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Comment by ynniv | Hacker News Reader

I get that you work with what you have (in this case, a corpus of job postings), but a ranking that places Baltimore in the top three tech hubs fails the sniff test. CBRE has a better list here (email registration wall): https://www.cbre.com/research-and-reports/Scoring-Tech-Talen...

I'm biased in that it places Atlanta unusually high, but overall it is a better, less surprising ranking:

  Bay Area
  Seattle
  New York
  Washington DC
  Atlanta
  Toronto
  Raleigh
  Austin
  Boston

View on HN

Their data is obviously broken. If you look at the source, it is "Indeed", which is obviously not an unbiased sample of data.

Let's pick a huge employer in Silicon Valley, Facebook, and search for jobs on Indeed.

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=facebook&l=Menlo+Park%2C+CA

Not a single Software Engineer position.

And I really don't think hot San Francisco startups are using Indeed to look for talent, which is why SF falls so low on their rankings

Indeed is a scraper with lots of low quality inventory or as my boss ex Total Jobs director said "shit inventory".

Tier one employers don't normally advertise on indeed

Exactly.

Which is also why Indeed's previous article "Where are the Highest Paying Tech Jobs in the US" is complete garbage. Shows SV average at $111k. SV and SF have disproportionately high portion of Tier 1 companies and positions, many of which will never show up on Indeed.

How can you talk about SV without Facebook? Facebook has 20k employees, about half of them in SV.

Where do they advertise?

Top-50 universities, reaching out to engineers with reasonable resumes directly and leveraging the networks of their employees with referral bonuses. Plus way more inbound interest than they can easily vet.

So recruiters and referral bonuses.

The article's methodology is silly because it measures tech listings as a percentage of job listings. Choosing a scale-neutral metric ignores the network effects associated with population density. For example, a town with a hundred jobs of which 99 are tech would top out this metric.

The sample is definitely biased because it is only Indeed data, but I disagree about the scaling. I think using percentage of overall jobs that are "tech" is fine. It's their attempt to neutralize metro areas that overall use Indeed less than others.

Since this is only looking at populations greater than 1 million, I think an area with an overwhelming percentage of tech jobs such as your hypo 99% would be very interesting to anyone hunting for a tech job.

Again, this is Indeed, so job seekers and employers are the target audience of this post.

Atlanta is the center of tech ambitions for the southeast. It has a lot of Fortune 500 company headquarters - Turner Broadcasting with 18+ major online brands, Home Depot, Lowe's, etc. Yahoo and Google had offices. There are also a lot of small satellite consulting firms. Cost of housing is much lower, though traffic is bad as well. It's a nice green city, but Venture funding is low, so it depends on your ambitions.

I'd be very cautious about Atlanta. Outside of Google, many of the companies there are wanting to pay salaries I'd consider substantially below market (even including COLA) compared to the other hubs.

That includes those fortune 500 companies (a couple of whom had internal recruiters bail when I mentioned my current salary + the COLA number). Cutting your real estate costs by $12-15k goes a long way but it doesn't magically cover $40k+ paycuts. It is good for employers (for instance, one guy was willing to disclose "I got two guys with Master degrees for $20k less than what you wanted.") but not so good for employees on the upper end of the pay scale. (i.e. above 6 figures outside of SF/NYC)

It is anecdotal, just my experience after looking to move there.

If we're going to be anecdotal, I moved to Atlanta from Boston. I now have lower expenses, a higher salary, the weather is better, cars last twice as long, and people are less abrasive. Every time I check there are more startups, more new buildings, more people, more opportunities...

Just my experience after having moved here.

I just moved to Atlanta from Seattle and got a 25% raise in the process. In fact I had two similar offers to choose from.

I had a much different experience applying for jobs as a data scientist in Atlanta - of the companies I got offers for, the base salaries + total comp were similar to what glassdoor reported for data scientists in silicon valley, albeit just a hair lower. According to the various online cost-of-living calculators, I'd have to be making about $200k in the Bay Area to be living the same lifestyle.

Though looking at glassdoor data for Atlanta, it does look like data scientists have an average that's almost $34k lower than san francisco. So maybe I just got lucky.

> I got two guys with Master degrees for $20k less than what you wanted.") but not so good for employees on the upper end of the pay scale.

MIT grad, data scientist here. Again, if you are not a top data scientist, it will work fine for you. I routinely get offered $300K/year as a recent PhD grad in the Bay area. I would not get anywhere near proportional compensation in Atlanta or even Seattle.

That's some incredible money, congrats!

I'm not going to pretend this is scientific in any way, but using online COL calculators (http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/index.html), $300k in San Francisco is supposedly (taken with many grains of salt) equivalent to $172k in Atlanta, which you could surely land?

Those calculators are ridiculous because they assume you spend your entire income. The cost of living adjustment only applies to what you spend when evaluating which salary:city combination is ideal for you.

Those calculators are ridiculous because they assume you spend your entire income.

For most Americans that's pretty close to being correct - the average savings rate is around 6%. (https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/10/03/heres-the-average-...)

You don't think that varies a lot by income? My impression is that savings as a percentage go up dramatically with income. I don't think I know anyone working in the industry that considers it reasonable to not max out their 401k, and who doesn't save substantially on top of that.

This would be quite difficult for someone on an average salary with kids, or sometime who works in an industry where keeping up appearances is important.

