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Is Big Tech Turning New York City Into America's Second Silicon Valley? (nytimes.com) 144

When Facebook decided it wanted to move 6,000 workers into Hudson Yards in New York, "existing tenants were told to move," reports the New York Times, as "part of a rush by the West Coast technology giants to expand in New York City." The growth in New York is occurring largely without major economic incentives from the city and state governments. Officials are mindful of the outcry last year over at least $3 billion in public subsidies that Amazon was offered to build a corporate campus in Queens... Amazon's announcement last month that it would lease space in Midtown for 1,500 workers renewed a debate over whether incentives should be used to woo huge tech companies to New York...

At Google's New York office, highly skilled workers now outnumber their colleagues in sales and marketing. Of the nearly 800 job openings that Amazon has in the city, more than half are for developers, engineers and data scientists. "Every line of business and every platform is represented quite healthfully," said William Floyd, Google's head of external affairs in New York, the company's largest office except for its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. "Not everyone wants to be in California.'' Oren Michels, a tech adviser and investor who sold Mashery, a company based in San Francisco, to Intel in 2013, said that New York City had become a refuge for tech workers who did not want to be surrounded solely by those working in the same industry. "You have younger engineers and those sorts of people who frankly want to live in New York City because it's a more interesting and fun place to live," he said. "San Francisco is turning into a company town and the company is tech, both professionally and personally...."

Since 2016, the number of job openings in the city's tech sector has jumped 38 percent, an analysis for The Times by the jobs website Glassdoor found. In November, New York had the third-highest number of tech openings among United States cities, 26,843, behind just San Francisco and Seattle. It is not only the biggest tech firms that are growing in New York. From 2018 through the third quarter of 2019, investors pumped more than $27 billion into start-ups in the New York City region, the second most in that time for any area outside San Francisco, according to the MoneyTree Report by PwC-CB Insights. (Nearly $100 billion was invested in start-ups in the Silicon Valley area in that period....)

The major tech firms are expected to grow to the point that they are among the largest private tenants in New York in the coming years, rivaling longtime leaders like JPMorgan Chase.

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Is Big Tech Turning New York City Into America's Second Silicon Valley?

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  • Infrastructure load in such a metropole is already exceedingly high. I don't think anyone will be happier for adding additional load.

    Frankly if anything, if they want another Silicon Valley, why not plan a completely new city that is tailored towards this kind of economy? It's not like the money to do it wasn't there.

    • Frankly if anything, if they want another Silicon Valley, why not plan a completely new city that is tailored towards this kind of economy? It's not like the money to do it wasn't there.

      Because a lot of people want to get away from exactly that.

      New York City had become a refuge for tech workers who did not want to be surrounded solely by those working in the same industry. "You have younger engineers and those sorts of people who frankly want to live in New York City because it's a more interesting and fun place to live," he said. "San Francisco is turning into a company town and the company is tech, both professionally and personally...."

      From the summary even...

      • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        San Francisco wasn't like this before either, though. What makes anyone think New York won't have the same fate?

        If big tech brings most capital, the greedy bastards will hand over the city. If they really want New York as a "haven", then they need to take steps to make sure their own ilk doesn't change the city too much.

        • Because NY's economy is much more diverse, e.g. financial services which still dominate downtown.

        • by Hodr ( 219920 )

          NY has 10 times the population and nearly 10 times the size of SF and as the other reply states, is already very established in several other industries.

          So even if tech did take over, it would take a much longer time.

        • San Francisco wasn't like this before either, though. What makes anyone think New York won't have the same fate?

          If big tech brings most capital, the greedy bastards will hand over the city. If they really want New York as a "haven", then they need to take steps to make sure their own ilk doesn't change the city too much.

          Everywhere that Californians go as a "haven" starts to become California. That's popular in some circles when it's "just some hicks" being transformed, but I wonder if it's going to be popular in New York ...

          • by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @09:58AM (#59591972)

            San Francisco wasn't like this before either, though. What makes anyone think New York won't have the same fate?

            If big tech brings most capital, the greedy bastards will hand over the city. If they really want New York as a "haven", then they need to take steps to make sure their own ilk doesn't change the city too much.

            Everywhere that Californians go as a "haven" starts to become California. That's popular in some circles when it's "just some hicks" being transformed, but I wonder if it's going to be popular in New York ...

            New York is about the only place that would be improved by becoming California.

