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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

I'm a CMU undergraduate who moved to San Francisco.

Every year, the School of Computer Science publishes a survey of where undergrads go after college: https://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2015-su... [pdf]

About half of the 2015 graduates go to employment in the West/CA.

I'll add that I am not even a graduate in CS (I majored in Business), yet I know a lot of non-CS majors my year who have also moved out here.

California is where the prestigious jobs are. And that's what matters at the end. Is Pittsburgh capable of supporting a Silicon Valley? Not as long as Pittsburgh's weather remains the way it is, anyways.

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I'll second that I found it strange that the brutal Pittsburgh weather wasn't mentioned. CMU, Cornell and MIT have an awfully hard time competing for graduate students in CS when the visit days have to be late March or early April (there can be nearly a sixty degree Fahrenheit difference once you include wind chill).

Brutal is pretty relative. I grew up about an hour north of Pittsburgh and moved into the city about eight years ago. I find Pittsburgh's weather to be abnormally sane for the area. Pittsburgh doesn't get the extremes that much of a Rust Belt gets. Even 35-50 minutes outside the city gets four or five times the snow. Sure, the temperature gets into the single digits for a couple of weeks (negatives with wind chill, but I've found there's not much wind in a Pittsburgh winter), but most of our summers don't exceed 90˚F. I can heat and cool a 1400 sq ft house for under $200/mo with gas heating and electric A/C, plus a house full of geeky electronics, a house inhabited by people who chronically forget to turn things off.

What's brutal to me? North Dakota. Montana. Maine. Vermont and New Hampshire. Northern New York and its Buffalo area.

Stockholm syndrome. Pittsburgh gets less direct sunlight per year than Seattle. 6 months of the year you basically can't go outside without freezing your face off. It's still snowing in April...

>Not as long as the weather remains the way it is, anyways.

Really? I like a lot about the California climate (and terrain) but this seems a level of geographical determinism that wasn't true until pretty recently. And arguably, even today, is influenced mostly by a fairly specific class of mobile/social/web companies.

For example, there's a huge amount of pharma/genomics and other forms of tech in the Boston area (and most of the big SV companies are adding or have added offices there as well). And Boston isn't exactly known for its weather--not that I actually mind it all that much most of the time.

By that logic, the desert southwest should be booming in tech. The weather is admittedly not to everyone's taste but a lot of people like it.

I was referring to Pittsburgh's coin-flip weather. Edited OP for clarity.

Yes, it really is that bad.

Pittsburgher who moved to Seattle here - would agree. As bad as Seattle weather is, Pittsburgh hits both extremes (ice and heat) and isn't predictable.

As a Seattite who lived in PGH for a year, I agree with you. I found the winter to be quite difficult.

I'm a PhD student at CMU right now. We just went from 75-degree "wow, we skipped spring" weather a few weekends ago to snow last weekend. Who knows what next week will bring.

Keeps things interesting as long as you remain indoors!

Oh, so it's Dallas. 75 is spring here, though.

There's plenty to complain about regarding Pittsburgh's gray, gray weather, but this up-and-down spring is wildly atypical for the area and not localized to southwestern PA. The same thing is happening in Ohio, across the rest of Pennsylvania, through New Jersey, and into the NYC area - and I'm sure in neighboring states as well.

This has just been a bizarre year. In New England, I swear someone mixed up the March and April buttons. March is usually crazy (but was pretty nice this year) and we're getting snow and gold grey days in April.

Don't worry; global warming will change the weather in the next twenty years.

... not to mention the coastline. In terms of longer-term capital investment, Pittsburgh has some high-ground advantages. ;)

I'm a current ECE student and I could see it.

AlphaLab accelerator and TechShop are in the area, and there are the Google and Uber campuses by CMU.

A lot of the talent right now is getting pulled by the big name west coast companies, but I could see something growing over the next ten years.

(The weather is awfully dreary, though.)

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