweetest deal possible. Right, Yeah, you know you're already going to go there, but they don't know that. So what you say is, hey, we're thinking about going someplace. We haven't made up our mind yet, what are you going to do to convince us to come to your neck of the woods. That was the kind of allegation or accusation or suspicion. Suspicion is probably the best word for it. A lot of people held that Amazon had already had in mind where it was going to go, they just hadn't told anyone because it was a way to wheedle out the best possible deal. Now, I'm not saying Amazon actually did stack the deck from the start. However, there are other people who don't have a problem floating that possibility. For a long time, it actually seemed like Atlanta, Georgia was out in the leite Like all the way up to almost the end, people thought Atlanta was seriously in the running. There was a time when most folks figured that Amazon was going to go to Atlanta, to the point where bookies in Vegas were giving Atlanta the best odds of being the city to become HQ two. But that is not where Amazon chose to go. In the end, Amazon sort of chose to divide and conquer. Now, part of that might have been because it turned out to be a lot harder to find a single location that would have access to fifty thousand or so tech workers that the company was looking to fill out these offices over the course of like a decade. There just weren't very many great single locations that could handle that kind of demand, and so Amazon instead chose to split the HQ two into two locations, one in New York City specifically Long Island City in Queens, and the other in Arlington County in northern Virginia. As we will see, that's not exactly how things would turn out. But first let's take another quick break. We're back. So Amazon announced their decision in November twenty eighteen. The backlash happened almost instantly. Now, to be clear, there were plenty of critics who had lots to say about how Amazon had conducted the whole search in the first place, and then there were even more critics about how the various areas that were under consideration had tried to outdo one another in publicity stunts and incentive packages that were s with NDA's. But when Amazon said, yeah, we're actually spliting this up and neither of the choices include the cities that were thought to be in the top of the running, folks kind of flip their lids right Like people were just already assuming that Atlanta was going to be the location, for example, or maybe Miami, Florida. But when it turned out not to be the case, a lot of folks were saying, well, that makes no sense. You must have had this planned out from the beginning. Now, it did become clear that in New York, the city had offered truly massive tax breaks more than a billion dollars tied to job creation. And remember this is half of the jobs that the HQ two was to hold. Right, the original concept was a single campus that would house around fifty thousand jobs. Instead we're looking at two campuses, each capable of holding around twenty five thousand employees. Now, some of the folks who brokeered the deal really defended it. Like I said, they argued that they weren't taking money from other projects, so this was not a net loss in any way, shape or form for the city. But then, as I mentioned, critics were saying, well, yeah, it's not like you took money out of the school budget to give to Amazon, but you are offering Amazon the chance to occupy a large part of Long Island City, not paying taxes, and meanwhile being a burden on taxpayers in the city, And that was something you couldn't just dismiss. Now, that was an ongoing issue, largely brought by AOC Alexandria Arcasio Cortes, who had just recently been elected to the House of Representatives in New York, and she was making a very strong and passionate argument against the deal that was being offered to Amazon. She was not the only one like there were Republicans who also disagreed with the deal that was being offered. So, as I mentioned before, this was something that people across both sides of the aisle had agreement upon. They just felt that this was an unnecessary gesture to a company led by someone who again was frequently in the running to be the richest person in the world. Things in Virginia were a little bit similar, but you know, they had promised more than half a billion dollars in cash grants, again tied to job creation within the region, but in Virginia, resistance was a bit more muted. It wasn't nearly as passionate as what was happening in New York. Also, Virginia had facilities that needed to be filled. There were these large campuses of buildings that at one time or another belonged to defense contractors, but those companies had gone out of business or moved away, and so there were some pretty significant office space areas that were vacant, and the idea was that, well, we need to fill that space up. It's not doing any good right now. So that became part of kind of the deal to Amazon. There were more than enough questionable decisions going around. However, for example, in Virginia, according to an article I read by Casey Newton in The Verge, the deal brokers had agreed to make sure that Amazon would actually receive written notice of any Freedom of Information Act public requests in advance, so that the company would have kind of a head start to figure out how best to protect itself before you know, something potentially nasty becomes public information. And many of the folks who had tried to land this deal had, as a matter of course, done all this, like I said, in secret, so that truly undermines citizen trust, like when you find out your leaders are secretly making these deals that have huge benefits to a company and allowing the company to operate by a completely different set of rules than the rest of us do. Like I think most Americans have an understanding that there are different judicial systems, and those systems depend heavily upon how influential and wealthy you are, and the more influential and the more wealthy you are, generally speaking, the better off you are, and the less repercussions you will face if you are ever cold in front of the court. And sometimes you know, laws just don't apply to you. That's not always the case. If you steal from other rich people, for example, you can still be sent to you know, prison for a long time. See also Sam Beateman freed. But for the most part, if you're really wealthy and influential, you don't have to worry as much. Well, that seemed to be the feeling people were having with these kind of deals with Amazon, that Amazon was giving this preferential treatment that no one else in the region would receive, and that rubs people the wrong way because it's inherently unfair. In New York, politicians on both sides raised questions and