"one of the best recruiting tools Amazon has is if people come interview on a nice day, and people are sitting outside having lunch from a food truck."
Have they been to Seattle during the months of November to June?
I have (I live in Seattle, but don't work for Amazon) and the weather is pretty great roughly nine months out of the year. Late November to February are dreary but spring, summer, and most of fall make up for it. Sorry for leaking the secret, fellow Seattleites.
I was in Seattle a number of years ago for a training session, in January. It rained off and on, but overall I thought the weather was beautiful. Except the one day that it snowed, but the rest of the week was in the 70's.
Edit: to the response below, this was back in 98 or 99, something like that. I've looked up the historical weather, and it must have been that it felt like 70's to me, coming from Chicago (so it was probably more like 50's). I just remember not needing a jacket for most of the time I was there, and it "feeling good" when the sun came out.
16 year resident here, and I'm trying to think of a week where it snowed and hit 70 within a seven day period. I'm not saying GP is lying, not at all, but perhaps might have selectively remembered their time in Seattle in January. Perhaps the sun peeked out and it just seemed like it was 70 in contrast. :-)
Maybe they're thinking of Denver? Doesn't sound like the PNW I know. Although occasionally you do get some nice days in February. Not 70F nice, though.
I hesitate to pick on a post that was probably just a typo or remembering slightly wrong, but I was wondering so I looked it up: the record high for Seattle in January is 67F recorded in 1931. And the record low is zero...Fahrenheit. Yoiks, I'd have to consider moving again if it hit zero. :-)
70 is a bit of an exaggeration, but 60 is not unusual. And if you're coming from most other places in the Northern US, it feels like 70 since you're coming from snow and ice.
We lived in Bellevue for about 18 months and the weather was beautiful. Almost everyone we met said the whole "it always rains" thing is just something they tell people so they'll stay away.
I moved from a pretty dry state to the Potomac valley, and noticed that if I happened to mention Seattle people would say, But it rains there all the time. The ground that we were standing on might be soft from recent storms, mushrooms might be sprouting around our feet, but Hey it rains in Seattle.
No, March '13 to Aug '14. But yes, many people called it a mild winter. While we had previously spent 5 years in Dallas, and 4 in Boston. My wife is originally from Idaho, and I from Michigan, anything less than multiple feet of snow, is "mild" :)
Depends on how you define great weather. It doesn't rain nearly as much as people assume (lived there 6 years), but most days have some light drizzle. For a tennis player, that is emotionally taxing (is it going to rain? should we make plans).
I moved to Seattle and it's not the rain that bothers me (it's really not as bad as people say, even during the winter months), it's the cold. .. or rather lack of hot.
It never gets above 26C here. There are plenty of other cities like this (London just had a record heatwave .. of 29C; seriously that's too hot for them. People were passing out in the toobs. Wellington, another coastal city, has people bitching when it gets up to 27C as too hot), but the difference is they do get warm .. for an extended period of time. From May through August (opposite in Wellington cause hemispheres), you know you can put your jacket away. You don't need it. At worst it's gonna be a little refrigerator like if you stay out too late.
In Seattle, it could be mid-June and you might need that jacket...at noon, and then the next day you'll be burning up.
While I miss the seasons a little bit (mainly thunderstorms and snow for a little bit), Seattle is WAY better than the midwest. I'll gladly take mild weather over hot humid summers and winters so cold all you see during the winter outside are bundles of clothing walking around.
>I have (I live in Seattle, but don't work for Amazon) and the weather is pretty great roughly nine months out of the year.
I have to disagree: it depends on how you define "great". If you think Seattle in the winter is bad, try spending a winter in North Dakota or Minnesota. Or even the northeast, such as upstate NY.
I lived in Seattle for almost 12 years, and I only found 2-3 months a year to be what I'd call "great" weather (or even good). My life and mood have improved dramatically since I moved to a place with more sun and fewer clouds. Obviously this is largely a matter of personal preference, but I couldn't disagree more that 9 months of the year in Seattle are great....
> "one of the best recruiting tools Amazon has is if people come interview on a nice day, and people are sitting outside having lunch from a food truck."
Because no one else has that ever? That seems pretty normal, pretty silly to consider a perk and personally pretty useless.
It's closer to like November to March/April. It was in the 80s for a few days in April here this year.
Also, the only places around the country where it isn't dreary, damp, and grey from late fall through spring is California or the South. Compared to the Northeast or the midwest, Seattle's winters are incredibly mild.
A lot of the "intermountain West" gets cold but sunny winters. It doesn't rain that much here in Bend - we get a lot of sun, actually. Cold and dry beats just above freezing and drizzly gray rain any day, in my book.
Totally agree. Here in Spokane we get four seasons including sunny, hot, dry summers and cold sun-on-snow winters. It's striking how much it's like my native New England, right down to the Maple trees, but minus the humidity and mosquitoes. I lived in Seattle for years and the winter temps in the 30s and 40sF combined with damp and gray just wore me down. In my opinion winter ran from October-June. One of the more comical things I discovered upon moving to Seattle was the concept of a "sun break" -- a usually brief interlude where the sun found a weak spot in the clouds, shined through, and everybody ran outside to see it.
Rather than sun breaks, I've always referred to them as "sucker holes." A whole bunch of suckers are going to get caught out in the next downpour that's surely only a few minutes away.
Having grown up in Indiana, I approve this message. I'll take cloudy and drizzle over -25F and snow. I think Seattle winters are great. All the snow I can handle just 45 minutes down the road, and when I'm sick of snow I just get in my car and drive back home.
I do miss Charlotte, NC, though (though recently passed laws make me pine less for NC than I used to). My first winter there, I remember asking a coworker, "does the sun EVER stop shining here?"
Having worked at Amazon.com, we used to joke that we could get anyone to move to Seattle if they interviewed in August. The summers are pretty amazing in Seattle, but the weather sucks the other 9 months of the year.
Totally off topic, but does anyone know who organizes the weekly sailboat groups in lake union? I see them from my apartment about once a week and they all tie their boats together when it starts to get dark and have what looks like a mild party. It looks like so much fun.
