Which one of the 25000 jobs are you going to miss the most?
For me it has to be pee bottle collector.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe one of the AWS jobs they would've created? Maybe an executive job?
Let's do a little math. Part of the agreement was that Amazon would bring an average salary of $150k to HQ2. While that's not the $4B often mentioned, it is $3,750,000,000.
Let's be completely ridiculous and assume all but 100 employees at HQ2 would make minimum wage. So, 24,900 people would make $15/hour, or $31,200 per year. That's a total $776,880,000 per year, leaving $2,973,120,000 for those 100 execs, so each would gross $29,731,200 per year.
According to Glassdoor, the average Amazon executive makes $128,759 per year. If we spitball a number, say, 1000 people would be executives in HQ2, that's a total of $128,759,000 per year in executive salaries. To then achieve a mean average of $150k, the other 24,000 employees would have to average $150,885.04 each.
Even if 1000 executives averaged $1M per year, that would leave $2.75B to be split among the 24,000 other staff, for an average salary of $114,583.33. Not bad for collecting pee bottles.
This wasn't going to be an Amazon warehouse. I understand the argument against Amazon in terms of abusing manual labor. This was office jobs, including accountants, management, and programmers, the latter two of which I'd be qualified for. So yeah, I'm going to miss some of those jobs.