resistance to the plans, and just a few months after Amazon announced its intention to move into the Big Apple, the company changed course. In February twenty nineteen, Amazon said, you know what, on second thought, we're not going to build an HQ in Long Island City and they canceled those plans even then, like there had been some money, time and effort spent on preparing for this, so that was a waste. But yeah, Amazon pulled out, and the brokers in New York called it one of the biggest tragedies they had ever seen. Now keep in mind they said that in twenty nineteen. All they needed to do was wait a single year and then they would see what a real tragedy actually is, because trust me, the pandemic was way worse than a big company deciding against moving into town anyway. At that point in twenty nineteen, Virginia would become the one and only site for HQ two, or maybe HQ one point five, because it wasn't as big as HQ was going to be, right, it was going to be twenty five thousand people, not fifty thousand. So Amazon would also open some supplemental offices, one of which would be in New York, one that would be in Nashville, Tennessee. They just wouldn't be on a scale of an HQ two. So those financial deals that Virginia had made, keep in mind, those were tied to job creation. But then between Amazon's announcement of the HQ two locations, which ultimately would just become Virginia, and when HQ two would actually be ready to open, which was in the summer of twenty twenty three, we got the pandemic and boom, Suddenly people were not going into offices at all, even offices that were going to be State of the art and the result of huge political and financial deals would remain largely empty. Heck, I mean the construction work on offices would stop for quite some time because of lockdown and things of that nature. So Amazon was not ready to open the Virginia facility until the summer of twenty twenty three, which, as I'm sure you've noticed, came after the pandemic hit. And perhaps this is one of many reasons why Amazon has pushed so hard for a return to office, because again, the company's financial incentives in Virginia are tied to job creation within the region, and Amazon just has not been hitting those numbers. They have not been on track at all. In fact, Tao Armas of The Washington Post reported in April of this year that the number of people employed in the Virginia office actually shrank last year. The HQ two as it stands right now, includes a pair of high rise buildings and has a capacity for around fourteen thousand employees. Now, remember, the goal ultimately is to hit twenty five thousand, and originally the idea was to hit twenty five thousand by the end of the twenty twenties. And while it has the capacity for fourteen thousand in its existing facilities. Right now, it's more like eight thousand people work there. That's according to the most recent estimations I could find. It may not be exact, it may be more or less, but somewhere around eight thousand, so slightly more than half capacity. And again there are issues with the remote work. Plus, Amazon, like many other tech companies, has held a few rounds of layoffs in recent years that has impacted the hiring in Virginia. They've had hiring freezes and layoffs. That's really part of the problem. That's why the numbers have shrunk. And some of this is to do with the pandemic. A lot of it is, in fact, because during lockdown, a lot of tech companies in particular went into kind of a hiring extravaganza. But then once things calmed down, when the pandemic began to ease off a little bit, there were more hands on deck than we're needed, and so companies began to cut back again. We've seen this with Meta, We've seen it with Google, We've seen it with other places. Elon Musk positively eviscerated staff numbers over what used to beat Twitter. So in some ways you could argue Amazon was a little more gentle with their layoffs, which is a weird way to put it. I don't think getting laid off is ever really gentle. It stinks. But Amazon maintains that it still wishes to get to those twenty five thousand jobs on the books in Virginia. However, it may take a little bit longer than they initially anticipated when they were brokering these deals in the late twenty tens. So according to the company's VP of worldwide Economic Development, a woman named Holly Sullivan, the plan is to reach the twenty five thousand job milestone in Virginia by around twenty thirty eight, so another fourteen years. Ough. So the pandemic has really changed things, and you do have companies like Amazon that are passing return to office mandates. But the reality is that a lot of companies have found that remote work works. That's a pretty tough pill to swallow when a lot of your strategy has centered around the procurement of significant office space. It's tough for leaders who envisioned their towns turning into like a city of the future, filled with people who are working and living and playing in these high tech community centers. Tastefully landscaped and designed for ultimate pedestrian maneuverability. Instead, we're getting these large office buildings that are dramatically underutilized, with companies paying huge bills for rent and electricity and water and stuff, and meanwhile only a fraction of employees are even going in there. In some ways, I think it's understandable why company leaders are pushing back against remote work. They have heavily invested in some really expensive stuff, and if no one is going to the office, it's hard to justify those hefty expenses to your stakeholders, whether they're shareholders or private investors. And if people can work from remotely, they might not even live in places like Virginia where leaders expect you to deliver upon your promise to bring tens of thousands of jobs to the region. What if the people working for HQ two actually don't live anywhere close to Virginia because they don't have to. They can just log in remotely and work, well, then you're going to have problems trying to get those cash guarantees that you are banking on when you brokeer these deals back in twenty eighteen. So that's a big problem. Now there are other reasons why some bosses want folks to return to office. It's not all cynical stuff like justifying the office space or improving the optics, because you know, no one wants to have a client visit a practically deserted office floor that doesn't look good. You want the office to look busy and vibrant. So there are those reasons, and those are fairly shallow reasons for requiring employees to come back to the office. But there are at least some studies that have shown that for certain types of jobs, collaboration is the most effective when people are working within close proximity of one another, particularly with regard to mentoring. So that's not the case