Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover | Hacker News Reader

Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover

nytimes.com

135 pointsdanso148 comments

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 experienced non-technical talent (our C-suite ended up in DC) and raising significant funds. It's just really hard to get serious VCs to pay attention to Pittsburgh.

> It's just really hard to get serious VCs to pay attention to Pittsburgh.

I'm an angel investor in a few dozen tech startups, about half in the Bay Area and half spread elsewhere around the country. The biggest problem with those outside of the Bay Area is that for lack of a better term "they don't think big enough". A lot of the promising ones turn into lifestyle-type businesses (e.g. a focus on services revenue instead of software revenue) when, in my opinion, they could have achieved much greater exits. Whether justified or not, I know many other investors with a similar bias based on similar experiences.

On balance, maybe not such a bad thing.

It's a good point, I have noticed that as well. But it's both a cause and consequence of the lack of easy access to capital. Early stage big ideas that require a lot of initial capital just won't get funded in a place like Pittsburgh. Once they pick up, then they have a chance (see Duolingo for example). But by that time most have had to make ends meet...

Interesting, can you expand on services business being lifestyle vs product being venture?

I had never heard of that distinction before and usually just thought of lifestyle businesses as slower growing vs faster.

Sure, here's an example - a small startup which occupies an attractive niche, definite market need, product-market fit, and decent traction. The founder developed a software platform in response to market need, but the market also told her that there were opportunities to sell extensive services. Now that the software platform is done and there is a small services team in place, the founder can choose to sell either:

a) the software platform, which might make $20k/year, but you can sell thousands of them without much incremental overhead needed; once integrated, it's also extremely sticky; low customer churn and high customer satisfaction

b) a services package, which might make $50k/year, but for every 3-4 you sell, you need to hire a new employee @ $75k/year fully-loaded overhead cost

Before you say "sell both!" - unfortunately the nature of things is such that, more or less, the founder needs to prioritize selling one or the other. Consciously or not, she is prioritizing the services revenue, and as a result about 90% of new sales are services contracts. I (and the other investors) would prefer that she prioritize software. Even if it makes them unprofitable, it would make for a much better risk-adjusted bet. And this isn't like "it's a much better bet for the investors, because they can diversify risk out in a portfolio, but the poor founder would probably be left with nothing". She understands both sides and says she wants to build up the software revenue, but the culture around her (south-eastern city) is so strongly opposed to it, that the execution has been impossible. This is a classic case of where a smaller PE firm will come in and buy it out for a few million, purposefully cut the services revenue, go hog wild selling software, and flip it a few years later for 10-20x what they paid.

Thank you; it's very interesting to hear the details on this. One question:

>she wants to build up the software revenue, but the culture around her (south-eastern city) is so strongly opposed to it, that the execution has been impossible

Do you mean the existing company culture, e.g. employees only having service-oriented skills, or the southeastern city culture, somehow being inhospitable for developing software?

I'm curious because I currently live in a southeastern city (Nashville), am about to move to another (Atlanta), and am in the beginning stages of building a B2B SAAS startup.

All of the above, including her own subliminal bias which is reinforced by being around a lot of peers who run services businesses.

Thanks!

> This is a classic case of where a smaller PE firm will come in and buy it out for a few million, purposefully cut the services revenue, go hog wild selling software, and flip it a few years later for 10-20x what they paid.

Or the classic case where PE buys it, cuts services and all the staff who know anything about the product, go hog wild trying to sell software and realize that that the market isn't there and never was and the services path actually was the only the way to make inroads. The investment craters and everybody loses money.

Certainly, there is always risk of poor strategy and/or poor execution, with an outcome exactly as you describe. Having seen both scenarios play out however (as both an investor and an operator), in this case I think it would be the right move.

This article from 2011 is relevant:

https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/24/what-should-you-do-with-yo...

There are plenty of successful service oriented companies.

For example, Uber and Lyft, both sell a service that requires a proportional amount of new contractors and employees, to scale.

Another would be Palantir, which sells services based off of a core software product.

How do you classify companies that are ambitious, but perform work that doesn't scale?

Why would that last be a good idea? You're throwing away a good business with 70% gross margins - for what? Okay, to concentrate on something that might be a good business with 99% gross margins, but is the difference between 70% and 99% all that important compared to other factors, like the difference between is and might be? Not a rhetorical question; maybe there is some logic to it that I'm missing.

Which is more of an issue with those VCs than the founders; there are a number of self-driving car startups here and they have a unique advantage: 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 (indeed, CMU won 1st place in the DARPA Grand Urban challenge, readily beating the likes of Stanford and Berkeley).

Some California VCs are mistakenly under the impression that anywhere outside the Bay Area must be Siberia. It's going to eventually bite them in terms of missed future opportunities and ROI on their funds.

It's an interesting point that robust autonomous systems may be more likely to emerge in organizations from places that have distinct seasons (including a perennial 'orange construction barrel' season).

> 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 Lake Tahoe area, which in the winter can be much more challenging than anywhere in within 500 miles of Pittsburgh.