        • by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @10:04AM (#59591994) Journal

          As expensive as New York is (for both business and individuals), as crowded as it is, with all of the regulatory burdens they have... all of that compounded equals a big hassle. And yet, they're cramming into Hudson Yards. Facebook could go to any larger city to do these jobs. Dallas, Miami, Boston, Phoenix, you name it. There's ample tech talent, and what talent they don't have would relocate there for a good salary. But they CHOSE to go to NYC. Why? Because someone at Facebook wants to "live the New York adventure", checking that off of their bucket list, and Facebook has so much money that they'll readily agree to it to keep that group happy. That doesn't just take money. That takes stupid money.

          If these tech giants had real competition and they had to fight harder for those dollars, you wouldn't see this move happening. But Amazon, Google, and Facebook are essentially monopolies in their respective sectors. So they're at that point where the dollars pretty much flow in endlessly. As old rock star Neil Young put it in a letter to his fans during his prime, "You people are sending me more money than I can spend".

          Stupid Money equals stupid, extravagant decisions. At this point, the tech giants are Tony Montana sniffing a mountain of coke at his desk, with a lighted The World Is Yours globe in a fountain down in the lobby.

          • I see these companies absorbing those costs because of the recruitment/retention benefit.

            It absolutely makes sense for a large transnational corporation to have an office in NYC. Once you filter out the actual practical advantages -- sharing the same city with Wall St, finance, banking, advertising/media -- the balance is providing a "benefit" to high-value workers who would otherwise leave for a job in NYC.

            But I see many of them capping their commitment to NYC staffing that's not there for practical NYC r

          • As expensive as New York is (for both business and individuals), as crowded as it is, with all of the regulatory burdens they have... all of that compounded equals a big hassle

            Because those are not the only factor in the business decision.

            I've lived in a cheap area, a dying rust-belt former-city. Only reason there were programmers were defense contractors serving the local base. And recruitment was a massive problem. Any of the locals who graduated high school without being pregnant or addicted to something left town ASAP....and the local school system was awful anyway, since there wasn't enough tax base to pay for it.

            Which meant recruitment was trying to convince people to le

      • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        One idea that comes to mind is building a city like a solar system. In the center you have the city proper with suburbs surrounding it. And waaay outside you build a "asteroid belt" of industry.

        You connect the suburbs surrounding downtown directly by high speed, high capacity public transportation to keep the roads free.

        One point of the star belongs to Oracle, another to Google, the third to Facebook and so on. Whichever company you work at, that corresponding suburb you move into.

        You disallow any industry

        • One point of the star belongs to Oracle, another to Google, the third to Facebook and so on. Whichever company you work at, that corresponding suburb you move into.

          Sounds like a dystopian nightmare from a Stephenson novel. Do the corporations also get to manage their appointed suburbs, run the police and other public services there? Hard pass on that idea...

          • It sounds like a very ordinary "company town", which were typically mining towns. Or any of various seaports in history, with the docks and warehouses dominated by single companies like the East India company during England's colonial phase.

          • like a dystopian nightmare from a Stephenson novel

            Wait, are we sure those novels aren't Utopian?

            How can we tell for sure?

        • by cusco ( 717999 )

          That was the model of Moscow during the Soviet Union, it worked well for heavy industry but I'm not so sure that it's appropriate for modern highly-mobile tech workers. Think about having to uproot your family every few years when you change jobs in order to go work at one of the other tech companies, and also that your significant other would have to change jobs when you did.

    • by Hodr ( 219920 )

      Infrastructure load in such a metropole is already exceedingly high. I don't think anyone will be happier for adding additional load.

      Frankly if anything, if they want another Silicon Valley, why not plan a completely new city that is tailored towards this kind of economy? It's not like the money to do it wasn't there.

      Seems like it would be cheaper to retrofit a failing city that already has appropriate infrastructure (water, sewer, streets, etc.)

      Los Vegas comes to mind (not the strip obviously). I would say something in Michigan, except you would need to rebuild all the infrastructure as well.

  • Betteridge says so.

    • Betteridge-type headlines are really starting to take over this site.

      Should Coal Miners Learn To Code?
      Will Iran Launch a Cyberattack Against the U.S.?
      Will Australia's Wildfires Change the Country Forever?
      Is Big Tech Turning New York City Into America's Second Silicon Valley?

      • Will the Click Learn to Bait, Launching Silicon Cybercode?

        Will Australia's Miners Burn New York into a Coal Silicon Valley?

        Will Iran turn their big tech cyberattack into a wildfire that consumes them?

        Will slashdot learn to smell like OS/2 on a Chromebook?

