IT pros in Washington, DC, are ready to ditch their current jobs and flock to Amazon's HQ2, a new survey says (AMZN)

jeff bezos

Washington, DC, information-technology professionals are happy that Amazon is opening up one of its HQ2 campuses in the area, a new poll indicates.
Almost three-quarters of them said they would be willing to leave their current job to work for Amazon.
Many are hoping that Amazon will pay higher salaries. But there are other reasons they like the idea of working for the tech giant.

While Amazon has faced a slew of protests over its decision to hire up to 25,000 people for its new HQ2 offices in New York, it can expect a much warmer welcome in the Virginia and Washington, DC, area, a new poll from Eagle Hill Consulting indicates.

Amazon expects to hire about 25,000 people for its new office in Crystal City, Virginia, which is in the larger Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Information-technology workers in the area are looking forward to the possibilities working at Amazon will give them, the survey of about 1,000 working-age people in the DC area found.

Of IT workers surveyed, 71% said they would consider leaving their job to work at Amazon. Furthermore, 71% of that group said the most enticing reason to leave would be if Amazon offered them a better salary.

That may not happen as automatically as these IT pros might think. The DC area is already the third-highest-paying area overall, after San Francisco and Amazon's hometown of Seattle, according to data from LinkedIn. While competition for employees should drive up salaries, there's no reason to believe that Amazon will automatically be paying its DC employees the same rates as it does in Seattle.

However, money isn't the only thing they find exciting about Amazon, according to the survey.

Forty-five percent of respondents said they found Amazon a compelling employer because it could lead to more interesting work than they're currently doing. Given that Amazon likes to build its own technology in-house and that it works on everything from advertising to cloud computing to the Alexa voice assistant, this could be a perk.

Likewise, 45% said they liked the idea of working for a "progressive "company. Amazon has been known to champion progressive causes. In November 2018, the company signed a letter to the Trump administration opposing changes that would define gender as biological sex at birth. And last year, after being criticized for its pay practices, Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15.

Note that this poll was completed in December 2018, before the Trump administration's battle with Congress over funding for a border wall shut down much of the federal government. That shutdown could have a ripple effect over Amazon's bid for the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon.

That's important because the survey respondents included federal workers as well as local businesses. In the Washington, DC, area, many private businesses supply the public sector, even if they're not government agencies themselves. So for any workers who feel like their livelihoods are threatened by the ongoing political turmoil on Capitol Hill, Amazon's entrance into the job market could come as a huge relief.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This tiny building in Wilmington, Delaware is home to 300,000 businesses