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Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

nytimes.com

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Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#101

Post by bane »

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #70
bane wrote: post #48

Pittsburgh is a great town. It looks a bit like it was on the barely winning side of a fist fight, but it has lots going for it: - Two big, well funded, well respected schools cranking out talent. CMU is one of the top schools in the world for CS. - Cheap rent - If you want to buy a house, some really beautiful neighborhoods - SEI - lots of cyber security talent - Great food and activities, it's not hard to find plen…

Given that Pittsburgh has a lot of security talent, do you think it is a good idea for someone out of state to apply for security jobs there?

Start with SEI https://www.sei.cmu.edu/careers/

They'll be very representative of the top of the hiring pool with deep connections to D.C.

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#102

Post by bane »

closeparen wrote: post #86
bane wrote: post #48

Pittsburgh is a great town. It looks a bit like it was on the barely winning side of a fist fight, but it has lots going for it: - Two big, well funded, well respected schools cranking out talent. CMU is one of the top schools in the world for CS. - Cheap rent - If you want to buy a house, some really beautiful neighborhoods - SEI - lots of cyber security talent - Great food and activities, it's not hard to find plen…

Won't cheap rent go away as soon as any substantial number of programmers move in?

Top of the line houses in absolutely beautiful parts of Pitt aren't even breaking $1mil. Plus there isn't the local NIMBY allergy there. Pittsburgh wants housing development.

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#103

Post by nostrademons »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #26
whopa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they aren't biased by the immaculate freeways and roads in California -- Pittsburgh has a much wider variety of challenging driving situations, weather, and conditions than California so it is a great test bed for developing autonomous vehicles Careful, don't compare Pittsburgh to an entire state. Pennsylvania doesn't have any real mountains, whereas California does. Google tests their self driving vehicles in the…

As an SF transplant, my only thoughts after seeing California drivers struggling with the artificial snow and hills at Tahoe were "these people have never been to Pittsburgh." Also, eastern Pennsylvania has the Appalachian mountains, and last time I checked, they were "real."

Also a Bay Area transplant here, initially from Boston.

I'd agree that Californian snow-driving skills are a joke, and that Tahoe isn't actually that difficult compared to New England winters.

However, there really are terrain types that CA has (and Google tests its self-driving cars on) that just don't exist back east. There's nothing like CA 1 on the east coast, with windy 15mph switchbacks and a sheer several hundred foot drop into the ocean if you miss a curve. Nor do they regularly have to deal with the road being closed because of rockslides, or Tesla drivers who pass you illegally.

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#104

Post by bane »

stcredzero wrote: post #74
bane wrote: post #48

Pittsburgh is a great town. It looks a bit like it was on the barely winning side of a fist fight, but it has lots going for it: - Two big, well funded, well respected schools cranking out talent. CMU is one of the top schools in the world for CS. - Cheap rent - If you want to buy a house, some really beautiful neighborhoods - SEI - lots of cyber security talent - Great food and activities, it's not hard to find plen…

Pittsburgh is a great town. It looks a bit like it was on the barely winning side of a fist fight I was born in Pittsburgh, and I have some experience with towns in the region and other rust belt river towns. Maybe I'm biased, but I'd say that Pittsburgh, in its good parts, looks better than most in the region. Also, I'm old enough to know the benefits of the Clean Air Act on that town. Once, you could literally smel…

The internet is full of jaw dropping photos of Pittsburgh pre-EPA and CAA.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pittsburgh+pollution+photos&...

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#105

Post by Hydraulix989 »

jjawssd wrote: post #92
762236 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A drawback for us engineers: no moonlighting law. When you work for a tech company in Pittsburgh, they own everything you think and produce, even in your off hours when you're trying to bootstrap that startup. Pittsburgh can never turn into a Silicon Valley with this limitation.

What policy is this a consequence of?

It's more of a consequence of an absence of policy (like with net neutrality -- nothing stopping ISPs from traffic-shaping and restricting content without "regulation" of some sort) than the presence of one.

Employers are free to impose whatever restrictions on "moonlighting" they want on their employment contracts (and tech's routinely non-unionized workers are put in a position where they have no choice but to accept them)

California actually has laws in place that make it illegal for employers to do things like add non-compete clauses to their employment contracts (and these laws also render said clauses to be unenforceable).

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#106

Post by javra »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #61
javra wrote: post #50

Wow, this article really doesn't even at least mention some of the problems this new boom bring. Maybe ask long time residents of neighborhoods like East Liberty, Bloomfield, or Lawrenceville how happy they are that they got driven out by rising rents due to rich techies? The "revitalization" of Pittsburgh might benefit some, most of them relatively new to the city, but gentrification will hurt lots of its populace w…

What I don't understand is why so many young tech dude(tte)s seem incapable of integrating. Any place that experiences a tech boom will also experience a boom in luxury apartments, $10+ cocktails, tapas bars, on demand laundry and so on. This can't help but to displace the old way of living in an area, even if it does bring jobs. Is it so terrible to find, vet, and rent a normal apartment, do your own chores, and eat…

I think for some parts the problem is not really specific to tech people. It's just very difficult to integrate milieus that differ that much in income. People living on six figure annual income just have different needs than people trying to get by with magnitudes less.