for everybody, but for engineers, for example, coder's computer scientists that kind of thing, they tend to benefit from working within proximity to others, particularly if you're talking about people who are kind of entry level into the position. They receive more frequent and higher quality feedback on their work from their peers who happen to be working within the same office space than if they would if everyone was working remotely. Like, people still get feedback on their work when they work remotely, but it doesn't tend to be as frequent or as high quality. So there are some use cases where a return to office has been shown to improve the overall quality of output. So I don't want to suggest that the only reasons any leaders ever want folks to go back into an office are shallow. I don't believe that's the case. I do think it's something that has to be considered carefully because there are so many other factors that affect your employees. For example, cost of living. Right like, there's so many tech companies that are in the San Francisco area, but I'm sure a lot of you are aware the price to live in San Francisco is so high that it's prohibitive for a lot of people. So remote work gives the ability to get one of those great salary jobs but potentially live someplace where it's a much lower cost of living. Your dollars go much further, So that makes a lot more sense. Being forced to come back into the office might mean that you have to relocate. It may mean that it's honestly unrealistic that you cannot do it because you can't afford to work at the place if you have to live there. So like I said, it's a delicate thing. It's nuanced, and the problem is that corporate policy as a rule doesn't do well with nuance. It does broad brush strokes. Anyway, that is what has happened to Amazon's HQ two so far. It is a work in progress. Clearly, to hit that goal of twenty five thousand jobs, Amazon is going to need to build even more office space in order to accommodate those extra bodies. They only have room for fourteen thousand. But before they do that, they still have six thousand empty desks to deal with at the existing facilities. I think all those cities that previously had bid upon the honor of having Amazon come to their town should probably pat themselves on the back for having dodged a bullet, unless, of course, people have found out more details about those proposals that the city had offered to Amazon, then there might be some more tough questions to answer. But that's a follow up on the story of Amazon's HQ two. There's obviously even more than that, and there are a lot of complicating issues that I didn't really touch on. But I think that that would require almost a full mini series to dive into everything from the polytical intrigue to you know, I didn't even touch on the fact that Amazon has famously been dealing with a lot of resistance from employees. A lot of employees in not just office spaces, but employees in like the warehouses, have been working toward unionization, and how Amazon has opposed that, sometimes to a degree that has been questioned as being potentially criminal. All of that plays a part into these kinds of stories, but again that would probably require its own mini series to get into real depth. I just wanted to give kind of an overview of how things had turned out because I was just looking back on old Tech Stuff episodes and I thought, oh, here's something I feel I should probably update, because when I recorded the first one, New York was still very much going to be one of the locations for Amazon's HQ two, and then just a few months later that was off the table. Well that's it for this episode. I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you at? So today I thought we could revisit something that really happened just a few years ago. In fact, I actually did an episode of tech Stuff about this back in the fall of twenty eighteen. But a lot has changed since then, including the COVID nineteen out break, which would throw an enormous monkey wrench into the whole thing. And it's all about the controversial Amazon HQ two decision and how everything kind of unfolded from the moment when Amazon announced a request for proposal. So let's get to it. And as I said, there's an episode in twenty eighteen about this, and it's so funny because obviously a lot, a lot would change from then to now, including one of the locations picked for HQ two would be dismissed between then and now. At the time, I didn't know that was gonna happen, all right, So let's get some background before we jump into all this. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in Bellevue, Washington, way back in nineteen ninety four, which means it celebrated its thirtieth birthday this year. And like a lot of famous tech companies, Amazon got its start in a garage. Now. Back then, Amazon's business was all about books. You remember, books. You would pop onto Amazon dot Com. Actually before it was Cadabra as an abracadabra, but it became Amazon. But you would pop on Amazon and you would order a book that you wanted. You know, maybe it was a book it was just hard to track down in your neck of the woods, Like maybe there was a limited printing of those books and no one near you had it, or maybe you live someplace that wasn't close to a bookshop, so you go on to Amazon, you'd place your order and you wait for a while for Amazon to ship the book to you. It was a pretty humble start to a business, and it gave no indication that the company would grow into one of the largest wealthiest organizations in the world, propelling Jeff Bezos to be in the running for richest person on Earth. And it would also end up being a company that would hoard enormous amounts of customer information, mostly to put to the use of selling stuff to you more effectively than it had before. Well, I'm not going to do a full rundown on the history of Amazon. I have done episodes about that in the past, and even though a lot has happened since the last of those, we're just focusing on really one element to it. But I will hit a few high points just to kind of mark the passing of time. So, unlike lots of other web based businesses that were founded in the nineties, Amazon was actually one of the few that weathered the insane storm that was the dot com bubble burst, as well as the tragedy of the terrorist attacks in the United States on nine to eleven. In fact, Amazon ultimately posted its first ever profitable quarter at the end of two thousand and one. Like many other internet startups, the company operated at a loss for the first several years of its existence. It required regular investment rounds in order to stay afloat, so it was generating more and more revenue. Like things were moving in the right direction, The losses were coming down, the revenues were coming