Navigating serious grade changes, both uphill and downhill, presents more of a challenge for trucks too, even for humans right now. The only places to really test that in the US are pretty much west of Denver.

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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Davis_(Pennsylvania) - 3,213 ft - highest point in PA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tejon_Pass - 4,160 ft

Tejon Pass is on I-5 in northern LA County, and it is a huge trucking route. The grade is very steep between the Central Valley and the top of the pass, and is fairly challenging for trucks. There is no equivalent to those conditions in PA.

Also, if your impression of Tahoe is only the heavily touristed parts, your view is incomplete. The mountain roads in the Sierras have no equivalent east of the Mississippi.

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'm just objecting to the claim that somehow Pittsburgh captures all the challenging road conditions that autonomous vehicles will encounter.

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.

Have you ever driven on 70 or 80 through PA? Because "steep grade mountain pass with heavy traffic, including lots of trucks" is an apt description of either route.

Definitely easy for a non-Pittsburgh to equate difficulty with elevation. Which ignores elevation changes, weather, sharp turns, tunnels, and bridges. Also a strange fondness for salt which generally makes things worse. Find a Pittsburgher who thinks driving in Tahoe is hard, even off the beaten path.

Personally I try my best to get as far off the beaten path as I can. Tahoe and surrounding areas is a cake walk compared to Pittsburgh.

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.

This sounds like someone who has never driven in Tahoe and Pittsburgh. I've done quite a bit in both.

I can tell you that 80 and 50 that head over the sierras are often closed for what would be consider relatively minor snow in Pittsburgh. Sometimes it's not even the road conditions, just lack of visibility (fog or snow). Significant ice is also fairly rare just because of level of maintenance, I suspect somewhat fueled by poor California drivers and ski resorts that push for excessive road maintenance.

On the other hand Pittsburgh gets plenty of snow, plenty of storms, and I can assure you they don't close the highways unless it's a storm of the century so bad that you'll not even be able to find cars let alone drive them. Additionally the Pittsburgh area roads have significant elevation changes, often narrow, and poorly maintained. Take for instance the top 10 steeps roads in the USA. Pittsburgh has #2 and it snows there. SF has #9 and #10, but it rarely snows there. Another puzzling factor is Pittsburgh uses a ton of salt, yet has temperature variations that often lead to snow melting from salt, then refreezing in sheets of ice or "black" ice. I've definitely skidded WAY further in the Pittsburgh on ice than I have have around Tahoe. For a year or so I was crossing 3 7200 foot passes each weekend around Tahoe and in the last 20 years I'm often up around there for various reasons.

Even the average Pittsburgh driver seems to deal with snow MUCH better than the ones I find up around Tahoe area when it snows. Even though the Pittsburgh driver is likely in a 10 year old front wheel drive econobox instead of a newish AWD SUV.

>> lifestyle-type businesses

e.g. profitable.

Also parallelism aside pretty sure we both mean i.e. not e.g.

Which is great for the people living off that income, and not great for investors unless it's also valuable. VCs would need to take fewer, smaller risks if they're expecting smaller rewards per success story.

I feel like it's a pretty recent development that investors don't expect their investments to turn a profit.

The investment needs to turn a profit for the investor by appreciating in value, which is different from turning a profit in general.

VCs by definition are looking for the Next Big Thing, not to finance someone's lifestyle business. The returns are too low to justify the huge risk. There are many other lower risk ways to get lifestyle-business sized returns for an investor.

VC limited partners invest because it has low correlation to other investments and the potential for 100% returns. If they're just getting a potential 7% (or whatever), they can buy stocks or real estate etc. at much lower risk.

It seems like the midwest much prefers B2B software and health industry-focused startups. I'm assuming because they become profitable much faster and don't need the explosive growth and capital needs of moonshot SV companies. Fewer unicorn exits drops the EV of an investment, so you can't take as many risky bets.

I'd guess the medical startups are largely because of Cleveland Clinic and UPMC.

I understand your position, but I think these companies do exist here. I know, because I've been at a few of them (Avere Systems and Bossa Nova Robotics, for example). I think our biggest challenge is getting sufficient capital in the region. The airport situation has been a serious impediment - great airport, few direct flights to the west coast - but that is changing.

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, which has direct international service to many cities in Asia and Europe and fancy flat-bed planes (on the hour) to NYC... Austin has direct service to London and Frankfurt and flights every 30 minutes to mega hubs in Dallas and Houston, and well, New York is New York.

Even by car, the closest nearest city at a two hours without traffic is ... Cleveland, and while Philly, DC, and NYC are drivable, you're looking at 4-5 hours without traffic to Philly or DC and 6-7 hours to NYC if you're lucky. And it's not the easiest of drives either with the winding and truck-filled PA Turnpike.

Even within the metro area, there isn't much outside the downtown core. A few nice suburbs to the north, south, and east, but there isn't anything to the scale of the Bay Area, even with it's housing crunch, nor the Pacific Northwest, nor even Austin / San-Antonio.

