Of Course Only Half Amazon’s HQ Jobs Will Be Tech – How Do You Think A Modern Company Works?

We’ve a report that only some half of the new jobs in Amazon’s HQ2 – scheduled to land in Queens and Crystal City real soon now – will be tech jobs, the rest will be administrative, clerical, that sort of thing. Which is one of those ideas so damn obvious you rather wonder what people have been smoking? How does anyone think a modern corporation does work? There have to be people who count the money the code brings in, after all. And the modern legal system does demand a significant number of people to monitor diversity targets, doesn’t it?

Only half of the positions that Amazon.com Inc. has promised to bring to its two new headquarters in New York and Virginia will be tech jobs, government officials in both states say.

New York City officials said during a presentation Tuesday night that of the at least 25,000 jobs that the online retailer plans to bring to a new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, 12,500 will be in tech.

Well, yes, seems logical enough. Journalists should know this, not even a plurality of those working at newspapers are actually journalists after all. And no, I don’t mean just aren’t competent ones, I mean that the printers and accountants and HR and janitors and, and, will outnumber the people who actually write stuff.

So why this surprise?

The other half will be “administrative jobs, custodial staff, HR, all those things,” said Eleni Bourinaris-Suarez, vice president of government and community relations at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which helped broker the Queens deal with Amazon.

That’s how organisations work. The military has more administrative peeps than fighting. GE more bean counters than engineers. Why would Amazon be any different?