July 5 is the first day of summer. Every year on the 4th you'd be biting your nails wondering if it was gonna stop raining so you could set off fireworks when it got dark at 10pm.
I'd rather have free lunch brought in than have to go outside (rain or shine) and buy my lunch. I'd be more interested by a first rate company cafeteria with good (cheap or free) food.
I don't know what the food trucks are like in Seattle, but in SF they are as expensive (or more so) than regular restaurants. So if I'm going to go out for food, I'd rather go someplace where I can sit down and eat.
I'd rather pay for my food because then there isn't the expectation that I stay at work to "enjoy" it. But I'm with you on food trucks. I just don't see the appeal (no, I don't need half of my lunch sliding down my arm as I stand up to eat it) but, damn, they are popular in urban Seattle.
I dunno, lunch was pretty well enforced at amazon. Go out and get food, come back and eat somewhere (conference room, kitchen area, outside, wherever). Took a full out each day.
Way worse where I am now, 25 minute lunch break. ugh.
Or have they been any place else in Seattle? I just got back from enjoying a tasty burrito from a food truck, and I don't work anywhere near Amazon.
Regardless, I can't see this as a selling point to anyone but college grads. Anyone with experience will probably know that the novelty of eating off a food truck on a sunny day will pale in comparison to other considerations (starting with Amazon's reputation as a workplace).
Weather is like many things a very personal matter. Some like it dry, some like it cold, others like it wet. Unfortunately, there seems to be this overwhelming agreement that warm (even humid) is good and anything else is bad. I haven't been to a place yet where saying "good weather" doesn't mean warm and sunny. There is no good or bad weather, if we're honest. No rain equals less water reserves, warm winter in some places equals more bugs in the summer, and so on. The world climate isn't binary and very, very complex. So, wishing for warm and sunny 365 days in every corner of the world is a little foolish and unrealistic, besides not being comfortable to everybody.
People live in Alaska, Seattle is not the worst, someone moving from Alaska might like Seattle.
People live in Detroit, Job is scarce. Moving to Seattle to get a job especially if it pays well might be the best move instead of being unemployed.
People live in East Louis and South Chicago, Moving to Seattle to escape the violence because you want to raise your kids in a better place is not bad.
I'm not from Seattle, but I just want to say there are many valid reasons to move to Seattle. I say this because every time Seattle comes up, this discussion of the weather comes up, I don't see that when folks talk about London tho.
> discussion of the weather comes up, I don't see that when folks talk about London tho.
Really‽ I'm from London, and pretty much everyone I meet makes some comment on the weather there.
I've had people insist to me that London is rainy and foggy for months on end. I think this comes from the usual depiction in cinema, which is pretty much opposite to the weather in TV series set in the countryside surrounding London. The reality is closer to the sunny weather, fog is very rare.
Sunny weather? That's what you get in places like Barcelona, not London definitely.
There's a ceiling made of what seems to be solid clouds 10 months a year, including light rain as the default weather status throughout. This June has been atrocious (we just had the heating on for a while this evening) and last year we didn't have summer bar a week at the end of June.
But yeah, fog is very rare. It's just clouds, always. Grey grey grey and wet wet wet. OTOH you don't have to constantly suffer 30°C with 80% humidity for +4 months a year, which is nice if you're not on holiday.
> Amazon's is the most ambitious gambit of them all. When its spheres and three surrounding towers are completed, the company will have 10 million square feet of office space in Seattle, more than 15 percent of the city's inventory, on a campus that occupies more than 10 square blocks.
15% of a city's commercial inventory seems like a lot. Any comparable levels to companies in other cities? Is this typical for one company to own/lease such a large percentage of commercial real-estate or is the statistic misleading?
Eh, you've got to keep in mind that Seattle is pretty tiny itself, and is surrounded by a lot of suburbs that are also industrial/tech centers (Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Etc).
The real information here is that 10 square blocks is enough to be 15 percent of the city's inventory.
Seattle is tiny. So is SF. I'm amused by how small the core of all of the West coast cities seem to be when people try to convince me that there's dense urban living to be found outside of the East Coast.
Humana has more than 15% of the commercial inventory in downtown Louisville, KY, and maybe even still more than 15% of the entire Louisville metro area as a whole. I don't recall the exact numbers and searches aren't turning them up right now.
I'm not sure it's that unusual, statistically. If anything, one large company per city is maybe closer to the historic norm (especially if you count old fashioned company towns and more modern might as well be company campus towns like Redmond, WA) and something of the median or mode of city existence, at least in the US.
I live in Seattle and and I'm not surprised by the 15% figure. But that will change. The majority of Seattle is not developed yet and there's a lot of new construction going on. Give it a few years for all the current development to finish and your going to see significantly more apartment and office buildings. So the 15% figure will start to go down.
In a story on Arthur Sulzberger, Mark Bowden wrote in
Vanity Fair, "Whether owing to hubris or sheer
distraction, the erection of a new headquarters often
seems to spell trouble for corporations."
Anecdotal experience tends to lead many people in the
technology industry to suggest that growth (or newly
“sexy”) companies rapidly head into difficulties at
about the same time as they move from the seedy garages
and crumbling buildings they started in to shiny new
office buildings.
I first saw it reported in SFGate, they've since retracted the story:
Editor's note: SFGATE has removed this story after reviewing Zynga's company valuation.
The initial report was based on the enterprise value of Zynga compared to its cash reserves and property value. The latest company financial data as of May 6th, 2016, however, indicates an overall market valuation of $2.2 billion, with cash reserves of $987 million, putting its enterprise value at $1.21 billion, which is significantly more than the projected value of the company's real estate holdings at 8th and Townsend Streets in San Francisco.
Amazon didn't build headquarters before the SLU move. Before that they rented pre-existing structures. That difference is the point of the predictive signal.
The problem with that correlation in this case, is that in all of the best examples of that phenomenon, the companies were no longer being run by their founders. I'd be willing to bet that's not a trivial factor in the overall situation.
And also regression to the mean (a constant factor in any of these attempts to predict the fall of a big company). When will a company want to, or need to, build a big headquarters? When things have been going very well and the sky seems like the limit.