In short, it's hard to get to and out of, and while there's an exciting transformation going on, at the end of the day unless someone revives PIT as a major transit hub, it's still going to be a relatively isolated post-industrial mid-western rust-belt city.

I totally agree. I wrote to the mayor about this, and we could definitely use more help raising awareness to the city about this very pressing issue (@billpeduto on Twitter if you're also affected)... I've never had an SFO<->PIT flight without layovers.

Also, we ask everyone here to please continue to refrain from using the pejorative "rust-belt" to describe our beloved hometown and emerging tech center. It is a very unwelcoming word. Thank you!

I'm doing that this week and I had to choose a 6:30am flight to get a layover less than 6 hours and a price less than $1000.

> I've never had an SFO<->PIT flight without layovers.

About 10 years ago, I did a round trip a month, each under $300 and all flights non-stop. Then USAirways hub status left, and the pain set in.

> we ask everyone here to please continue to refrain from using the pejorative "rust-belt"

Who is "we"? I spent the first few decades of my life in a great lakes rust belt city and this is the first time I've heard of anyone considering it a pejorative.

People actually from Pittsburgh do (I'm a fourth generation native, my great grandfather farmed tomatoes for H.J. Heinz -- look on a ketchup bottle):

"Shame. It’s pretty thick in these parts, and it’s linked to the region’s nickname, 'The Rust Belt.' After all, rust connotes disuse, or of being left behind." [1]

Hope that helps you see our point of view a bit more.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richey-piiparinen/rust-belt-de...

Interesting. I've always viewed it as a slightly clever term connoting the region's heavy reliance on the steel industry in the past and the undeniable economic/demographic decline that followed.

I obviously don't know about Pittsburgh, but it is absolutely not viewed as a perjorative in some other cities typically considered part of the rust belt.

An addendum to my sibling comment here:

A cusory web search turns up indie bookstores, restaurants, literary publishers, community groups of various sorts, etc in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit that embrace the term "rust belt". I didn't easily find similar results for Pittsburgh, so maybe yinz do have a different take on it. But please don't assume others intend "rust belt" as a pejorative, and please consider recognizing that as it's not widely used pejoratively, you may have limited success convincing others to stop using it.

I've only ever heard Californians and New Yorkers use the word pejoratively, like in OP's context.

You must not look very hard. I fly annually SFO <-> PIT direct, including another one in a week.

I'm from Pittsburgh, too.

Not only do I find the term "rust belt" perfectly acceptable, I find your scolding strangers on the internet about its use to be pompously absurd.

You are not "our" spokesman invested with some kind of moral authority to publicly sermonize about "our" identity. Please refrain from doing so on "our" behalf, and speak only for yourself.

With the increase in speed limit on the turnpike, DC has become just under 4 hours for me. From my house in the city to the Silver Spring metro stop is 3h 55m on the GPS. Toronto is a 6 hour drive, Charlotte or Chicago are also only a 7 hour drive. I know many people prefer to fly, but between getting to the airport, getting there in enough time (1.5 hours or so), probable delays, actually flying, getting out of the other airport, and getting to your preferred destination, you are looking at a time frame that is either less than, equal to, or within a 2 hour time frame of what it takes to fly. Criticism of international flights is completely valid, but between MegaBus and driving, I feel like a lot of cities are relatively easy to get to. As for international flights, I know a lot of friends who will take a MegaBus to NYC, Toronto, DC, or Philly and just fly round trip out of there. There are a lot of overnight or close to overnight MegaBus routes to those places.

Agree if you are just concerned about travel time but there's also the opportunity to get work done, sleep, or watch a movie on a plane. I generally avoid driving these days just because I find myself increasingly dreading the level of concentration and focus required to drive safely for more than two or three hours at a stretch.

That is completely fair. The equation also drastically changes when you are looking at traveling alone and traveling with more than one person. Even with just my husband and I, the cost in both time and money to fly to Philly, NYC, DC, and Ohio is simply not worth it. Instead, we plunk down the money for a new audiobook and split the driving.

Unless you have a private jet, or perhaps you only fly first-class, I'm not sure how you actually sleep or get any work done on one. As someone who's over 6 feet, I'm so cramped in a modern plane that that alone makes it pretty hard to get a computer out and do anything useful with it; add to that people reclining their seats (now I can't use my laptop at all), kids kicking the back of my seat, people crawling over me to go to the bathroom if I'm not in the window seat, and worse, on a short flight, the fact that you're not even allowed to have your laptop out for a large portion of the flight--by the time you're finally allowed to get it out because the plane has reached altitude and you get started with something, now the plane is coming in for a landing and you have to put it away again.

Substitute "on a plane" for "on a train" and you'd be correct. Trains are great for bringing a laptop and getting work done while you travel: the seats have reasonably generous space, there's power outlets (many planes still don't have these in economy), and you're allowed to get your laptop out as soon as you sit down, well before the train even leaves the station, and you don't have to put it away until you're ready to get up and walk off the train.

I'm only 5'6" so I can sleep like a baby and work comfortably as well.

