
Amazon Asking Cities for Their High Schoolers' SAT Scores - meri_dian
http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/amazon-hq2-visits-focus-on-education-2018-4-1020254404
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jweir
The legality or the morality of this aside, I doubt this is being used as a
metric for directly hiring those taking the SAT.

My gut is telling me this is a metric to evaluate the education system for
families to move there (or remain there).

Having recently moved, education, was a huge metric – but it is tough to
determine. SAT scores are much better than the state testing which vary from
state to state. SAT scores gives you the outcome of K-12 experience.

edit - typos

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learc83
>And SAT scores gives you the outcome of K-12.

If you account for many other factors.

The percentage of students that take the SAT in a given area is often
overlooked, but it varies wildly by state.

You also have to correct for racial/cultural, language, and income bias in SAT
scores.

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michaelt

      You also have to account for racial/cultural,
      language, and income bias
    

Whatever backlash Amazon faces for asking for overall average SAT scores, it's
nothing compared to the backlash they'd get if they'd asked for average SAT
scores for white and asian kids from married two-parent families with a six-
figure household income, english as a first language and both parents college
graduates.

~~~
smt88
They probably wouldn't need to ask for this. They can just combine public data
sets with the SAT scores to come up with a rough, adjusted estimate.

But that's assuming they'd even want to correct for any of the aforementioned
biases. I doubt they care because their employees wouldn't care. "Good school"
in some places often also means "white school" because of the nature of income
disparities, but you never hear parents asking, "But when you say 'good,' are
you adjusting for race?"

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vinceguidry
My mom was telling me yesterday that a big part of the political agenda in
South Carolina revolves around education. Apparently, they're finding it very
difficult to encourage companies to locate firms there because it's so
difficult to find local talent. It costs far more to relocate people than it
does to find someone local.

So lots of legislative activity around education policies.

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AdmiralAsshat
Umm...are high schools _authorized_ to share that kind of information with a
giant retailer? What is to stop Amazon, or anyone else who asks, from simply
using that data to target its advertising towards children?

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alehul
It's actually public information, at least at a state level. Extrapolating
that to the largest city in the state wouldn't be a hard process, and so I
don't think it's concerning information if anonymized and aggregated.

Also, as a Bostonian, I really hope this will edge us over Atlanta and
whatnot, as MA has the highest standardized test scores in the nation. Been
waiting for ages for this city to become more of a tech center.

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jessaustin
ISTM housing costs are the big barrier for Boston? Tech companies already know
the area has plenty of talent.

Expensive housing can be a difficult problem, since lots of vested interests
are opposed to any effective solution.

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mateo411
I think the reason the Boston is not more of a tech center is that MA law
supports no compete clauses as condition for employment. CA has high housing
prices where the tech industry is located. However, CA does not support no
compete clauses for condition for employment.

~~~
alehul
There are definitely a lot of factors at play (education, etc. etc.),
including a preferential attachment model where cities with established
startups and funding opportunities will attract new startups.

You've really hit the nail on the head, however, as that no-compete clause is,
while perhaps even enticing to large companies, very restrictive to new
startups. We seem to disproportionately have ideas about and go on some
entrepreneurial mission in an area we already know intimately, usually related
to our current employment. No-compete clauses destroy that entire basket of
opportunities.

~~~
jessaustin
That seems like a reason that no state besides California would have lots of
startups? We're moving the goal posts a bit, however, since thread parent from
Boston cares about tech jobs which is not the same as startups.

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foobaw
Maybe they're trying to strategize on SAT Prep book marketing /s.

Jokes aside, SAT score is not a good indicator of "success" in terms of salary
at least in my personal circle. Some of my friends who got perfect scores on
their SATs are all at sub-standard jobs, getting paid significantly less than
the average salary. Of course, this is purely based on personal anecdote but
attending top-tier schools seem to have a stronger correlation.

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lotsofpulp
Top tier schools are a proxy for people who score high on SATs, and/or have
wealthy networks that can get them in. Many of the companies that pay the most
only recruit at specific schools for this very reason, the high hurdles of
getting into the school itself give them candidates that have higher chances
of being successful hires.

SAT is not a good indicator of success for a specific individual, but when
sifting through thousands of people, it seemingly is a useful metric.

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viburnum
Haha, Amazon asked me for my SATs way back when too. What dopes.

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lithos
Amazon kinda already has a metric for this based on what areas are buying prep
books.

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walterkobayashi
So, Boston wins!

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dsfyu404ed
They've probably already chosen their finalists for the next round and are
looking for a metric to justify their choice.

Per [1] the list is currently Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas,
Denver, Washington DC, and Columbus, Ohio.

Boston has a tech workforce that has a lot in common with SillyValley so it
seems like it would be a good culture fit and for a company like Amazon the
benefits to being located in the same city and sharing the same workforce as
the federal government are innumerable.

Denver is SV-lite. If that's what they were looking for there's a lot of other
West coast options that would be on the list.

Dallas and Colombus seem to be the wildcards. They don't have the advantages
or workforce or access that Boston or DC do but they're cheap and Amazon might
be betting that its size and lack of competition there would let it dominate
local politics. They might also be betting that they can tap into the "I'll
move but not to CA" demographic" and get a good 5-10yr run as a monopoly on
local talent until the tech scene there grows.

Austin, Chicago and Atlanta seem like the middle ground between Boston/DC and
Dallas/Columbus.

I don't know enough about local economics in all those places to know how
sorting by SAT scores would turn out.

I'm betting DC and Boston are gonna make the next cut. I don't think Denver
will make the cut. the other four I have no idea.

[1][http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-reveals-
hq2-candidates...](http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-reveals-
hq2-candidates-2018-1?utm_source=markets&utm_medium=ingest)

Edit: Not sure why I'm being down-voted here. Is my analysis wrong or is the
suggestion that there exists people in tech who don't want to be part of the
SV tech scene just that abhorrent?

edit2 If I wanted to evaluate the pros and cons of all 20 cities listed in [1]
I'd write a real article about it and post it on HN for internet points. I
just evaluated the ones the author highlighted at the top.

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kd5bjo
Dallas has a sizeable tech workforce, but they're primarily telecom/embedded
engineers instead of the webapp engineers you'll find in SV. It also has a
major international airport that's halfway between the two coasts of the US.

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sjm-lbm
Dallas also has a sizable amount of really unsexy business process automation-
type development jobs - it's the original home if both EDS and Perot Systems,
for instance, and DXC and NTT DATA still have sizable facilities there.

Dallas isn't the #1 tech job location or anything, but there's a decent
workforce and Amazon would be a fairly unique offering in the Dallas area.

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foobarbazetc
Lots of data centers too...

Not that those jobs are great... but...

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NavyNuke
Data center jobs are nice for the relatively small number of employees that
find employment in them...