Do you need specially-designed places to be creative?
Off-hand, the places that were really wildly creative during the 20th century were pretty standard offices and workshops, weren't they? Think of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and Bletchley Park. They all accomplished wild things. But the buildings were unremarkable.
I've read that the Bell Labs offices were designed in order to promote collaboration. It was laid out such that there'd be long hallways between the offices and things like restrooms and stairs, so that there'd be greater chances of colleagues bumping into each other and talking about work.
I don't have a copy of The Idea Factory[1], where I recall reading this handy, but that's my best recollection.
And now we put everyone in open-floorplan barns to "promote colllaboration", with nowhere for people to go back and work at when they are done collaborating.
"Hallway conversations" have become "constant conversations"
One of the first things I ask potential employers in my current job search is whether they employ open space office or not, and simply refuse to talk further if they want me to sit with 20+ people in one room. I hope more developers will do it to put some pressure on this matter.
I'd love to have the leverage to do that, but I don't. The vast majority of companies see nothing wrong with this, and I'm not so in demand that I can filter based on office space.
I have two theories of why open-plan offices are popular.
The first is simply that it's cheaper to have an open office. Modern office buildings tend to have large spaces -- nearly whole floors -- that are open, but can be subdivided. But subdivision costs money. Paying carpenters to put up walls isn't cheap, and even cube systems can be surprisingly expensive. Plus managers are accountable for costs. So they choose the cheap option.
The second is that open office plans are good for communication and collaboration, though less good for individual silent work. Managers are essentially all about communication and collaboration, which is why they love these open offices. Unfortunately while programmers need to both communicate and work alone, they need to communicate and collaborate much less than managers do, which is why office plans that are selected by managers make things difficult for the programmers.
Building 20 on MIT, home of a string of critical innovations that came out of WWII, designed as a temporary building, is beguilingly crappy looking. In reality, Building 20 ended up being an ideal incubator: you could knock down or put up a wall anytime you wanted (nobody cares if everything is temporary), you could stick your head out of the corridor and as for some Barium or copper wires from the guys across the hall. The entrances encouraged smart people working on different project to bump into each other. Building 20's replacement, a piece of Magazine Architecture designed by I.M. Pei caused the same innovators to be blissfully unaware they were working at cross purposes because they never saw each other in the glistening gloom of interior of that slab.
I visited PARC a couple times in the 90s. It was unusual in sitting atop a hill with a nice view and (iirc) no immediate neighbors. In the group I visited, researchers had their own offices, plus communal area. I vaguely remember some long corridors which might've increased the frequency of bumping into people.
(Having an office was not so freaking unusual 20 years ago.)
To be honest, the section of the city Amazon has "swallowed" was grass and weed filled parking lots 5 years ago as well as broken down buildings. While the construction has been a drag for drivers in that area, the city looks and feels so much better, IMO, due to their investments.
Now, has Amazon invested enough in infrastructure to help the swelling population they are partly to blame for increasing (not to mention lack of houses, housing prices, student class sizes, etc.)? No, not really - but that's the price of being one of the fastest growing cities with the lowest unemployment in the country. But in terms of the city buildings and neighborhood - so much better.
Yeah I don't get the complaints and honestly don't hear them much at least from my friends (I don't work for Amazon). I've lived here my whole life, seen the city change a lot. I used to think I'd probably move away some day. I've been to probably 40 countries now and the more I see of the world the more I see Seattle as ideal and heading (mostly) in the right direction.
I think people forget that Seattle was one of the first big cities to successfully revitalize their downtown. It started at Westlake Center and took twenty years to make it a mile north to South Lake Union.
That's how I feel about Amazon, too. It cracks me up some of the things the author laments losing. No broken bottles? No cigarette trash? I like having at least one area of the city somewhat clean.
You hear this sort of thing about the "Disney-fication" of Times Square in NYC all the time. Not that I'm a fan of Times Square for a variety of reasons but anyone who looks nostalgically back to the 42nd Street on 1985 has some seriously rose-colored glasses.
It's the dreaded gentrification. If your neighborhood isn't kept in its run down and decrepit state the land values might go up and push out people who can no longer afford to pay rent.
I don't think there's a need to be sardonic; the full paragraph that I believe you're referencing goes on to talk about other common sights and elements of various Seattle districts; the complaint that some Seattlelites are putting forward isn't "we want a decrepit city" it's they want their decrepit city.
The complaint about the changes Amazon and other companies are making is not about keeping the city in a state of disarray and filthiness, it's about control over the tone and feel of the city, preferring that a single corporate entity not be able to set or dictate the tone/feel to accommodate their interests. Even if there is a net positive as a result, the local residents have no choice in the matter - as was written in the article, those parts of the city are no longer Seattle in some people's minds, it's Amazon's territory.
I'm not condemning or condoning this position - I did live in the Seattle area for about 5 years, and while I loved it, didn't really have the same historical attachment most Seattle folk have, and they love their city, what it was, is, and what it can be.
It's not too difficult to empathize with the position either; suppose, in a rather silly example, that a wealthy business whose owners had a love for early 1900's german expressionism moved to your city (which you feel a connection to); over the course of a few years, a large part of your city begins to take the form of stills from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or from Metropolis. The owners clean up the area very well and bring in new trendy restaurants that meet their aesthetic vision. Even if you agree that the area has been changed for the better in terms of infrastructure and economics, are you really satisfied with having expressionism forced on you?
Again, this isn't to say that feelings should override progress with civil infrastructure improvement, but there's a bit more to the gentrification effect, specifically from the tech world, than just a bunch of grumpy people angry about losing their run down and decrepit land. People have seen what happened with San Francisco and they're scared, and rightfully so; while the standard of living in Seattle is decent, the average wages are no match for SV style tech money.
As someone who is a Seattle Native, I don't see many employed adults complaining about it nearly as much as I see early 20 somethings complaining about it. The same people who don't remember much of older Seattle. Yes, we had "grunge" but really, we are not missing much with these changes. I do dislike how expensive housing as gotten, but its not that.