The PA turnpike was built with a design speed of 100 mph and when I went to CMU, my record between Westchester County north of NYC and campus was 6 hours, 50 minutes (driving at times close to that design speed.) Three of the four speeding tickets I've gotten in life have also been on that road...

Even with a faster turnpike, Pittsburgh is well outside the Northeast Corridor megalopolis which does have an isolating effect on capital, and even with a tech makeover, it's still going to be an isolating city without similar makeovers in eastern Ohio and upstate NY.

I'm of that era of CMU grad the article talks about that spent four years there and left. It's a great town and I enjoy going back, but the prime reason I didn't stick around was isolation.

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...

Just speculating, but maybe it's because Google, Facebook, and Amazon have a tech presence in Austin and not in the other 3 metros you mentioned?

Google has sales and engineering in Chicago, engineering in Chapel Hill, and sales in Dallas. I think there may be some engineering in Dallas too. There are enough good people out there unwilling to relocate that you can find a Google presence in most tech corridors.

Google doesn't have an office in Dallas anymore

Wasn't Dell based in nearby Round Rock?

Austin is overhyped. There are cities in East Bay that nobody knows of (e.g., Emeryville) that have raised more money than Austin.

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).

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 plenty of things to do, some innovative areas that are turning around dead warehouse and industrial areas

- Some parts of the city are really beautiful and nice places to be, lots of great parks and so on

But there's some realities that I don't think limit what can come from the city, but rather shape what kinds of businesses should set up shop there.

- Geographic isolation

- Parts of the city can be pretty rough still, rougher than what you might find elsewhere

- hard to bring in quality talent if they aren't being sourced from the schools

- Non-tech talent comes from completely different industries

So I think that if you can shape a business that targets a large domestic market and solves real problems, even non-sexy B2B ones, you can probably grow a thriving business there. You probably won't end up hitting it big on social media, but many B2B problems are billion dollar businesses.

There's a very similarly sized city on the west coast with similar population, etc.: Portland. It is a good illustration of what can help or harm cities.

Portland lacks anchors like the one put down in Pittsburgh by robber barons. Later philanthropists like Vollum of Tektronix in Portland weren't nearly as effective as Carnegie. Silicon Forest turned out to be a bit of a volatile dud compared to Silicon Valley.

Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has great universities in CMU and U Pitt. Portland's equivalents PDX State, erstwhile Oregon Graduate Institute, and OHSU never reached the heights of CMU or UPitt as they lacked the deep and broad foundation of Pittsburgh's universities.

I like both cities, but just on the basis of Shadyside-Oakland-Lawrenceville-etc. and the intellectual atmosphere there, I love Pittsburgh much more.

Disappointingly, in Portland there's no intellectual atmosphere of any sort.

> Some parts of the city are really beautiful and nice places to be, lots of great parks and so on

It's hard to understate this point. Compared with San Francisco, Pittsburgh is much more visibly green. There are trees everywhere, grassy areas abound, and the city itself is nestled in green hills.

San Francisco is full of concrete. The Bay Area is still really brown from the recent droughts. There are certainly people who can overlook this and live perfectly contently. But in Pittsburgh, I don't have to give up the greenery for a city life.

There is a remaining conception of Pittsburgh as a dirty industrial wasteland. Today one good look at the city from a high vantage point on a sunny day kills this conception instantly.

Good luck finding a sunny day because Pittsburgh enjoys the fewest hours of annual sunlight of any major city, and continues to have air quality as bad as any other US city, being in the top ten worst according to the Lung Association.

What causes the poor air quality? There are no obvious pollution sources other than cars.

There are still major steel works in the area, some of which are operating with grandfathered emissions limits. Also Pittsburgh receives the wind-blown emissions of practically every coal-fired power plant in the nation.

I don't feel like there's any major lack of sunlight and I've lived in Pittsburgh for years. Source?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_d...

Seattle is shown to be even worse in the winter months than Pittsburgh on that chart.

Seattle is at a higher latitude.

Winter often has very long periods of ZERO sun, literally not being able to point at where the sun is. My GF called it "gloomy doomy". During the winter I would actually forget what a sunny day looked like.

Often remarked that we had less rain than Portland, but also less sunny days.

Most people in California don't realize that the air quality in the San Francisco Bay Area is actually worse than in Pittsburgh [1].

Moreover, after growing up in Pittsburgh and living in Seattle, I can tell you that Seattle definitely has less sunlight (it's not even close) than Pittsburgh. So much less that my doctor had to prescribe my Vitamin D to address a deficiency I had when I moved there (after living in Pittsburgh my whole life, no problems).

[1] "California is home to eight of the 10 cities in America where air pollution is worst" https://qz.com/963089/california-is-home-to-eight-of-the-10-...

Most people don't realize that because it's not true. The air quality of the combined statistical area of San Francisco is worse than that of the CSA containing Pittsburgh, but pollution in the expansive San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose CSA is centered elsewhere, whereas Pittsburgh is the pollution epicenter of its CSA. This is due chiefly to its geography, not some kind of moral failing. San Francisco has very favorable geography for air quality.