  • by tweissin ( 1705886 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @04:01AM (#59591340)
    Tech people are some of the only people who can afford to live in NYC.
    • Tech people are some of the only people who can afford to *move* to NYC. There's lots of rent-controlled buildings, which allows some local flavor.
      • If you don't already live in a rent-controlled apartment, you don't rent a rent-controlled apartment.

        When they say it is one the most expensive cities in the world... unsurprisingly, that includes rent.

  • of Silicon Valley it seems like NYC would be one of the last places you want to go.
  • From the calls I get, the positions in NYC are "big vision", "leadership" roles, For most but not all technology experts, there is a real loss of innovation as they mature and learn more about leadership, budgets, and scheduling. I'd not expect technological innovation from there, I'd expect money to be allocated to technology projects from there.

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Well, the "big vision" people need actual technological experts to make their fantasies into reality, so if that's were "leadership" wants to locate they're going to have to bring in an army of people able to do that work to support them.

      • Ethical "big vision" need skilled sources of valid information. Quarterly bonus earning "big vision" people need cronies to generate support for their claims. They don't necessarily need to accomplish any of their big visions, merely escape before a collapse and take credit for the project. See the current president of the USA as a prime example of this approach.

      • by pyrrho ( 167252 )
        those people are available remotely and from all over the world, where they have to be distributed anyway.
  • Boston's 128 beltway was called Silicon Valley East by many, as far back as the 70s.

    Since then RTP, Austin,, Minneapolis, and Denver, among others, have come along.

    NYC is late to the game. Too late to be considered second by anyone who knows anything.
    • If by "anyone who knows anything" you mean a handful of nerds who read obscure magazines in the 70's, I guess so.
    • by Hodr ( 219920 )

      There's a difference between being a tech hub and being "the next silicon valley". The second would assume that the amount of tech related industry would rival the original. We have had none, to date, that rival the original in either the number of companies, size of companies, or value of investment. Probably not even if you combined every one of the places you just mentioned.

      • Probably not even if you combined every one of the places you just mentioned.

        Some day you might even get a chance to visit Boston, and from the sounds of it, it would be a really exiting trip for you, full of surprises.

    • Charlotte, NC and Madison, WI are also becoming tech hubs of their areas.
    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      NYC is late to the game. Too late to be considered second by anyone who knows anything.

      They don't mean second temporally. They mean second in size and scope.

  • by hashish16 ( 1817982 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @06:42AM (#59591530)
    This is pretty much the only reason why a Silicone Valley can exists in California and pretty much nowhere else.
    • This theory would work better if that was not a recently-passed law.

      Silicon Valley started in the late 50s/early 60s. It grew to prominence in the 80s. The law you cite was passed decades later.

    • Horse pucky, California has had Silicon Valley for many decades longer than they've had employee-friendly laws like that.

      Don't be an ignoramous who spews whatever their friends said as if it was true; look shit up. Learn to internet.

      • Horse pucky, California has had Silicon Valley for many decades longer than they've had employee-friendly laws like that.

        This is patently false. Non-compete agreements were outlawed in California way back in 1872.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • That link doesn't say what you think it says.

          I mean, the link says what you say. But that's just original research in wikipedia, unsurprisingly. Click their citation, and see if it actually says that! It says the law has existing that long in some form, sure. But has it existed in a way that helps tech workers? No. Originally it only applied to managers. And many California courts had considered it to only prevent contracts that would keep a person out of the industry, while allowing contracts that controll

  • Isn't this normal? Aren't about half of the jobs anywhere in the western world 'tech' jobs?

    • by Hodr ( 219920 )

      For every tech job you have a dozen service jobs. Retail, food, infrastructure, waste management, social services, education, defense, finance, religion, etc. etc. etc.

  • Awesome. That's a lot closer to me so I can go see the homeless shtting streets and hipster pod cities for my own.
  • No matter how much it wants to be New York is never going to be a "valley".

  • The growth in New York is occurring largely without major economic incentives from the city and state governments.

    There is no reason the taxpayers should be forced to cough up billions of dollars for multi-billion dollar, international companies who pay little if any taxes to come to their area. If companies want to put down roots, they should pay their own way, not have the community start in a financial hole for years, if not decades, to come.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @08:36AM (#59591754)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ceg97 ( 976736 )
        Its a little like the stock market - for every seller there is a buyer. So there are many people who want to move to the New York area. It might boggle your mind but there are many who don't think avoiding taxes is a major life goal.
        • by sfcat ( 872532 )

          Its a little like the stock market - for every seller there is a buyer. So there are many people who want to move to the New York area. It might boggle your mind but there are many who don't think avoiding taxes is a major life goal.

