As if it wasn't already easy enough for engineers to switch between Seattle-area cloud computing rivals, Amazon just announced plans to open a new engineering office just down the street from Microsoft's headquarters.
Amazon said on Monday that it has leased 111,000 square feet of office space in Redmond, Washington, about three miles from Microsoft's headquarters. The office will open in 2021, have enough space for more than 600 employees, and primarily house technology and engineering teams supporting database services for Amazon's multibillion-dollar cloud computing business Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft employees defecting to Amazon — with the ultimate goal of returning to Microsoft with a promotion — is apparently common enough that the scenario is featured in a "Cards Against Humanity"-style game played internally at Microsoft team-building events.
Meanwhile, AWS hasn't announced any hiring freezes during the pandemic: The cloud unit confirmed as recently has April that it hasn't frozen any hiring. Microsoft in April confirmed it froze hiring except in unspecified "strategic areas," though employees told Business Insider that it is still hiring within its Azure cloud business, while Google also in April said it has enacted hiring freezes in some parts of the company, particularly marketing.
Neither AWS nor Microsoft have yet responded to requests about their latest hiring plans.
This isn't the first time Amazon has opened an office right in Microsoft's backyard. Amazon in December said it leased a two-building 219,000-square-foot campus in Redmond to serve as the headquarters for research and development and "prototype manufacturing and qualification facility" for Project Kuiper. The project is Amazon's effort to provide low-latency, high-speed broadband internet by launching more than 3,200 satellites into orbit.
Amazon also last year announced plans for at least one big tower in the nearby suburb of Bellevue, where Microsoft has thousands of employees. Amazon has since said it plans to hire 15,000 employees in Bellevue.
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