As for your linked article, that seems irrelevant. Nobody thinks Hanford, CA is an upcoming tech hub.

I'm not sure Pittsburgh is much sunnier

Rank City Annual % sunshine 164 PITTSBURGH, PA 45% 165 SEATTLE C.O., WA 43%

The Bay Area turns green and brown every year. It has nothing to do with droughts. In the winter, the grass on the hills is green. In the summer, it is brown or "golden." That color is what the phrase "Golden Hills of California" is referring to.

Rule of thumb is that the Santa Cruz mountains are green and the East Bay Hills are brown. When I moved to the Bay Area, I was taught that this is how you orient yourself: if green is on your left and brown on your right, you're going north; if green is on your right and brown on your left, you're going south; if you're driving toward brown, you're going east; and if you're driving toward green you're basically in the mountains already or on one of the bridges.

I didn't know that about tge Santa Cruz mountains. The hills are brown in the summer in the North Bay and on up into Mendicino county.

It's because the fog regularly rolls over them on the peninsula, even during the summer. So there's a lot of moisture available for redwoods, undergrowth, etc.

BTW, it doesn't apply to the foothills, nor does it apply farther south (past Cupertino or so). So Rancho San Antonio is still brown in summer, ditto Lexington Reservoir, The Dish, San Jose foothills, etc. San Lorenzo valley is green year-round, though.

I was visiting a friend in SF, we had a dog with us. Was pretty shocking how far I had to walk to find a square foot of grass.

San Francisco has an ocean and a bay though.

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.

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 smell when you were getting into Pittsburgh, and the sulfur from coal burning literally made it smell like excrement! (Not exactly, but it was a smell in the same family of smells, due to the sulfur.) Today, there's not a trace of this!

Pittsburgh still is measured to have bad air quality compared to other cities, but it's certainly not bad enough that you actually notice it.

I'll never forget, as a kid, seeing a news report on KDKA, showing a white cat with long fur. The only way to see that the fur was white, was to spread the fur and look at the base of the hairs, as the rest of the fur was an orange-pink color. This was down near J&L. (Yeah, I'm old.)

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

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

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

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.

The population of Pittsburgh City proper peaked in the 1950's. It then depopulated significantly as people left the region and the city center. There is an abundance of extra housing at a reasonable rate close to the city center because of this excess supply. It used to house 650k people and currently only holds 300k. It won't last forever but by no means is it on the verge of becoming an expensive city.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+pittsburg...

I moved to Pittsburgh a year and a half ago after living in SF for 5 years and I can say that I really love it here. Food is great, people are extremely friendly, and the town is just a great town to be in. I met a Pittsburgh native and I told him that I've noticed that parts of the city are getting "SFed." A few neighborhoods which no one would be caught dead in 5-10 years ago are suddenly bustling with tech company tees from google, uber, duolingo, ibm, amazon, apple and others. Pittsburghers are very prod of their city, as they should be. I just hope it doesn't reach the level of discourse that we've seen in San Francisco.

Can you speak to Pittsburgh's zoning policies? SF makes it nearly impossible to add a significant number of new housing units because the zoning policies don't allow less dense housing to be replaced with larger, taller apartment buildings. Hopefully Pittsburgh isn't like that.

It is not. I am a fourth generation Pittsburgh native. The bigger problem is the NIMBYs in SF that vote for things like "zoning policies" to protect the value of their houses. This situation is a very uniquely San Francisco one. The vast majority of houses in Pittsburgh aren't million dollar homes (yet) so this NIMBY-ism just doesn't happen.

It goes without saying that ludicrous regulations like "historically protected" homes that you can't remodel without bribing the city and trees on your property that you don't own (the city owns) that exist in SF don't exist in Pittsburgh.

On another note, the nice thing about Pittsburgh is that you don't have such an oppressively high cost of living compared to SF. You don't have $10 toast here, and you can rent a 1 bdr apartment for the cost of renting a single parking spot for your car in SF. Every single cost from utilities to parking to insurance for your car is a significant fraction of the equivalent cost in SF.

I was about to comment "no way, Pittsburgh also has the $10 toast"... but then looking around to the place I used to go to, I realize it's more like $4-$5 (see http://www.coca-cafe.net/breakfast.php or https://www.facebook.com/B52PGH/menu/). Wow, I left Pittsburgh for NYC just two years ago and my frame of reference has already completely switched...

I pay 450 in rent (with roomates) take the incline and walk to my job downtown and certainly spend less than 10 dollars for lunch that isn't toast. You can live in Pittsburgh comfortably incredibly cheaply.