          And there are even more who just want to move to the $city (for your value of city) when they are young. There is nothing wrong with this and there are many causes. Some of it is that people want to live in a city when they are young and can enjoy it. Some of it is naive about the difficulty of living in a city with their specific earning potential. Some of it is the nature of the current economy with most of the opportunity concentrated in cities. But it does create an imbalance for folks who work in

      • People are leaving California, but more people are coming than are leaving.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • From April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2019, California grew 6.4% and New York State grew by 0.4%

          Learn to internet, look facts up before you state them, even if you think you "remember." It isn't hard, and you're wrong 100% of the time that you pull it out of your ass, so learning to look things up would be hugely beneficial for you personally, even more so than for the average person with a small ass.

      • Just wait till the first big noreaster rolls in and the power goes out/streets can't be cleared, or a muggy 105 degree late July 2 week spell, they will beg to go somewhere nicer

      • by amorsen ( 7485 )

        It's the taxation and housing that has them fit to be tied!

        To a first approximation, if someone predicts that an area is doomed because high house prices are causing people to leave, you can dismiss their argument. If people really were leaving and not being replaced, house prices would not be high.

        Making that kind of argument will mostly cause people to wonder about whether you are generally a rational person. Also it will cause people to mod you up on Slashdot. What that says about Slashdot users, myself included, is unclear.

  • No Bias Here... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mightypenguin ( 593397 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @08:32AM (#59591748)
    "highly skilled workers now outnumber their colleagues in sales and marketing" You heard it here, Sales and Marketing are not "highly skilled" but merely drudgeons plodding through life rueing the day they were born.
  • by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @10:09AM (#59592002)

    Almost nobody but young developers are going to pull up and move to NYC. People with families are not going to move, nobody over 35 is going to live in NYC for midwestern salary; I am willing to bet none of these "forced moves" include substantial pay raises.

    And, they get free H1-B slave labor when they fail to fill all the positions they are opening up.

    • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @10:42AM (#59592104)

      I don't think they're looking to relocate people. They're looking for a place to put the next crop of CS grads that is slightly less expensive than Seattle or SV. Every one of these companies relies on a constant pipeline of new graduates looking to continue their campus lifestyle into their late 20s. This is how they get constant 70+ hour weeks out of them...put them in a hip, fun office environment and provide meals, entertainment and services designed to keep them working. Locating in NYC allows these new students to live the big city hipster dream while they're young, so it's attractive. And if they're in the office most of the day, they won't mind the closet-sized apartment they're renting for slightly less than the SF going rate. :-)

      We'll see what happens...this is exactly what played out in the last tech bubble. Eventually, a recession will come and even the TBTF FAANG companies will look to slow their spending rates.

  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @10:26AM (#59592046)

    For those who don't remember, the First Dotcom Bubble occurred simultaneously in SV/SF and New York City. At the time it was because the massive internet buildout was being driven by publishers, media companies and advertising firms, traditionally based in NYC. The idea was that the web was going to just another media type for the traditional publishers to push content onto, so NYC got the name Silicon Alley. That, and there was easy access to the finance epicenter so it was easy for founders to go on CNBC and cheerlead for their pet food startup.

    My guess is that this time, it's driven by the FAANGs needing entertainment talent to push their lock-in streaming services. Being a metro New Yorker, seeing more potential places to work is a good thing, but Amazon isn't known for being a nice employer. NYC is expensive, but not California expensive unless you choose to live in the city. Housing and taxes are not cheap, but you can certainly get a house for less than $2M within a reasonable commute...you can't do that in CA anymore. So, you get the young hip city vibe with an ever so slight reduction in salary requirements. (If you live in the city, good luck...there you're still talking SF-style $3000+ rents.)

    I assume that a lot of these jobs are going to be typical hipster creative jobs that they'd put in CA or Seattle, and the technical jobs are likely going to be "Cloud Architects" which translates loosely into "AWS Salesman."

  • by wired_parrot ( 768394 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @12:27PM (#59592422)
    Actually, it is California that is America's second silicon valley. Up to the 1950s, most of America's electronic industry were centered around the New Jersey-New York metropolitan area. Edison's Menlo Park, Bell labs and GE's Research lab were all based in the area. It wasn't until Shockley moved to northern California in 1956 to start Shockley Semiconductors that northern California began displacing the NY-NJ metropolitan area as a tech sector hub in the U.S. So in essence this is just a return to tech's roots.
    • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )
      IIRC, David Sarnoff provided one complete floor for Edwin Armstrong in the Empire State building to develop a radio transmission mode with less noise than AM which became FM. Imagine that, a techie site right in the middle of NYC.