Plus, Amazon is not the only player here. Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, and Disney are all in the area as well. Google is also building a new office in the SLU area as well.
I've actually stopped shopping at Amazon. I'll pay and extra $10 for high ticket items to avoid that retailer.
I'm sure many of the higher ups there don't have any ill-will, but they have unintentionally (or maybe intentionally; I dunno) become America's new Wal-Mart. That's a bad thing.
Consumerist culture erodes long term sustainability. Laptop/cellphone replacement cycles need to be 10 years, not 2. Old electronics need to be recycled--like actually recycled and not shipped to Africa where teenagers rip out and smelter what components they can.
I'm not saying Amazon is intentionally causing more consumerism, but it is a result of their type of industry. And the effects bleed out in a way you can see in its home city of Seattle.
Have you considered that maybe the prices of some products are so low because of planned obsolescence? If you want quality, buy Miele. You have a life time guarantee. And you won't have to use it. People who can't afford the quality can buy Samsung. Or do you think people who don't have $10k for a fridge shouldn't have one?
I think Miele has planned obsolescence now too, at least on most of its washing machines. It also seems unlikely the prices are low because of planned obsolescence - there's only so much you can cut from something before it starts failing within the warranty period. Most of the cost savings seem to be from newer, more automated and efficient mass production techniques. Planned obsolescence is a separate and intentional design decision.
There are plenty of valid concerns and complaints about Amazon (I'll list some of mine below), but I don't see why you're blaming them for electronics recycling and lifetimes, or "Walmartification". Amazon has done a pretty good job of being an all-in-one place to shop online and having very low prices overall.
For cellphone replacement cycles, I have absolutely no idea where you get the idea that Amazon has anything to do with this. AFAIK, most Americans still "buy" cellphones at cellphone stores run by the big 4. You can blame them for the 2-year subsidization scheme. And phones are lasting longer now. I have a 3-year-old Galaxy S4 that works great. For a while, there were huge changes in the hardware, but it's plateauing now.
For laptop replacement cycles, again I have no idea why you'd blame Amazon in particular, but here especially, people simply are not replacing laptops in 2 years like they did 10+ years ago. It's a real "problem" for the PC industry in fact, because people are keeping their PCs around a lot longer than they used to. I've got a few laptops ranging from probably 4-6 years old, and lots of people have desktops quite a bit older than that. New computers just aren't any faster than old ones, they only consume a little less power.
Consumerism is something you can only really blame society in general for. And these days, with this crummy economy, I think it's probably less than it used to be: with rents so high nationwide, and salaries stagnant, and underemployment rampant, people aren't spending as much on trinkets and junk as they used to. Some things still are popular to spend on, like phones (but not computers), but overall I would imagine there's less "consumerism" right now than there was back in 1999 because we are not in a booming economy. When people have extra money to spend, they spend more; when things are tight, they don't.
As for valid (IMO) complaints about Amazon, here's my list:
1) they jerk their prices around a LOT. I have stuff in my "save for later" cart that keeps jumping up and down by huge factors (one pen in particular keeps jumping between $5-something and $9.99). Many things seem to start out at a low price, and then when I put them in my cart but don't buy them right away, they just keep going up and up and up. It really feels like a ploy to extract more money.
2) their prices are frequently not that low anymore. I always try to shop around for stuff, and will frequently (but not always) find better deals at smaller sellers.
3) a lot of stuff they sell is junk shipped from China, and it's not immediately obvious that it's being shipped from out of the country.
For a lot of small knick-knacks that I need (for instance, I needed a new windshield washer nozzle recently), I'm finding that Ebay is actually the best place to go, strangely enough. Independent online stores (even ones owned by companies selling on Ebay) usually cost about the same, maybe slightly less, but then have high shipping charges which isn't helpful if you're only buying one thing, and it's really easy to punch in a part number and find something on Ebay. You can find it on Amazon too, but it usually seems to be a much worse deal, though I'm not sure why. I wonder if Ebay has lower fees for large-volume sellers than Amazon. The main thing Amazon is really, really good for is the reviews. And even these are suspect these days because for certain classes of items, many of the reviews are shill reviews, or at least suspect, because someone was given the item at a reduced price in exchange for writing a review.
The phenomenon you're viewing is usually the opposite of what you're suggesting. Amazon is trying to let you opportunistically buy things at a lower price by allowing prices to change frequently.
Part of the appeal of Amazon is being able to get something on your doorstep in two days at the click of a button -- if this isn't something that interests you then services like Ebay might be better -- but the sheer convenience of being able to not plan out bulk orders and having a near 100% reliability with no hassle is great.
When I was purchasing things on Ebay, shipping was frequently late, or entire items would be fraudulent, which I've heard has gotten better, but I'd prefer to offload that stress for a few dollars a year.
I've been buying stuff on Ebay since 1996, and I only once ran into a fraudulent seller, and that was in 1998; I managed to track down his home address and phone number, and called and talked to his parents, who promptly straightened it all out. (It was some stupid teenager "selling" stuff and never shipping it.)
What I do see these days is counterfeit stuff. It's really easy to avoid this stuff though: there's a checkbox on the left that lets you filter results to show only US sellers or North American sellers. Filter out the Chinese sellers and the counterfeit stuff goes away. I've never had a big problem with late shipping, but if you're the type who demands stuff ASAP I can see how you'd be unhappy. The big thing you can do on Ebay is be careful who you buy from and look at the feedbacks. Huge-volume sellers with good feedback are usually pretty safe, and ship quickly. Low-volume occasional sellers with 100% feedback are safe. Foreign sellers with spotty feedback are to be avoided unless it's something really cheap and you're willing to take a gamble on it being junk (if it doesn't show up at all, Ebay will refund your money). It's really not that different from Amazon in this regard, since so much stuff on Amazon is sold by "affiliates", a bunch of whom are Chinese sellers, or otherwise independent companies that ship themselves rather than outsourcing that to Amazon.
2) They have never been the lowest prices - you could, and still can, almost always find better prices elsewhere. But for the majority of people, the convenience is worth the extra cost.