Pittsburgh also has a lot of underdeveloped waterfront real estate and still has room to develop in a lot of areas within an hour (or closer) drive of downtown. Over the last 20 years, a lot of areas that used to be mills (all along the waterfronts) have become entertainment areas (restaurants, movie theaters, shops, and bars) with mid-sized apartment buildings or town houses that are in close proximity to them. Over the last 5 years, it has become more popular to live in downtown proper too. There are a lot of areas that have gone from being not very populated to places people want to live with great school districts. The one thing I wish we would fix would be public transportation. Unless you are trying to get downtown, public transit is essentially useless, especially when trying to get to the other side of the city. There are very few bus routes that run late at night and the rail system essentially only services those who live in the South Hills.

Getting around by bus is both inconvenient and expensive, public transit needs more funding here.

How's the bike infrastructure? I get around pretty much everywhere in Manhattan and Brooklyn by bike; I only take public transit a few times per month.

Also, I imagine the winters there can be harsh.

As much as I love it here, we got our share of problems. Winter is rough and so is the biking situation, due to bridge related reasons. However the city is very good at dealing with the bad weather and the current powers that be have been doing a lot to make infrastructure more bike friendly.

What are the bridge-related issues? You appear to have a lot more bridges than Manhattan<->Brooklyn, which is nice.

Is it the lack of proper bike lanes on the bridges?

Yes. The incredible amount of bridges (most anywhere) makes it so a lot of roadways, be it the bridges themselves or just general weirdness begat from building roads in a river valley, are super not safe for bikers.

I have a biased view on this (I briefly biked competitively), so take it with a mild grain of salt, but it's pretty much fine if you can be an assertive cyclist. Some of the bridges you have to be very assertive about owning your lane -- particularly the highland park bridge, to get to areas north/northeast of the city. From downtown to the north side, there are several bike-friendly bridges: The Clemente, Warhol, and Rachel Carson bridges all have sidewalks. To the south side, the Smithfield bridge has a very large (and very popular) sidewalk, and the newly renovated Hot Metal bridge has a dedicated bike span.

It's solid and improving. We're a one car family (two working parents and a young child). We put maybe 2500 miles per year on our car, much of that on longer trips out of the city. Between walking, biking, and public transit, it's good. Having some kind of car available is still more useful than I wish it was, though.

Every city in the country has the potential to "SF'ed" - zoning laws make it so. If there is one place we would actually benefit from deregulation (as a country) it would be in eliminating zoning regulation. The places that need it most are the places that attract tech-boomification [sic] (Oakland is another example). A solution would be to encourage even growth across a city through targeting neighborhoods with inclusive development from a fungible pot of funds from the new revenues. This, coupled with expedited approvals and (not-yet-create) anti-NIMBY laws could make shit awesome for every one.

As a Cleveland native, I look at Pittsburgh somewhat jealously as a city that is achieving what Cleveland has been slow to do over the last 30 years: find a post-industrial midwestern identity.

Cleveland would do well to create industrial and R&D ties to Pittsburgh. It's relatively close in proximity. Creating a regional tech hub would benefit both.

Case Western has to step up its game.

Cleveland Clinic and NASA could have a role too, but could really use some coordination.

As a CWRU grad, I don't really see what power they have fix Cleveland's problems. One of them is due to the high levels segregation (both wealth and race) and sprawl due to white flight from the inner city.

This is slowly changing as Cleveland tries to revitalize the downtown, but I'm not sure there are any good plans to help out extremely poor areas such as East Cleveland.

> I'm not sure there are any good plans to help out extremely poor areas such as East Cleveland.

I'm not sure this is necessarily helping, but there was a plan to have Cleveland annex East Cleveland. The East Cleveland City Council basically nuked it and then recalled their mayor who had proposed it, IIRC.

Football rivalries aside, Pittsburgh and Cleveland would do well to partner more often.

Both are very similar cities, they have more in common with each other than others in the rust belt.

Rather than settle football rivalries, I kind of wish Cleveland would just ditch the Browns and offload them to another city already. But for good this time. Their stadium is occupying probably one of the best spots on the Lakefront, and is entirely wasted there.

There's no need to spell it out, we know Cleveland Browns fans look at Pittsburgh jealously.

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 who will then be forced to live in the sprawl ghettos around the city where crime is already a big problem.

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 "regular" food (non-organic, probably GMO, the horrors!) from the normal grocery store or the nondescript diner/sandwich shop? And just act like a normal person and not carouse like an idiot having brunch exclusively with your well-heeled friends? I guess it's human nature and has more to do with money than anything else, but so much for software engineer exceptionalism.

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.

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...

I think you're right, and to be more precise, that they are trying to create their ideal college town, a place that typically combines quaint shops with familiar big box chain stores.

I think it just shows what most people would do if money we're not an issue, so rather than techies being unable to live normally, this is what normal looks like when people are not so constrained by money. I think NYC is a good example since it's not just techies, but rather how people like to live when they are less constrained by money.

It's a power thing. When you immigrate to a new area and come in at the bottom of the social strata, you have no choice but to assimilate and work your way up. When you immigrate and come in at the top of the social strata, you change the social strata.

Local businesses can't help but cater to economic incentives. If most of the dollars coming in want luxury apartments, $10 cocktails, tapas bars, on-demand laundry, etc, that's what they'll get.