up, but you were still operating mostly in the red. Amazon was still losing money year over year, and finally made a profitable quarter at the end of two thousand and one one, which was an interesting thing to have happened, considering that that was in the wake of the September eleventh terrorist attacks, so Amazon wouldn't have its first profitable year until two thousand and three. That year, it earned thirty five million dollars, as opposed to the previous year in which it lost nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars. So yeah, Amazon was really turning things around. This was kind of like the inflection point for the company, and also Amazon obviously branched out beyond just selling books. They started selling all sorts of stuff. In fact, books would just become one of millions of different items carried by Amazon over the following years, and it would also experiment in other areas as well, such as in digital streaming many years later, so Amazon kind of got its hands into everything. But two thousand and three was a big year. That was also the year that Amazon introduced Amazon webs Services, at least in full. The company had already been dipping its toe in those waters in previous years, but two thousand and three was really where that became a thing, and the average person is probably much more familiar with Amazon's online storefront, but it's really Amazon's Web Services that brings in big bucks. Or to be more precise, actually, Amazon Web Services doesn't make the most money out of all of Amazon's divisions. I think it's closer to like between fifteen and twenty percent on average, so not the most, but it's the most profitable division within Amazon because the amount of money it's bringing in versus how much it costs to operate the division, there's a much larger profit margin there. When you're looking at Amazon's other businesses, the cost of doing business is so high comparatively speaking, that less profit is generated from that revenue. So AWS is Amazon's business to business service. They offer cloud computing and online development platforms to their various clients, and these days that includes providing compute power for startup AI companies, but you know, that's another story for another episode. The company introduced Amazon Prime in two thousand and five, so at the time, for seventy nine bucks a year, customers could sign up and receive unlimited two day shipping on their orders. Amazon was busy building out distribution centers around the world in order to make this a possibility. So the company was hard at work streamlining supply chains and making sure that goods were really close to where they would be needed. And knowing so much about customers through the process of like data mining and stuff, Amazon could actually anticipate the sorts of things that were needed in different areas and move things to where they needed to be proactively and be able to deliver on that two day promise in lots of different regions. So we have this big company that's based out of Washington State, and it has distribution centers and data centers all over the place. It is huge. By twenty seventeen, the company employed more than half a million people. Now, of course, only a fraction of those were working at the corporate headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Many people were working in things like warehouses and stuff like that. But the company's growth was insane, and the higher ups decided that what was needed was a second corporate HQ, potentially one on the opposite side of the United States of America. So on September seventh, twenty seventeen, Amazon released a statement alerting the world that the company was looking to establish a secondary headquarters HQ two, and this would be equivalent to the home operations in Seattle, Washington. The company issued an RFP that stands for request for proposal, and essentially this was Amazon saying, hey, y'all, we're looking to build ourselves away real nice operation someplace. It surely will bring a whole message jobs to your doorstep, and getting us on your map is certain to put a big old feather in your political cap. So if you're interested, send us your thoughts, hugs, and kisses. Amazon. Clearly I'm paraphrasing here. USA Today's Elizabeth Weiss wrote that at the time of Amazon's announcement, the Seattle HQ was the workplace for around forty thousand people. Now that's hard for me to even imagine. I have only ever worked in offices where there were fewer than two hundred people there, and usually most of those offices it was actually fewer than one hundred people. Why said the Amazon's workforce took up nearly twenty percent of all the office space in the city of Seattle. So imagine that. Imagine you live in a city and you run into someone who's dressed up in say, business attire, and you figure there's a one out of five chance they work for Amazon. That's crazy. Anyway, everyone seemed to take it at face value that Amazon of course needed to build a secondary corporate HQ. The operations of the company had grown so large and so complex that there was really no doubt that expansion was required and that it made more sense to move away from Seattle, not because Seattle is not a good location, but because Seattle was getting tapped out for things like talent, So you wanted to locate this partly because it would also mean if you say, had a location on the East Coast, you would have operating hours that would span more of the day, right because the East coast of the United States is three hours ahead of the West coast. So that seemed like that was a good idea. But who was going to get this and in fact, who was going to throw their proverbial hat into the ring for consideration. Well, actually, let's answer that second question first, like who got involved, because, as it would turn out, the answer was a whole bunch of cities and various other regions that were begging for consideration. In fact, Amazon received two hundred thirty eight submissions to their RFP. That's a lot of responses, and the applicants included cities in the United States as well as in Canada. From October nineteenth, twenty seventeen, to January eighteenth, twenty eighteen, the team at Amazon began to whittle the list down to a group of just twenty finalists, and I'm going to tell you what they were. So the finalists for Amazon's HQ two, in alphabetical order, They included Atlanta, Georgia, which is my hometown, Austin, Texas, Boston, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, Columbus, Ohio, Dallas, Texas, Denver, Colorado, Indianapolis, Indiana, Los Angeles, California, Miami, Florida, Montgomery County, and Maryland. As they say in seventeen seventy six, Nashville, Tennessee, Newark, New Jersey, New York City, New York State, a region in northern Virginia called Arlington County, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Raleigh, North Carolina, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC. Those were the contenders who would win. Well, that would be something of a surprise. I'll talk more about that, but first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, before the break, I mentioned a list of twenty regions that had kind of made the short list for Amazon. But even before that list was announced, there was this crazy period in which various cities and regions that were trying to pull out all the stops in an effort to cox Amazon into choosing them for the location for HQ two. And it got pretty absurd and more than a little gross, or at least it was gross if you find some aspects of capitalism to be icky, you know, like how some cities will spend way more money in an effort to lure businesses into them than they would spend to do stuff like, I don't know, address infrastructure problems, or fund schools or address housing crises. And yeah, we'll have more to say about that later because that becomes a big critical point when we talk about New York City. So through the first half of twenty eighteen or so, you would occasionally see news about some city or another making outlandish promises or ridiculous public displays in an effort to stand out among the other candidates. For example, the city of Tucson, Arizona, which I'm sure you'll notice was not on that list of twenty on the short list, Tucson sent a plant to Jeff Bezos. Not just any plant. It was a twenty one foot tall saguaro cactus. Amazon News responded to this, saying the company was not allowed to accept gifts, so instead it had donated the cactus to a desert museum in Birmingham, Alabama. The city put up three giant Amazon delivery boxes around town and encouraged citizens to go out and take selfies with the boxes, and then to tweet their selfies using the hashtag that read bring a to b which is cute, but in the end it didn't really move the needle. Here in Georgia, to our great embarrassment, the city of stone Crest was vying to become the new home of Amazon HQ. This was seen as a long shot, as stone Crest itself is not a very large city. It's actually kind of in the metro Atlanta area. It's outside the perimeter. The perimeter, by the way, for those not in Atlanta, that's a highway called two eighty five, and two eighty five encircles all of the city of Atlanta and some of the outlying metro areas. Stonecrest is outside of that. It's a little less than a half hour drive from downtown Atlanta. The traffic's not bad, but anyway, Stonecrest's proposal included the chance for Amazon to essentially have its own city within Stonecrest itself. Stonecrest would continue to exist, but the city of Amazon would be carved out from a space within Stonecrest's holdings, with Stonecrest apparently handling all the utilities and municipal things that would be required for Amazon to operate. But people figured that Stonecrest didn't really have a chance because Atlanta had its own proposal into Amazon, and as we would see on that short list, Atlanta would end up making it on the list, Stonecrest did not. Now, other places were taking a less gimmicky approach, but no less effective. New Jersey offered tax breaks amounting to around five billion buckaroos. That's a princely sum, if ever there was one. Now, this was figured because the deal said that the state would offer up to ten thousand dollars per job created within New Jersey per year for an entire decade. Now, Amazon was pitching the HQ two as a project that would ultimately bring in fifty thousand jobs to whichever area the facility would be located in. So if you take fifty thousand jobs, you multiply that times ten thousand dollars, then you multiply that times ten years, and you get five billion dollars over that ten year period. Other cities offered their own incentives, all eager to convince Amazon to pick their location for HQ two. Now, this would ruffle feathers in more than a few places. There were critics who were arguing that peticians seemed far more eager to cater to one of the world's richest human beings rather than actually use their powers to make the lives of their constituents better and safer. Many people were worried that should their own city actually win the bidding, it would mean a net loss for the region, that whatever benefit Amazon's arrival would bring wouldn't be enough to offset what the area had given up in order to get Amazon there. I feel this distinctly because living in Atlanta, there's still people at least of my age or older who are wincing over the Summer Olympics of nineteen ninety six because Atlanta bent over backward in order to get the Olympics to our city and spent an awful lot of money in order to make that happen. And while many of the facilities that were built were repurposed after the Olympics, so they didn't like just go to waste or anything. There were a lot of questions as to whether or not it ultimately was worth the expense that was paid to get the Olympics there. That's a matter for another time, but I mean this is a common thing, like within cities where you'll hear about cities that are trying to coax a company or other organization into the city, and that sometimes the things they're using to coax the company end up costing more than any benefit you see from the company actually going there. That was a real fear in a lot of places. Now this gets complicated because many times the actual deals that were being proposed were covered by non disclosure agreements, which means they were not public knowledge. People were not allowed to talk about what was actually in the deal. So we had cases where people just didn't know what the cities were agreeing to and you wouldn't know until Amazon made its decision. And if it shows your city, then presumably at least some of the information would become public and maybe you wouldn't agree with it. But at the time you weren't being told anything, which obviously was not helping with trust issues. And you know, some cities were really worried about how Amazon would have a big impact on their communities, like in New York. I mentioned that earlier. In New York City, there were lots of critics who were bringing up questions about this, that Amazon's impact on the city would be so severe and meanwhile, it would be off the hook for paying for that stuff, that all of that burden would go to citizens instead. So in New York that became a huge conversation about how, Yeah, according to the brokers, it's not like they were taking money away from one project and giving it to Amazon. The brokers were saying, we're not doing that. We're not taking money away from anything that's in our budget. We're doing is we're offering incentives to Amazon. But the critics were saying, sure, but if Amazon takes you up