      Getting back to California Silicon Valley, it has cultural roots of if you fail at a startup you will not be tarred for the rest of your life like in other places. You can re-invent yourself. This comes from the 1800s gold rush where just about everyone was a failure. What they a

  • by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @02:23PM (#59592912)

    Somewhere like Kansas city which already has fiber build out thanks to google or Effingham IL which is at the intersection of the two largest interstates in the country, the heart of the heartland. The land is dirt cheap, the ground is extremely stable (there are dozens of modernized homes from 18th century), the populations are enough to cultivate workers who desperately need the jobs and have strong mid-western work ethic but so small that the communities would lose effectively nothing giving massive tax breaks since they have tiny revenues now.

    Building out tech infrastructure someplace like that would land a heavy blow against the last mile and revitalizing a part of the country more or less left in the dust by the shift to the tech economy. Seriously, look at how cheap housing is https://www.zillow.com/effingham-il. Compare that to SF. Don't want to be evil? Then make sure you put job training in place and provide true entry level opportunities for the locals.

    • Recruitment, retention and executives.

      There's a lack of local universities producing new grads to hire (Stanford, Berkley, Lots near NYC). There's also very few young people interested in moving to Kansas City just to be in Kansas City.

      For older hires, the school systems are not as good. And it's likely that the kids they do raise aren't going to stay in the area.

      Lastly, you'd have to have some senior management that want to move there to run the place. They aren't going to want to brag about their palat

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "There's a lack of local universities producing new grads to hire (Stanford, Berkley, Lots near NYC). There's also very few young people interested in moving to Kansas City just to be in Kansas City."

        Well right on top of Effingham you actually have Champaign-Urbana and while the name might be less familiar than Berkeley or Stanford their CS and Engineering curriculums are consistently in the top 5 in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Computer_Science,_University_of_Illinois_at_Urbana%E2

        • by sconeu ( 64226 )

          If you're a tech nerd and you don't know about UIUC, you are not a tech nerd.

        • Well right on top of Effingham you actually have Champaign-Urbana and while the name might be less familiar than Berkeley or Stanford their CS and Engineering curriculums are consistently in the top 5 in the world

          One university does not produce enough recent graduates. You need several.

          Why limit your recruitment pool to local and willing to relocate?

          Because there's very few companies that are willing to do 100% remote work for all positions.

          Actually they are better

          Statistics say no. No mater how much you use class size as the only metric.

          and there is effectively no "bad element" for kids to get in with.

          This is laughably out-of-touch with reality. Y'all think that meth just teleports in from the evil big cities?

          You might be surprised how many people would be thrilled to have safe and high quality schools, cheap housing, fresh local agricultural produce at every store and a tech salary that actually spends at their fingertips

          You might be surprised how many people accomplish this without having to live in the rural midwest.

          Have upper middle management run the place

          That makes them senior management.

          From Effingham Illinois it is a pretty short hop to Chicago, St Louis, and Indianapolis all of which are within a couple hours

          My airport's 15 minutes

    • What specific value does being close to an interstate highway have for a tech company?

      You believe that people in the midwest have a different work ethic than the rest of the country. Why do you believe that is a possible thing for a tech company? The internet says that the "midwestern work ethic" is "an unwaveringly pragmatic and dogmatic belief that hard work and perseverance rooted in quiet humility pays off in the long run." In what way do those values affect a tech startup? Does it affect a software com

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "What specific value does being close to an interstate highway have for a tech company?"

        A small tech company? Very little. A large tech company has substantial need for ready travel and to be able to truck in and out equipment and deliveries. But it isn't so much the interestates themselves. They meet there because it is a geographically significant location both north/south and east/west, for the same reason the major railroads intersect at the same point. The great plains are about as geologically stable

    • Ah, MotherEffingham Illinois. The city, or should I say truck stop, which got that name one time in my distant youth, when I had to transfer between Greyhound buses there at 3 in the morning. No, sorry to say, I don't think it is going to attract many workers from the coasts, and not even from the local university in Champaign-Urbana.

    • VP Biden told all those coal miners they should take up coding so there's going to be a huge talent pool there just waiting for their big break.

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