In SF old housing stock is rent controlled. On the rare occasion that it pops up on the market, competition is fierce. Usually it doesn't turn over, because policies intended to prevent that turnover are working.

New luxury complexes have straightforward availability and rent first-come-first-served. The leasing office will make an appointment with you pretty much whenever, and if you apply, you get the unit. They're known quantities with Yelp reviews and everything.

If you're a newcomer with not much time and not much price sensitivity, which are you going to end up with?

FWIW, Victorians in good shape rent for more than luxury skyscrapers. Rich people do prefer them and they are, in fact, more luxurious. But buildings that throw around the word "luxury" are the path of least resistance.

You'd be hard pressed to find any luxury apartment as luxurious as an average 100-year-old single family home, yet for some reason only the former is an obnoxious wealth symbol.

Considering no one is forcing people to spend their money on tapas bars or $10 cocktails, maybe it is terrible. The old delis/sandwich shops/diners/grocery stores have bad product and bad service, otherwise people would go there. Why would you not want a Trader Joe's, where you can find products of much higher quality, than a corner store bodega type place where there is no quality control or accountability? Why go to a deli when you can go somewhere with various options and spices than instead of just meat and bread?

What's the alternative for those neighborhoods? They weren't exactly in great shape before the tech companies came to Pittsburgh.

It's always interesting to see articles like this about your town; I must say it has been nice to watch Pittsburgh change over the years though.

In the case anyone's looking to make the leap, I'm hiring for a Research Programmer position at CMU https://cmu.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?job=2005...

PG has written about what it would take for Pittsburgh to become a startup hub. The gist of it is talent (which it has) and capital (early stages).

1) How to Be Silicon Valley http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

2) How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html

PG, who grew up in Pittsburgh, gave a nice talk about how to make Pittsburgh a startup hub: https://youtu.be/CpfdtgW6_oI

Paul Graham essay on Pittsburgh:

http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html

It seems to me that there is an article like this for every city in America and abroad these days. Is Pittsburg really that hot ? The numbers I could find for 2015 was that Pittsburg attracted $437mn in VC dollars, while the Bay Area attracted somewhere around $27bn.

http://www.post-gazette.com/business/tech-news/2015/03/19/Ve...

That is a 50x difference.

Remember that Pittsburgh only has a population of 300k. Obviously the Bay Area has a more bustling tech market, but for such a small market Pittsburgh (with an h) is doing pretty well, especially when you factor in how badly it was hit when the steel mills closed

I think you're missing the point that a lot of big tech companies are moving there. Google has 500 employees there and Uber has hundreds as well. I think that using the amount of VC funding a city receives as a measure of how hot its tech is doing is a bit misleading.

Also to compare anywhere against the Bay Area doesn't make sense. The Bay Area is obviously going to beat out everywhere else. It's like someone saying that they built a pretty big wall and then coming in and saying "Yeah but look how big the Great Wall of China is."

Last year I was going through a long and grueling job search after taking time off for family reasons. I was based in the midwest after living around the country over the past decade for my recent three jobs. It was the first time I felt totally untethered and able to look at any US locations for a new job. I work in scientific computing and machine learning, so there were various employment hubs to consider.

Knowing the cost of living on both coasts in large cities, and wanting to be close to my midwest family, I really badly wanted a job in a techie midwest place. Pittsburgh and Minneapolis were the top choices, but I also considered everything I could in Chicago, Madison, Dayton, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Grand Rapids, and a handful of other one-offs.

I have to say I was so thoroughly disappointed by the types of jobs and job offers, particularly salary and compensation -- even adjusting for cost of living -- that it was just not doable.

The companies were pitching the same cramped, over-crowded "collaborative" open offices despite private office space being so much cheaper. The salaries were genuinely around half of what they are in Boston and New York for similar work, probably less than half compared with SF. It seemed that bonuses and significant equity compensation were also pared down.

In the end, I took a new job in New York and decided that living with any of the perfectly workable strategies to reduce cost of living here (mainly, live with roommates however you must to have a short commute) was absolutely worth it to make 2x salary, greater bonus potential, and greater equity, and, realistically, greater chances at career growth.

Don't get me wrong. I actively didn't want this choice and wanted the comfort of Pittsburgh, the possibility of actual home ownership, more private space (except that damn open plan office man), and easy drive to my extended family.

It was just not exonomically attractive to pay the cost of earning roughly 40% of the conpensation for this, especially compounded. Maybe if I am lucky to rise to a senior position in the future and can transfer with less of a pay cut, it would be good.

To put some numbers on it, I am an ML engineer, somewhere between midlevel and senior with about 6 years of experience and a graduate degree, and I was looking for non-management and non-research-focused ML engineering roles across companies like (formerly) Silicon Graphics, Uber, DuoLingo, Google, random start-ups, some finance and insurance firms in Chicago, and PNC Bank outside of Cleveland.

I earned just under 200k at my most recent long-term role in Boston prior to my current role in NYC, not including cash bonus and equity.