on it, and they build this facility and they use that facility, they are going to put more stress on our infrastructure, whether that's in the school systems, in the roads, in the public transportation, whether it's just in all these other things that might or might not be intangible. They're going to put a strain on that. And meanwhile, through these tax incentives, you're not going to require Amazon to pay for them, but it has to be paid. Someone has to pay for that, so that ends up falling on all the other citizens. So what you're essentially doing is giving Amazon a free pass and making New Yorkers pay for it. That was like the big conversation that was happening in New York, And honestly, I think that there's a lot of merit in those criticisms. Now, in some cases, the incentives that were being offered in these deals would turn out to be the ones that didn't have any actual legislative backing. So, in other words, the people who were responsible for putting the proposal together didn't actually have the authority to make the offers they were making. They were doing what some salespeople often do. This is based upon my own personal observations in that some salespeople will make really big promises in order to land a sale, particularly salespeople who were on commission. They will make promises to the moon and back in order to get the ink on the dotted line, and once that ink has dried, they shift to the next deal, and meanwhile someone else is left holding the bag figuring out how do I deliver upon the promises that were made by the salesperson. That stinks. It's not the salesperson's job necessarily to deliver upon those promises. They're already doing something else. It's your job that sucks. I have been that sucker more than once and it is no fun. But yeah, there were cases in which Amazon was dealing with people who did not have the authority to make the deals they were offering. So the next step if Amazon had picked those places would be that the brokers would have to turn to the legislation and say our legislative body rather and say, hey, can we agree to make this a law? Because I already kind of told Amazon it could have a puppy, so we kind of got to get it a puppy. Sorry by then. In the end, Amazon did not choose a single place. It chose two places. However, as we'll get to Amazon would subsequently hit the eject button on one of those two choices and ultimately just go back down to one. Now Further, some would argue that Amazon's choices would reveal that the company had always had its future destinations in mind and had never really seriously considered any other potential location. So this is not, you know, verified, But there are skeptics who said, oh, Amazon always planned for these two locations to be the answer. They just said they were accepting proposals because it created a bidding war. Like if you already know where you're going to move, but you also know that your move is something that a lot of people are going to look at as a desirable thing, like they want you to move into the location, why not create a bidding war so that you get the sweetest deal possible. Right, Yeah, you know you're already going to go there, but they don't know that. So what you say is, hey, we're thinking about going someplace. We haven't made up our mind yet, what are you going to do to convince us to come to your neck of the woods. That was the kind of allegation or accusation or suspicion. Suspicion is probably the best word for it. A lot of people held that Amazon had already had in mind where it was going to go, they just hadn't told anyone because it was a way to wheedle out the best possible deal. Now, I'm not saying Amazon actually did stack the deck from the start. However, there are other people who don't have a problem floating that possibility. For a long time, it actually seemed like Atlanta, Georgia was out in the leite Like all the way up to almost the end, people thought Atlanta was seriously in the running. There was a time when most folks figured that Amazon was going to go to Atlanta, to the point where bookies in Vegas were giving Atlanta the best odds of being the city to become HQ two. But that is not where Amazon chose to go. In the end, Amazon sort of chose to divide and conquer. Now, part of that might have been because it turned out to be a lot harder to find a single location that would have access to fifty thousand or so tech workers that the company was looking to fill out these offices over the course of like a decade. There just weren't very many great single locations that could handle that kind of demand, and so Amazon instead chose to split the HQ two into two locations, one in New York City specifically Long Island City in Queens, and the other in Arlington County in northern Virginia. As we will see, that's not exactly how things would turn out. But first let's take another quick break. We're back. So Amazon announced their decision in November twenty eighteen. The backlash happened almost instantly. Now, to be clear, there were plenty of critics who had lots to say about how Amazon had conducted the whole search in the first place, and then there were even more critics about how the various areas that were under consideration had tried to outdo one another in publicity stunts and incentive packages that were s with NDA's. But when Amazon said, yeah, we're actually spliting this up and neither of the choices include the cities that were thought to be in the top of the running, folks kind of flip their lids right Like people were just already assuming that Atlanta was going to be the location, for example, or maybe Miami, Florida. But when it turned out not to be the case, a lot of folks were saying, well, that makes no sense. You must have had this planned out from the beginning. Now, it did become clear that in New York, the city had offered truly massive tax breaks more than a billion dollars tied to job creation. And remember this is half of the jobs that the HQ two was to hold. Right, the original concept was a single campus that would house around fifty thousand jobs. Instead we're looking at two campuses, each capable of holding around twenty five thousand employees. Now, some of the folks who brokeered the deal really defended it. Like I said, they argued that they weren't taking money from other projects, so this was not a net loss in any way, shape or form for the city. But then, as I mentioned, critics were saying, well, yeah, it's not like you took money out of the school budget to give to Amazon, but you are offering Amazon the chance to occupy a large part of Long Island City, not paying taxes, and meanwhile being a burden on taxpayers in the city, And that was something you couldn't just dismiss. Now, that was an ongoing issue, largely brought by AOC Alexandria Arcasio Cortes, who had just recently