3) No other stores sell stuff from China? Or maybe you're not used to seeing the cheap import items displayed next to the regular items?
You're buying the same stuff on Amazon as you would buy from Wal-Mart and that's your fault. You dropped your phone so you go on Amazon and buy a new phone, but you could buy a new screen, and a tiny screwdriver too.
I think you're right about the need for real recycling, and consumerism is a debate worth having, but I don't see how fragmenting the marketplace works towards a solution.
This, many times over. Yes, Seattle's South Lake Union now looks a lot like downtown San Jose. It's a completely different world from 10 years ago, though, and so much better.
Paul Allen was pushing for the Seattle Commons concept. When it didn't pass, he wound up owning a bunch of land that had no likely tenants. What South Lake Union has become is his "Plan B" because it's his property development company (Vulcan) that has done the lion's share of the building.
To prove that the Seattle Commons park could actually be built, Paul Allen acquired, or acquired rights to, a ton of land in South Lake Union. When voters rejected the property tax levy, he sat on it (as http://www.vulcanrealestate.com/). Between 2005-2012, he built what became Amazon's headquarters (http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon-to-make-giant-mo...) and a lot of Amazon's growth.
Didn't Amazon start off in that weird decrepit hospital near Beacon Hill? I mean, SODO could very well have been Seattle's tech hub in an alternate timeline. Though if I get your gist, the point is that the decision was made before any big tech revival.
I remember SLU in the 90's, it was shady and dying. But when I think about SLU today, and how close it is geographically to the heart of the city, it seems like such a lost opportunity that it's now just a sprawling office towers instead of something more vibrant. After 7pm, the whole area from Denny to Capitol Hill just shuts down.
We may have different definitions of walking distance from downtown because I think that both Volunteer and Washington Park fall in that range, although I understand that they are farther than a hypothetical South Lake Union park. On the other hand, I would note that neither Golden Gate Park nor Central Park are near their respective downtowns.
I don't really disagree, but it's a 50 minute (uphill) walk from Pike Place to Volunteer Park, whereas it's 15 minutes to the edge of SLU. I don't really mind walking an hour, but many people do.
Golden Gate is a little out of the way, Central Park is super accessible by subway.
Wasn't a biotech hub plan B originally? That never panned out.
For reference I've worked in SLU for the better part of a decade, first at Rosetta Biosoftware (ISB is in that building now) and at AWS for the last 8 years.
There were plans for a lot more commercial biotech back in the day. Some of it has rebounded, but Seattle never really became a competitor to Cambridge (MA), San Diego, or the Bay Area. The non-profit side is pretty good.
Ok, well if you are in a city you are most likely already surrounded by concrete and steel. The idea of these structures is to displace some of that concrete with a green area. What's a better solution for you?
Well you could design them like all the cities around the world whose primary design focus isn't vehicle traffic and tightly packed skyscrapers. You could design parks and walkways and bike lanes that are for people, and not businesses. You could design buildings with no exterior walls. You could design smaller buildings and space them farther from each other. You could encourage the development of small business outside mega-cities to grow community that doesn't require moving to an urban jungle. Or, you know, anything other than continuing to add concrete and steel and then patching it with artificial greenery to make it seem less oppressive. But i'm probably crazy.
Sure probably not the same bananas, but maybe one day it will be cheaper to grow in a local greenhouse or greenwall than to ship them from another hemisphere.
Interesting that this article has a clear bias that Amazon is making Seattle better, starting from
> Inevitably, the company's growing presence is making it a scapegoat for common urban woes such as traffic jams and rising rents
> New, luxury, one-bedroom apartments packed with amenities that appeal to young urban tech workers fetch upwards of $4,000 a month, putting them out of reach of the Starbucks barista.
This makes it sound like only luxury apartments are becoming expensive and baristas are upset because they feel entitled to that privilege. Rent at all levels is raising dramatically, 12% per year on Capitol Hill where I live. http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/09/seattle-rents-risi...
A lot of my friends work odd jobs as book editors, community managers, etc. and they are being priced out of the area. This is a real issue that warrants attention, unless you want everyone to move out of your neighborhoods except the well-to-do.
> To some long-time Seattleites, the new South Lake Union feels sterile, like an open-air mall. Wide sidewalks are devoid of cigarette butts and shattered beer bottles. Street people banging bongos and strumming acoustic guitars with mangy dogs in tow, a common sight in Seattle’s retail and financial districts, are conspicuously absent.
So the complainers are lamenting the lack of "beer bottles and cigarette butts," nobody "banging bongos" on the streets? Apparently failing to notice the "wide sidewalks?" What's wrong with them?
South Lake Union feel sterile because it's jammed between Denny, Mercer, I-5, and 99, four major throughways. Nobody has tried to urbanize that area for a reason. More power to Amazon for building it up though, and I hope it gains a neighborhood feel over time. I'm a bit skeptical; it feels to overwhelming, noisy, and overly corporate, cut off from the rest of the city.
> Meanwhile, the Space Needle's owners have complained that all the towers being thrown up by Amazon and developers hoping to house its workers are crowding out views of the aging tourist attraction.
I guess it's important that our iconic Space Needle is "aging." Yeah, nobody wants to see old stuff!
The article is called "Amazon Has Swallowed Downtown Seattle" do you really think there's a bias towards Amazon here? Your evidence is basically that the passages detailing the downsides of Amazon's expansion include silver linings.
I mean, the article could have been called "Amazon Turns Blighted Blocks Into Shining Urbanity."
What downsides does it detail? It says Amazon isn’t responsible for the city's growing pains. If there's more to the complaints about sterility than a few provincial hippies' fondness for squalor, you wouldn't know it from the article. The rest is sour grapes from the owners of an "aging tourist attraction".
> A lot of my friends work odd jobs as book editors, community managers, etc. and they are being priced out of the area. This is a real issue that warrants attention, unless you want everyone to move out of your neighborhoods except the well-to-do.
Sure, but Amazon's only contribution in that area is employing lots of people and paying them well. Not exactly cardinal sins.
If living costs are too high, that's likely on government policy around land use (although some increase in living costs is inevitable in an economic boom).
