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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

> NYC tech is in trouble.

I don't see much support for your argument here. As I see it, the stance is NYC is a strong enough tech city to be able to say no to Amazon; to not need to bend to their every whim to bring them here.

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I would agree that we didn't need to bend to their every whim. We could probably have given them no incentives or token incentives and still won the HQ2 deal. There was a time to do that -- when we were making the proposal, not after it was already agreed to by both sides.

But that isn't the my argument -- my argument is that the entire rhetoric is nonsensical. My shock is the dual narrative on "tech pays too much -- down with tech" "tech pays too little -- down with tech." This reeks of false excuses and clinging to some mythical perfect that doesn't exist and isn't driven by tech.

Inter-city import of workers is also non-sensical.

Finally, that the exit of 25,000 high paying jobs could be seen as some sort of victory is also alarming. NYC has really never recovered from the 2008 crash when ~500,000 well paying finance jobs were compressed/reduced/automated. NYC needs those jobs and the ecosystem they would create.

EDIT: In response to the citation request, i'll look for it. But rough numbers are: several broker dealers disappeared all together - Lehman, Bears, Merrill. UBS' building in Stamford is practically empty now. Legions of contractors, not on employee payroll but still working there, were also let go.

Their books of business were absorbed but the staff were mostly redundant. Secondly, 2008 was used (wisely) to compress unnecessary workers -- tons of stuff that used to be done by teams got automated by software.

As an example, i saw our own market data teams go from ~20 in 2006 --> 7 in 2010--> 2 in 2014 as more and more APIs and standardized software took over rote tasks like pulling market data, creating curves, etc. Other examples include Fax --> DTCC econfirm for operational work. Tear-ups for redundant contracts (e.g., TriOptima and other platforms.) Custom trade platforms per-firm cant compete in most cases to straight out of box Bloomberg POMS/AIM and again, technology made things more efficient.

> NYC has really never recovered from the 2008 crash when ~500,000 well paying finance jobs were compressed/reduced/automated.

Can you expand on that, or provide a citation/link? It doesn’t ring true to me (a New Yorker who worked in finance in 2008), but I’d love to learn more.

Ok... I see that you edited rather than reply.

I'd be very interested if you could find that link.

Let me answer your anecdote with another anecdote: I worked for one of the banks that disappeared (Merrill), and it's not like they just locked the doors. Many, many employees (like me) just became workers at Bank of America. Even given extremely generous assumptions, your 500k number sounds off by at least an order of magnitude.

The statement "NYC has never really recovered" still doesn't seem right to me.

>My shock is the dual narrative on "tech pays too much -- down with tech" "tech pays too little -- down with tech."

What's shocking about this? If you're uneducated and barely scraping by in LIC and Amazon moves in you have two problems: their low end jobs don't pay enough to improve your quality of life while their high end jobs are unattainable and will drive you out of the neighborhood. While Amazon might have been a net positive for the city it would have been actively harmful to a slice of the population. They spoke up.

> If you're uneducated and barely scraping by in LIC

LIC is already a 10m commute to midtown and home to nothing but shiny glass towers.

> Finally, that the exit of 25,000 high paying jobs could be seen as some sort of victory is also alarming. NYC has really never recovered from the 2008 crash when ~500,000 well paying finance jobs were compressed/reduced/automated. NYC needs those jobs and the ecosystem they would create.

NYC unemployment is like 4%. I don't think it's in need.

There is employment (96%) and then there is good employment. I'd argue the Amazon HQ2 jobs were good employment -- good salaries, benefits, training, etc.

I understand that too low unemployment (<3%) is bad since it constricts movement and creates inflation. However, aren't high paying high benefit jobs always a good thing?

  My shock is the dual narrative on "tech pays too much --
  down with tech" "tech pays too little -- down with tech."
  This reeks of false excuses

If my office was 35 Fahrenheit in the mornings and 100 Fahrenheit in the afternoon, would I be justified in complaining it was both too hot and too cold?

I get the spirit of your argument...and probably there is a "right" temperature. But what is the "right" salary -- if ~$150k is too high, what salary should Amazon give to their workers? Who decides? Should they also cut benefits just as an added way to reduce gentrification? What happens when someone gets promoted...do they get fired because their salary is too high now?

I understand the issue of gentrification is real. But this is the first time I've heard a progressive argument against good paying good benefits jobs -- usually the argument is that jobs don't pay enough and the benefits are too little (that can be regulated.)

> the exit of 25,000 high paying jobs

When did that happen?

> NYC has really never recovered from the 2008 crash

Um, what?

>My shock is the dual narrative on "tech pays too much -- down with tech" "tech pays too little -- down with tech."

People can be upset that 1) developer salaries are large enough to disrupt the local real estate market, and 2) that fulfillment center and delivery positions are churn-and-burn jobs that are paid like shit.

Neither of those positions are contradictory.

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