been elected to the House of Representatives in New York, and she was making a very strong and passionate argument against the deal that was being offered to Amazon. She was not the only one like there were Republicans who also disagreed with the deal that was being offered. So, as I mentioned before, this was something that people across both sides of the aisle had agreement upon. They just felt that this was an unnecessary gesture to a company led by someone who again was frequently in the running to be the richest person in the world. Things in Virginia were a little bit similar, but you know, they had promised more than half a billion dollars in cash grants, again tied to job creation within the region, but in Virginia, resistance was a bit more muted. It wasn't nearly as passionate as what was happening in New York. Also, Virginia had facilities that needed to be filled. There were these large campuses of buildings that at one time or another belonged to defense contractors, but those companies had gone out of business or moved away, and so there were some pretty significant office space areas that were vacant, and the idea was that, well, we need to fill that space up. It's not doing any good right now. So that became part of kind of the deal to Amazon. There were more than enough questionable decisions going around. However, for example, in Virginia, according to an article I read by Casey Newton in The Verge, the deal brokers had agreed to make sure that Amazon would actually receive written notice of any Freedom of Information Act public requests in advance, so that the company would have kind of a head start to figure out how best to protect itself before you know, something potentially nasty becomes public information. And many of the folks who had tried to land this deal had, as a matter of course, done all this, like I said, in secret, so that truly undermines citizen trust, like when you find out your leaders are secretly making these deals that have huge benefits to a company and allowing the company to operate by a completely different set of rules than the rest of us do. Like I think most Americans have an understanding that there are different judicial systems, and those systems depend heavily upon how influential and wealthy you are, and the more influential and the more wealthy you are, generally speaking, the better off you are, and the less repercussions you will face if you are ever cold in front of the court. And sometimes you know, laws just don't apply to you. That's not always the case. If you steal from other rich people, for example, you can still be sent to you know, prison for a long time. See also Sam Beateman freed. But for the most part, if you're really wealthy and influential, you don't have to worry as much. Well, that seemed to be the feeling people were having with these kind of deals with Amazon, that Amazon was giving this preferential treatment that no one else in the region would receive, and that rubs people the wrong way because it's inherently unfair. In New York, politicians on both sides raised questions and resistance to the plans, and just a few months after Amazon announced its intention to move into the Big Apple, the company changed course. In February twenty nineteen, Amazon said, you know what, on second thought, we're not going to build an HQ in Long Island City and they canceled those plans even then, like there had been some money, time and effort spent on preparing for this, so that was a waste. But yeah, Amazon pulled out, and the brokers in New York called it one of the biggest tragedies they had ever seen. Now keep in mind they said that in twenty nineteen. All they needed to do was wait a single year and then they would see what a real tragedy actually is, because trust me, the pandemic was way worse than a big company deciding against moving into town anyway. At that point in twenty nineteen, Virginia would become the one and only site for HQ two, or maybe HQ one point five, because it wasn't as big as HQ was going to be, right, it was going to be twenty five thousand people, not fifty thousand. So Amazon would also open some supplemental offices, one of which would be in New York, one that would be in Nashville, Tennessee. They just wouldn't be on a scale of an HQ two. So those financial deals that Virginia had made, keep in mind, those were tied to job creation. But then between Amazon's announcement of the HQ two locations, which ultimately would just become Virginia, and when HQ two would actually be ready to open, which was in the summer of twenty twenty three, we got the pandemic and boom, Suddenly people were not going into offices at all, even offices that were going to be State of the art and the result of huge political and financial deals would remain largely empty. Heck, I mean the construction work on offices would stop for quite some time because of lockdown and things of that nature. So Amazon was not ready to open the Virginia facility until the summer of twenty twenty three, which, as I'm sure you've noticed, came after the pandemic hit. And perhaps this is one of many reasons why Amazon has pushed so hard for a return to office, because again, the company's financial incentives in Virginia are tied to job creation within the region, and Amazon just has not been hitting those numbers. They have not been on track at all. In fact, Tao Armas of The Washington Post reported in April of this year that the number of people employed in the Virginia office actually shrank last year. The HQ two as it stands right now, includes a pair of high rise buildings and has a capacity for around fourteen thousand employees. Now, remember, the goal ultimately is to hit twenty five thousand, and originally the idea was to hit twenty five thousand by the end of the twenty twenties. And while it has the capacity for fourteen thousand in its existing facilities. Right now, it's more like eight thousand people work there. That's according to the most recent estimations I could find. It may not be exact, it may be more or less, but somewhere around eight thousand, so slightly more than half capacity. And again there are issues with the remote work. Plus, Amazon, like many other tech companies, has held a few rounds of layoffs in recent years that has impacted the hiring in Virginia. They've had hiring freezes and layoffs. That's really part of the problem. That's why the numbers have shrunk. And some of this is to do with the pandemic. A lot of it is, in fact, because during lockdown, a lot of tech companies in particular went into kind of a hiring extravaganza. But then once things calmed down, when the pandemic began to ease off a little bit, there were more hands on deck than we're needed, and so companies began to cut back again. We've seen this with Meta, We've seen it with Google, We've