The irony is that Seattle as a city is already extremely connected with nature. From their office they should be able to see Puget sound, Ranier and the cascades, not to mention lake union. There is a nice park a 15 minute walk away from their offices, and the city it's self has a surprising amount of trees. The hikes around Seattle are amazing and plenty within an hour drive. I work in downtown Seattle and have coworkers that have a ferry on their commute.
That all being said, I find the project fascinating and it fits in very well with the space needle, the balls should be glimpsable from the (useless) monorail.
"His survey of Amazon workers indicated they wanted cheap burgers and beer, which encouraged him to break from his traditional model and open the Brave Horse Tavern with a wide assortment of local brews, pub fare and long tables for family-style seating. "I'm sure glad we did that survey, because we might not have gone with this concept otherwise," Douglas said."
Cheap burgers and beer! A 1/4 lb cheeseburger + fries at Brave Horse is $13.50. Beer prices are not listed on the online menu. Presumably if you have to ask you can't afford it.
Compared to other Tom Douglas restaurants that's a bit cheaper than usual. Brave Horse is also worse. You can expect to pay $4-9 for a beer depending on what you're getting. Not exactly cheap, but not expensive either, especially for food around a business area.
I spent some time in Seattle last summer. I was really impressed by the LEED certifications that a lot of the buildings in the downtown area have; most of them are certified gold - the spaces seem really nice for working!
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadHave they been to Seattle during the months of November to June?
Edit: to the response below, this was back in 98 or 99, something like that. I've looked up the historical weather, and it must have been that it felt like 70's to me, coming from Chicago (so it was probably more like 50's). I just remember not needing a jacket for most of the time I was there, and it "feeling good" when the sun came out.
Source: 20 year Seattle resident who loves it anyway.
http://weather-warehouse.com/WeatherHistory/PastWeatherData_...
I lived in Bellevue for about 21 years, so I've got a bit more perspective.
It's not really that rainy, but it's grey 9 months out of the year for sure.
It never gets above 26C here. There are plenty of other cities like this (London just had a record heatwave .. of 29C; seriously that's too hot for them. People were passing out in the toobs. Wellington, another coastal city, has people bitching when it gets up to 27C as too hot), but the difference is they do get warm .. for an extended period of time. From May through August (opposite in Wellington cause hemispheres), you know you can put your jacket away. You don't need it. At worst it's gonna be a little refrigerator like if you stay out too late.
In Seattle, it could be mid-June and you might need that jacket...at noon, and then the next day you'll be burning up.
I miss seasons.
"On average London will see 31 days above 25 °C each year, and 4.2 days above 30.0 °C every year."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London#Climate
(I've lived in Seattle over 10 years.)
I have to disagree: it depends on how you define "great". If you think Seattle in the winter is bad, try spending a winter in North Dakota or Minnesota. Or even the northeast, such as upstate NY.
I'll take dreary over -40 any day.
[1] http://www.zillow.com/seattle-wa/home-values/
Because no one else has that ever? That seems pretty normal, pretty silly to consider a perk and personally pretty useless.
Also, the only places around the country where it isn't dreary, damp, and grey from late fall through spring is California or the South. Compared to the Northeast or the midwest, Seattle's winters are incredibly mild.
I do miss Charlotte, NC, though (though recently passed laws make me pine less for NC than I used to). My first winter there, I remember asking a coworker, "does the sun EVER stop shining here?"
Edit: Ok, fine, 2:30pm.
Nevermind, I found it myself: http://www.duckdodge.org/index.php
Although this year it sure looked like we started early.
I don't know what the food trucks are like in Seattle, but in SF they are as expensive (or more so) than regular restaurants. So if I'm going to go out for food, I'd rather go someplace where I can sit down and eat.
It's Amazon, you're expected to both pay for your lunch and stay at work to "enjoy it". Or stay late to make up for having to eat.
Way worse where I am now, 25 minute lunch break. ugh.
Regardless, I can't see this as a selling point to anyone but college grads. Anyone with experience will probably know that the novelty of eating off a food truck on a sunny day will pale in comparison to other considerations (starting with Amazon's reputation as a workplace).
People live in Detroit, Job is scarce. Moving to Seattle to get a job especially if it pays well might be the best move instead of being unemployed.
People live in East Louis and South Chicago, Moving to Seattle to escape the violence because you want to raise your kids in a better place is not bad.
I'm not from Seattle, but I just want to say there are many valid reasons to move to Seattle. I say this because every time Seattle comes up, this discussion of the weather comes up, I don't see that when folks talk about London tho.
Really‽ I'm from London, and pretty much everyone I meet makes some comment on the weather there.
I've had people insist to me that London is rainy and foggy for months on end. I think this comes from the usual depiction in cinema, which is pretty much opposite to the weather in TV series set in the countryside surrounding London. The reality is closer to the sunny weather, fog is very rare.
There's a ceiling made of what seems to be solid clouds 10 months a year, including light rain as the default weather status throughout. This June has been atrocious (we just had the heating on for a while this evening) and last year we didn't have summer bar a week at the end of June.
But yeah, fog is very rare. It's just clouds, always. Grey grey grey and wet wet wet. OTOH you don't have to constantly suffer 30°C with 80% humidity for +4 months a year, which is nice if you're not on holiday.
15% of a city's commercial inventory seems like a lot. Any comparable levels to companies in other cities? Is this typical for one company to own/lease such a large percentage of commercial real-estate or is the statistic misleading?
[edit] removed duplicate quote
Seattle is tiny. So is SF. I'm amused by how small the core of all of the West coast cities seem to be when people try to convince me that there's dense urban living to be found outside of the East Coast.
I'm not sure it's that unusual, statistically. If anything, one large company per city is maybe closer to the historic norm (especially if you count old fashioned company towns and more modern might as well be company campus towns like Redmond, WA) and something of the median or mode of city existence, at least in the US.
https://medium.com/halting-problem/zyngas-offices-now-worth-...
