It’s not HQ2, but firm to add 1,000 jobs here
It’s not HQ2, but the plans Amazon announced Friday to double down on its Vancouver operations are still substantial, promising to add 1,000 new tech jobs in the city in a flashy new office tower under development kitty corner to its existing offices.
From the company’s perspective, it’s a matter of “going where the talent is,” but it delivers a challenge to the city and province to ramp up the education of skilled technology graduates to fill the jobs in a growing tech sector, and help find affordable housing to keep them.
“The thing that primarily drives our decision here is the availability of awesome talent,” said Jesse Dougherty, Amazon’s general manager for its Vancouver operations.
“We’ve had a lot of success in growing this first corporate site,” Dougherty said of Amazon’s operations that stretch over seven floors of the Telus Garden office tower on Georgia Street downtown.
“And as our growth accelerates, we need to plan for the space to develop that,” Dougherty said, which will involve leasing 150,000 square feet of office space in a new building being developed by Oxford Properties at 402 Dunsmuir Street a stone’s throw away.
Dougherty said the company expects to move into the yet-to-be built office tower by 2020, but in the meantime will start hiring and locating new employees in about 50,000 square feet of temporary space Amazon has secured with the shared-office leasing firm WeWork, which just opened operations on seven floors in the Bentall III tower on Burrard Street.
However, Amazon’s officials deflected questions about whether the development reflects on Metro Vancouver’s chances for its HQ2 competition to secure a second, $5-billion, 50,000-employee second headquarters.
“I have no information about HQ2,” Dougherty said.
Some 90 per cent of Amazon’s existing jobs in downtown Vancouver are for software engineers or programmers, said Alexandre Ganon, vice-president for Canada and Mexico.
In addition to those, Gagnon said the company has 500 employees at fulfilment warehouses in New Westminster and Delta, and a total of 1,800 employees across the province.
“With our operations in Toronto and Ottawa, Amazon is one of the largest employers of software engineers in Canada,” Gagnon said.
Dougherty said the additional 1,000 jobs will be a mix of software engineers, technical employees, human resources and marketing experts, though the company didn’t identify specifics about what projects or products they would be working on.
The announcement was welcome news for the public officials who were drawn to the event, including Premier John Horgan, Delta MP Carla Qualtrough and Mayor Gregor Robertson.
Housing affordability and competition for talent are the key challenges of all technology hubs, said Bill Tam, CEO of the B.C. Technology Association.
“New York, London, San Francisco, Boston (and) increasingly in developed countries, it’s the same issue,” Tam said. “The point is, we have to attract the kind of jobs that make the balance work.”
Horgan said he last visited the Amazon offices as Opposition leader a year-and-a-half ago, where he heard Dougherty’s concerns about the need for more affordable housing, improved public transportation and a post-secondary education system that delivers more graduates.
“We’re committed to deliver on all three,” Horgan said. “So British Columbians can stay here and we can attract other people to put down roots in this spectacular city.”
Amazon’s arrival in Vancouver four years ago prompted faculty at BCIT to start training students as cloud-computing engineers and architects to fill the kinds of jobs the tech giant was creating, said Bill Klug, a professor in computer systems technology at the school.
“BCIT knew Amazon was going to be expanding into Canada, and other regions, and started looking at what that meant in terms of the potential for cloud-computing jobs,” Klug said, and is now in the position of delivering graduates to fill them.
“Hopefully (Amazon) will hire my students.”