seen it with other places. Elon Musk positively eviscerated staff numbers over what used to beat Twitter. So in some ways you could argue Amazon was a little more gentle with their layoffs, which is a weird way to put it. I don't think getting laid off is ever really gentle. It stinks. But Amazon maintains that it still wishes to get to those twenty five thousand jobs on the books in Virginia. However, it may take a little bit longer than they initially anticipated when they were brokering these deals in the late twenty tens. So according to the company's VP of worldwide Economic Development, a woman named Holly Sullivan, the plan is to reach the twenty five thousand job milestone in Virginia by around twenty thirty eight, so another fourteen years. Ough. So the pandemic has really changed things, and you do have companies like Amazon that are passing return to office mandates. But the reality is that a lot of companies have found that remote work works. That's a pretty tough pill to swallow when a lot of your strategy has centered around the procurement of significant office space. It's tough for leaders who envisioned their towns turning into like a city of the future, filled with people who are working and living and playing in these high tech community centers. Tastefully landscaped and designed for ultimate pedestrian maneuverability. Instead, we're getting these large office buildings that are dramatically underutilized, with companies paying huge bills for rent and electricity and water and stuff, and meanwhile only a fraction of employees are even going in there. In some ways, I think it's understandable why company leaders are pushing back against remote work. They have heavily invested in some really expensive stuff, and if no one is going to the office, it's hard to justify those hefty expenses to your stakeholders, whether they're shareholders or private investors. And if people can work from remotely, they might not even live in places like Virginia where leaders expect you to deliver upon your promise to bring tens of thousands of jobs to the region. What if the people working for HQ two actually don't live anywhere close to Virginia because they don't have to. They can just log in remotely and work, well, then you're going to have problems trying to get those cash guarantees that you are banking on when you brokeer these deals back in twenty eighteen. So that's a big problem. Now there are other reasons why some bosses want folks to return to office. It's not all cynical stuff like justifying the office space or improving the optics, because you know, no one wants to have a client visit a practically deserted office floor that doesn't look good. You want the office to look busy and vibrant. So there are those reasons, and those are fairly shallow reasons for requiring employees to come back to the office. But there are at least some studies that have shown that for certain types of jobs, collaboration is the most effective when people are working within close proximity of one another, particularly with regard to mentoring. So that's not the case for everybody, but for engineers, for example, coder's computer scientists that kind of thing, they tend to benefit from working within proximity to others, particularly if you're talking about people who are kind of entry level into the position. They receive more frequent and higher quality feedback on their work from their peers who happen to be working within the same office space than if they would if everyone was working remotely. Like, people still get feedback on their work when they work remotely, but it doesn't tend to be as frequent or as high quality. So there are some use cases where a return to office has been shown to improve the overall quality of output. So I don't want to suggest that the only reasons any leaders ever want folks to go back into an office are shallow. I don't believe that's the case. I do think it's something that has to be considered carefully because there are so many other factors that affect your employees. For example, cost of living. Right like, there's so many tech companies that are in the San Francisco area, but I'm sure a lot of you are aware the price to live in San Francisco is so high that it's prohibitive for a lot of people. So remote work gives the ability to get one of those great salary jobs but potentially live someplace where it's a much lower cost of living. Your dollars go much further, So that makes a lot more sense. Being forced to come back into the office might mean that you have to relocate. It may mean that it's honestly unrealistic that you cannot do it because you can't afford to work at the place if you have to live there. So like I said, it's a delicate thing. It's nuanced, and the problem is that corporate policy as a rule doesn't do well with nuance. It does broad brush strokes. Anyway, that is what has happened to Amazon's HQ two so far. It is a work in progress. Clearly, to hit that goal of twenty five thousand jobs, Amazon is going to need to build even more office space in order to accommodate those extra bodies. They only have room for fourteen thousand. But before they do that, they still have six thousand empty desks to deal with at the existing facilities. I think all those cities that previously had bid upon the honor of having Amazon come to their town should probably pat themselves on the back for having dodged a bullet, unless, of course, people have found out more details about those proposals that the city had offered to Amazon, then there might be some more tough questions to answer. But that's a follow up on the story of Amazon's HQ two. There's obviously even more than that, and there are a lot of complicating issues that I didn't really touch on. But I think that that would require almost a full mini series to dive into everything from the polytical intrigue to you know, I didn't even touch on the fact that Amazon has famously been dealing with a lot of resistance from employees. A lot of employees in not just office spaces, but employees in like the warehouses, have been working toward unionization, and how Amazon has opposed that, sometimes to a degree that has been questioned as being potentially criminal. All of that plays a part into these kinds of stories, but again that would probably require its own mini series to get into real depth. I just wanted to give kind of an overview of how things had turned out because I was just looking back on old Tech Stuff episodes and I thought, oh, here's something I feel I should probably update, because when I recorded the first one, New York was still very much going to be one of the locations for Amazon's HQ two, and then just a few months later that was off the table. Well that's it for this episode. I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.