Editor's note: SFGATE has removed this story after reviewing Zynga's company valuation. The initial report was based on the enterprise value of Zynga compared to its cash reserves and property value. The latest company financial data as of May 6th, 2016, however, indicates an overall market valuation of $2.2 billion, with cash reserves of $987 million, putting its enterprise value at $1.21 billion, which is significantly more than the projected value of the company's real estate holdings at 8th and Townsend Streets in San Francisco.
reminds me of jankyscroll (https://github.com/benzweig/jankyscroll)
Off-hand, the places that were really wildly creative during the 20th century were pretty standard offices and workshops, weren't they? Think of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and Bletchley Park. They all accomplished wild things. But the buildings were unremarkable.
I don't have a copy of The Idea Factory[1], where I recall reading this handy, but that's my best recollection.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...
"Hallway conversations" have become "constant conversations"
The first is simply that it's cheaper to have an open office. Modern office buildings tend to have large spaces -- nearly whole floors -- that are open, but can be subdivided. But subdivision costs money. Paying carpenters to put up walls isn't cheap, and even cube systems can be surprisingly expensive. Plus managers are accountable for costs. So they choose the cheap option.
The second is that open office plans are good for communication and collaboration, though less good for individual silent work. Managers are essentially all about communication and collaboration, which is why they love these open offices. Unfortunately while programmers need to both communicate and work alone, they need to communicate and collaborate much less than managers do, which is why office plans that are selected by managers make things difficult for the programmers.
That particular building was demolished in 2005.
http://mit2016.mit.edu/campus-cambridge/evolving-frontier/ma...
(Having an office was not so freaking unusual 20 years ago.)
Now, has Amazon invested enough in infrastructure to help the swelling population they are partly to blame for increasing (not to mention lack of houses, housing prices, student class sizes, etc.)? No, not really - but that's the price of being one of the fastest growing cities with the lowest unemployment in the country. But in terms of the city buildings and neighborhood - so much better.
The complaint about the changes Amazon and other companies are making is not about keeping the city in a state of disarray and filthiness, it's about control over the tone and feel of the city, preferring that a single corporate entity not be able to set or dictate the tone/feel to accommodate their interests. Even if there is a net positive as a result, the local residents have no choice in the matter - as was written in the article, those parts of the city are no longer Seattle in some people's minds, it's Amazon's territory.
I'm not condemning or condoning this position - I did live in the Seattle area for about 5 years, and while I loved it, didn't really have the same historical attachment most Seattle folk have, and they love their city, what it was, is, and what it can be.
It's not too difficult to empathize with the position either; suppose, in a rather silly example, that a wealthy business whose owners had a love for early 1900's german expressionism moved to your city (which you feel a connection to); over the course of a few years, a large part of your city begins to take the form of stills from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or from Metropolis. The owners clean up the area very well and bring in new trendy restaurants that meet their aesthetic vision. Even if you agree that the area has been changed for the better in terms of infrastructure and economics, are you really satisfied with having expressionism forced on you?
Again, this isn't to say that feelings should override progress with civil infrastructure improvement, but there's a bit more to the gentrification effect, specifically from the tech world, than just a bunch of grumpy people angry about losing their run down and decrepit land. People have seen what happened with San Francisco and they're scared, and rightfully so; while the standard of living in Seattle is decent, the average wages are no match for SV style tech money.
Plus, Amazon is not the only player here. Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, and Disney are all in the area as well. Google is also building a new office in the SLU area as well.
The exodus in the 70s really did a number on the area.
I'm sure many of the higher ups there don't have any ill-will, but they have unintentionally (or maybe intentionally; I dunno) become America's new Wal-Mart. That's a bad thing.
Consumerist culture erodes long term sustainability. Laptop/cellphone replacement cycles need to be 10 years, not 2. Old electronics need to be recycled--like actually recycled and not shipped to Africa where teenagers rip out and smelter what components they can.
I'm not saying Amazon is intentionally causing more consumerism, but it is a result of their type of industry. And the effects bleed out in a way you can see in its home city of Seattle.
As someone who does pricing strategy for a living, no it does not seem unlikely.
For cellphone replacement cycles, I have absolutely no idea where you get the idea that Amazon has anything to do with this. AFAIK, most Americans still "buy" cellphones at cellphone stores run by the big 4. You can blame them for the 2-year subsidization scheme. And phones are lasting longer now. I have a 3-year-old Galaxy S4 that works great. For a while, there were huge changes in the hardware, but it's plateauing now.
For laptop replacement cycles, again I have no idea why you'd blame Amazon in particular, but here especially, people simply are not replacing laptops in 2 years like they did 10+ years ago. It's a real "problem" for the PC industry in fact, because people are keeping their PCs around a lot longer than they used to. I've got a few laptops ranging from probably 4-6 years old, and lots of people have desktops quite a bit older than that. New computers just aren't any faster than old ones, they only consume a little less power.
Consumerism is something you can only really blame society in general for. And these days, with this crummy economy, I think it's probably less than it used to be: with rents so high nationwide, and salaries stagnant, and underemployment rampant, people aren't spending as much on trinkets and junk as they used to. Some things still are popular to spend on, like phones (but not computers), but overall I would imagine there's less "consumerism" right now than there was back in 1999 because we are not in a booming economy. When people have extra money to spend, they spend more; when things are tight, they don't.
As for valid (IMO) complaints about Amazon, here's my list:
1) they jerk their prices around a LOT. I have stuff in my "save for later" cart that keeps jumping up and down by huge factors (one pen in particular keeps jumping between $5-something and $9.99). Many things seem to start out at a low price, and then when I put them in my cart but don't buy them right away, they just keep going up and up and up. It really feels like a ploy to extract more money.
2) their prices are frequently not that low anymore. I always try to shop around for stuff, and will frequently (but not always) find better deals at smaller sellers.
3) a lot of stuff they sell is junk shipped from China, and it's not immediately obvious that it's being shipped from out of the country.