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#107

Post by nostrademons »

whopa wrote: post #52
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like someone has never been to Pennsylvania. Tejon Pass' major difficulty is the grade, and that's about it. PA may not have a highway that matches that grade, but many come close, and there are far more tight curves, typically far worse road conditions, and bad weather season is far more common than in N LA.

My point about Tejon Pass is that it's a steep grade mountain pass with heavy traffic including lots of trucks. There's no equivalent in PA. Highway trucking will be the first significant deployment of autonomous vehicles. One of the big challenges is Mountain West interstates. I do agree that the NE US is a proper testbed for bad weather city driving, since no West Coast cities have really that bad winter weather, I…

I'm also thinking of the Virgin River Gorge on I-15 in Southern Utah, which isn't just steep and winding, but also extremely narrow and windy, and yet supports interstate speeds. I don't know of anything similar in the Eastern U.S; upstate NY and Appalachia have plenty of gorges, but most are local roads and aren't the main interstate thoroughfare between them.

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#108

Post by Hydraulix989 »

stcredzero wrote: post #74
bane wrote: post #48

Pittsburgh is a great town. It looks a bit like it was on the barely winning side of a fist fight, but it has lots going for it: - Two big, well funded, well respected schools cranking out talent. CMU is one of the top schools in the world for CS. - Cheap rent - If you want to buy a house, some really beautiful neighborhoods - SEI - lots of cyber security talent - Great food and activities, it's not hard to find plen…

Pittsburgh is a great town. It looks a bit like it was on the barely winning side of a fist fight I was born in Pittsburgh, and I have some experience with towns in the region and other rust belt river towns. Maybe I'm biased, but I'd say that Pittsburgh, in its good parts, looks better than most in the region. Also, I'm old enough to know the benefits of the Clean Air Act on that town. Once, you could literally smel…

Yes, this is why the mayor of Pittsburgh made a big public pushback on Trump's "Pittsburgh, not Paris" speech -- Pittsburgh is an example of a city that recognized the importance of breathing quality air and so was able to clean itself up from Beijing-level air quality to the modern-day green city it is today.

Short YouTube video: https://youtu.be/tbFJMgfMCAs?t=1m12s

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#109

Post by nickstefan12 »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #61
javra wrote: post #50

Wow, this article really doesn't even at least mention some of the problems this new boom bring. Maybe ask long time residents of neighborhoods like East Liberty, Bloomfield, or Lawrenceville how happy they are that they got driven out by rising rents due to rich techies? The "revitalization" of Pittsburgh might benefit some, most of them relatively new to the city, but gentrification will hurt lots of its populace w…

What I don't understand is why so many young tech dude(tte)s seem incapable of integrating. Any place that experiences a tech boom will also experience a boom in luxury apartments, $10+ cocktails, tapas bars, on demand laundry and so on. This can't help but to displace the old way of living in an area, even if it does bring jobs. Is it so terrible to find, vet, and rent a normal apartment, do your own chores, and eat…

Your comment just made me think: these are all kind of conveniences of lifestyle that might relate to millenials growing up in McMansion-ville?

When they move to the city, they don't really want to live in the city. They want McMansion suburbanized city with a bar scene...

Re: Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

#110

Post by tomjakubowski »

theYipster wrote: post #28
pesenti wrote: post #8

I lived in Pittsburgh for 17 years. I bootstrapped a company out of CMU, grew it to $25M/year in revenue and sold it to IBM. Pittsburgh is a great place to start a company, lots of tech talent, lots of support and exposure in the community, cheap rent. And it is today a much more enjoyable place to live than 20 years ago (great restaurant scene, bike paths, revitalized downtown). There are two big drawbacks: finding…

I've long found a third drawback, which may be linked to the access to capital issue, is Pittsburgh's geographical isolation compared to the Bay Area and other tech hot spots. There's no major international air hub (anymore) and flights even to nearby cities such as NY, DC, and Philly are relatively pricey with limited schedules. There's no meaningful international service either anymore. This is in comparison to SFO…

I realize this is off-topic, but I'm somewhat surprised by the consistent use of the Austin metro as an example of a "tech hub" in comments here, when a metro area in its own state (Dallas) had raised more in venture capital as recently as 2016. [1] Austin is certainly shifting their economy to be tech-dominant, but it's still a small economy relative to other US cities.

What makes Austin a more important tech hub than, say: Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh-Durham, or Chicago?

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/globa...

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