The best offer I found out of all the midwest searching was in Minneapolis, at 130k with small anount of equity and no bonus. Every other company suggested that, for their area, pushing 100k was the best they could do.

I've lived in the midwest a lot, and I know that financially, 220k - 250k plus career growth in NYC is probably better, in pure earnings terms, than say 120k in Pittsburgh. Obviously other considerations could make a midwestern city attractive despite lower earnings, but the gap was big enough for me that I decided the cramped city rat race will have to do for now.

My general feeling was that a lot of the new focus on the midwest as a tech job region was more or less a rebranding event, trying to rebrand jobs to enable companies to pay lower salaries and reduced compensation for the same value proposition from the engineer, even after adjusting for cost of living.

Well if it's the best they can do it's they can do. Did you have multiple offers to leverage? Also how big was your network in the area? Sometimes you have to start something as well in some places to get what you want. Anyway thanks for sharing. Nice to hear that Minneapolis is a techie place.

i grew up in pittsburgh, and had to leave because there simply wasn't a job for me - (most of the cmu startups threw my resume in the trash as soon as it wasn't cmu) though that was a long time ago and things have changed.

however, the numbers still show slim pickings. search glass door or any job posting website, you will find that philadelphia (not a tech city) has ~5x the amount of positions available. NYC has 15x. a lot of people retort about per capita openings, but I don't think that matters as much as people think. people do have geographic preferences but also apply to many other cities, and CMU graduates more engineers than pittsburgh has data scientist openings.

as you said, sure you have a 'lower' cost of living, but the jobs in pittsburgh pay significantly less.

pittsbugh is not a walk-able city, its one of the least walk-able ones that I know. Its almost 100% certainty you will need a car if you live/work in the city, and if you normally get around without a car, moving to pittsburgh and needing to buy/upkeep a car will wipe away most of those cost of living savings.

traffic and parking in pittsburgh is a nightmare. you can be in a car and see the building you want to get to, but not make it within 30 minutes.

Parking downtown is bad, but I'd be curious what cities you are comparing it to with respect to traffic. I grew up in Chicago and lived in the Bay Area for a few years, and those are both far worse. A lot of the newer tech jobs are fairly close to downtown, the strip or the east end (both my wife and I are able to walk to work almost every day).

You are assuming just because it's Pittsburgh pay from companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Uber will not be competitive. If there is any discount on salary it's on the 10-15% range, not 50%.

software developers for amazon in Pittsburgh make between 56 and 107k, 78k mean (glassdoor).

Sanfrancisco, its 76 - 131k, 102k mean.

A side note. The cost of living here in Pittsburgh is much, much lower than in SF or in NYC. According to a Cost of Living calculator, to maintain the same living standard in Pittsburgh at $60K, you have to make $137K in SF.

In the internal Google salary survey, controlling for level and tenure, salaries in Pittsburgh are within 10% of salaries in Mountain View. Moving to Pittsburgh is similar to getting an enormous raise. However "controlling for level" masks the fact that Pittsburgh is Siberia, far from the palace court where it is harder to be promoted to a high level.

I was there is May for a college visit and It seems to be the next up-in-coming tech center.

The author seems to place most of the credit for the recent 'boom' on CMU for its rich history in the Machine Learning and Robotics fields. So my question is, what happens when other top universities begin to catch up or even possibly dethrone CMU? Would Pittsburg still continue to attract talent and businesses?

CMU has intense advantages that make that unlikely to occur within the next 50 years.

CMU has consistently been ranked #1 in the world for computer science. Generally, university rankings are VERY consistent over time. Harvard isn't going to stop being Harvard any time soon.

Also, "Pittsburgh" is spelled with an "h" at the end.

I think some tech people confuse it with Pittsburg in the SF Bay Area, if it was the one they heard of first.

> So my question is, what happens when other top universities begin to catch up or even possibly dethrone CMU?

What happens when CMU gains an even greater advantage over other top universities? Will Pittsburgh be able to handle the deluge of talent and businesses wanting to move there?

It would be folly to not mention Pitt and their place as a top tier medical institution as an aside. It's not just CMU and comp sci making PGH what it is today.

I graduated from CMU (SCS) 15 years ago. The school is so far ahead of nearly every other CS school in the world in regard to machine learning/AI, it's laughable to think it will ever be dethroned. They have ties with DARPA and other government agencies that have deep pockets. They've also successfully courted every major tech corporation in the country. I have to applaud their board of trustees/president/provost. They know what they're doing.

The article paints a rosy picture of Pittsburgh, but I remember these types of articles appearing back in 2000. The state of Pennsylvania even had a campaign (commercials, marketing, etc) to try to convince college graduates to stay in the state. It didn't work. Most of the talent will eventually leave. All but 2 of my 30 or so friends from graduate/undergrad left after they finished their degree.

In my last semester I was dying to leave because the weather is absolute shit for half the year. CMU was really the only thing there that was worthwhile to me.

I keep hearing OHMIGOD some car/bus is driving autonomously somewhere on the planet. CMU has been doing that since the 80s.

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