For a lot of small knick-knacks that I need (for instance, I needed a new windshield washer nozzle recently), I'm finding that Ebay is actually the best place to go, strangely enough. Independent online stores (even ones owned by companies selling on Ebay) usually cost about the same, maybe slightly less, but then have high shipping charges which isn't helpful if you're only buying one thing, and it's really easy to punch in a part number and find something on Ebay. You can find it on Amazon too, but it usually seems to be a much worse deal, though I'm not sure why. I wonder if Ebay has lower fees for large-volume sellers than Amazon. The main thing Amazon is really, really good for is the reviews. And even these are suspect these days because for certain classes of items, many of the reviews are shill reviews, or at least suspect, because someone was given the item at a reduced price in exchange for writing a review.
The phenomenon you're viewing is usually the opposite of what you're suggesting. Amazon is trying to let you opportunistically buy things at a lower price by allowing prices to change frequently.
Part of the appeal of Amazon is being able to get something on your doorstep in two days at the click of a button -- if this isn't something that interests you then services like Ebay might be better -- but the sheer convenience of being able to not plan out bulk orders and having a near 100% reliability with no hassle is great.
When I was purchasing things on Ebay, shipping was frequently late, or entire items would be fraudulent, which I've heard has gotten better, but I'd prefer to offload that stress for a few dollars a year.
What I do see these days is counterfeit stuff. It's really easy to avoid this stuff though: there's a checkbox on the left that lets you filter results to show only US sellers or North American sellers. Filter out the Chinese sellers and the counterfeit stuff goes away. I've never had a big problem with late shipping, but if you're the type who demands stuff ASAP I can see how you'd be unhappy. The big thing you can do on Ebay is be careful who you buy from and look at the feedbacks. Huge-volume sellers with good feedback are usually pretty safe, and ship quickly. Low-volume occasional sellers with 100% feedback are safe. Foreign sellers with spotty feedback are to be avoided unless it's something really cheap and you're willing to take a gamble on it being junk (if it doesn't show up at all, Ebay will refund your money). It's really not that different from Amazon in this regard, since so much stuff on Amazon is sold by "affiliates", a bunch of whom are Chinese sellers, or otherwise independent companies that ship themselves rather than outsourcing that to Amazon.
3) No other stores sell stuff from China? Or maybe you're not used to seeing the cheap import items displayed next to the regular items?
Amazon is inarguably the new Wal-Mart.
1) Putting local stores and shops out of business
2) Abusing their power as a distributor and treating their suppliers/partners like crap
3) Lower than average salaries for most employees
4) Treating employees terribly
Seriously, there are more similarities than differences.
I think you're right about the need for real recycling, and consumerism is a debate worth having, but I don't see how fragmenting the marketplace works towards a solution.
We missed out on a chance to have a giant urban park ("Seattle Commons": http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&...), but credit to Paul Allen for executing an unbelievable plan B.
[Bloomberg's article focuses more on Amazon's new HQ in downtown Seattle, but Amazon's impact today is mostly in South Lake Union. Background: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amazon-will...]
(Source: Born in Seattle and have lived within ~0.5 miles for 10+ years)
I remember SLU in the 90's, it was shady and dying. But when I think about SLU today, and how close it is geographically to the heart of the city, it seems like such a lost opportunity that it's now just a sprawling office towers instead of something more vibrant. After 7pm, the whole area from Denny to Capitol Hill just shuts down.
Golden Gate is a little out of the way, Central Park is super accessible by subway.
For reference I've worked in SLU for the better part of a decade, first at Rosetta Biosoftware (ISB is in that building now) and at AWS for the last 8 years.
OTOH they're talking about having space for 50k employees at SLU so I'm not sure why the author thinks Amazon is advancing downtonw...
Sure probably not the same bananas, but maybe one day it will be cheaper to grow in a local greenhouse or greenwall than to ship them from another hemisphere.
> Inevitably, the company's growing presence is making it a scapegoat for common urban woes such as traffic jams and rising rents
> New, luxury, one-bedroom apartments packed with amenities that appeal to young urban tech workers fetch upwards of $4,000 a month, putting them out of reach of the Starbucks barista.
This makes it sound like only luxury apartments are becoming expensive and baristas are upset because they feel entitled to that privilege. Rent at all levels is raising dramatically, 12% per year on Capitol Hill where I live. http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/09/seattle-rents-risi...
A lot of my friends work odd jobs as book editors, community managers, etc. and they are being priced out of the area. This is a real issue that warrants attention, unless you want everyone to move out of your neighborhoods except the well-to-do.
> To some long-time Seattleites, the new South Lake Union feels sterile, like an open-air mall. Wide sidewalks are devoid of cigarette butts and shattered beer bottles. Street people banging bongos and strumming acoustic guitars with mangy dogs in tow, a common sight in Seattle’s retail and financial districts, are conspicuously absent.
So the complainers are lamenting the lack of "beer bottles and cigarette butts," nobody "banging bongos" on the streets? Apparently failing to notice the "wide sidewalks?" What's wrong with them?
South Lake Union feel sterile because it's jammed between Denny, Mercer, I-5, and 99, four major throughways. Nobody has tried to urbanize that area for a reason. More power to Amazon for building it up though, and I hope it gains a neighborhood feel over time. I'm a bit skeptical; it feels to overwhelming, noisy, and overly corporate, cut off from the rest of the city.
> Meanwhile, the Space Needle's owners have complained that all the towers being thrown up by Amazon and developers hoping to house its workers are crowding out views of the aging tourist attraction.
I guess it's important that our iconic Space Needle is "aging." Yeah, nobody wants to see old stuff!
I mean, the article could have been called "Amazon Turns Blighted Blocks Into Shining Urbanity."
Sure, but Amazon's only contribution in that area is employing lots of people and paying them well. Not exactly cardinal sins.
If living costs are too high, that's likely on government policy around land use (although some increase in living costs is inevitable in an economic boom).
Both Google and Microsoft have urban and suburban offices and run commuter shuttles. I don't think it would hurt Amazon to do the same.
That all being said, I find the project fascinating and it fits in very well with the space needle, the balls should be glimpsable from the (useless) monorail.
Cheap burgers and beer! A 1/4 lb cheeseburger + fries at Brave Horse is $13.50. Beer prices are not listed on the online menu. Presumably if you have to ask you can't afford it.