OK, savings rate does vary by income, according to the Fed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/2016-economic-wel... . They only break things out into three income brackets (0-40K, 40K-100K, 100K+) - but even in the 100K+ bracket the median savings rate is somewhere between 6 and 10%, which isn't quite "max out the 401k" level. It looks like the data is available (https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/shed_dat...). The survey asks about level of education, what field that education was in, and number of children, so something like what you're asking about is actually checkable.

That's mostly a choice for high income earners, and much of that discretionary spend costs similar amounts no matter where you live.

Vacation costs, Amazon splurges, etc, don't change between Akron and SF.

The thing that's impossible to make up in these COLA calculations is retirement savings. Putting away 10% of $300k is very different than 10% of $172k. And you don't have to retire where you work.

What is that like as VP of data science?

> I'd be very cautious about Atlanta. Outside of Google, many of the companies there are wanting to pay salaries I'd consider substantially below market (even including COLA) compared to the other hubs.

If most companies are paying a certain salary, doesn't that imply that salary IS market rate?

I don't think you can directly compare salaries across cities even after factoring in cost of living since it ignores the fact some places are more desirable to live in than others and thus should command "premiums".

I've heard this anecdotally as well. I've also heard that companies are willing to pay big money to get you in from other tech hubs only to screw you down the line on bonuses. It's tough to justify a raise at an Atlanta tech company when you're the guy or girl who's already paid more than everyone else.

Also, people overestimate the effects of cheaper housing. Yes, cheaper housing is nice but one has to remember that lots of things cost the same no matter where you live. Food, transportation, travel, and education costs are mostly static across the country. It's important to factor that in and not get dazzled by the fancy house or condo you can suddenly afford.

> If most companies are paying a certain salary, doesn't that imply that salary IS market rate?

In my particular case, the "market rate" at Location A is ~$40k higher (after COLA) than the "market rate" in Atlanta.

So, when I mean "market rate" I mean "My options at Location A + the options in Atlanta."

> I don't think you can directly compare salaries across cities even after factoring in cost of living since it ignores the fact some places are more desirable to live in than others and thus should command "premiums".

To be perfectly honest, I consider Atlanta vs. where I am now a wash in most respects and a $40k premium is simply too steep for the difference. It isn't like I live in the Bay Area where rent is $40k.

There isn't such a thing as "market rate"

What companies did you look at and what do you consider market rate? You might consider Silly Valley salaries to be market rate but they're not. In fact those rates are what the top 1% of coders make if they're lucky. I would expect Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and other competitive technology companies to pay those rates but market rate is going to be 60-180k. There are tons and tons of jobs paying in that range from less cool tech companies like NCR, AT&T, Borland (Micro whatever), and IBM. There are also tons of other companies headquartered in Atlanta willing to pay those rates like Rubbermaid, CTX (trains), Coca Cola, and Bank of America. There are also a lot of companies that tend to pay below market rate for coders because of the cool factor of working for them like the TV and Film companies.

> You might consider Silly Valley salaries to be market rate but they're not.

I don't work in the Bay Area, NYC, or a similar location. I'm comparing my current location to Atlanta.

This is now the third time I've repeated this ITT, including the OP.

Atlanta here. My house cost less than my post-tax salary… you can magically cover 40k paycuts.. in fact in SF that 40k would probably be rent alone.

Yes, but I don't live or work in the Bay Area.

The difference in rent/real estate is like $10k/year. I've been to Atlanta regularly for quite some time and I can assure you I know the exact difference in COLA as a result. ;)

I can assure you there are plenty of engineers making north of $100k in midtown

I hear Square's local office in Atlantic Station pays $150k+.

I have no idea what everyone else's salary is (and I'm not going to share mine), but Square Atlanta pays, well, and -- more importantly -- we have an amazing team. And we're hiring. Get in touch if you're interested: my email is ${USERNAME}@gmail.com

I think that's the case. A lot of the Google engineering team that originally was hired on that office closing came at 180+ I heard

I've seen 90-140 be pretty common for mid and senior engineers in Atlanta. That's not SF prices but housing is definitely cheaper. Maybe not for too long though

Yeah, and I've had multiple internal recruiters for these companies nope out at my equivalent salary in Atlanta. Maybe its just something wrong with me in the view of companies in Atlanta vs. where I live now then.

I moved from SF to Atlanta three years ago. I figure that Atlanta will always be cheaper because they can just build more Atlanta if they need to, whereas San Francisco is essentially an island.

This is absolutely true. Check Glassdoor.

Which midtown? Atlanta's midtow?

Atlanta's Midtown, which borders Georgia Tech and is a mixed business / residential district.

Thanks for this :)

Yeah, I'm sure they exist but everyone noped out at my current salary equivalent. So maybe its just my skillset isn't popular Atlanta or something about my personality turns people off in the Southeast vs. where I'm at now.

UPS hq is in Atlanta, too.

> ambitions

> had offices

As a former Baltimore resident, what exactly makes you think Baltimore fails the sniff test?

For example, Johns Hopkins University is IIRC the highest-funded research-focused university in the USA.

(Edit - adding link to support above : Johns Hopkins leads U.S. universities in research spending for 37th consecutive year : https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/12/07/research-spending-hopkins-nsf...)

Other cities on the list have ~half the research spending, plus ALSO large tech industries.

Balitimore-Columbia showed up because of Columbia, not Baltimore. NSA and several other agencies are in or near Columbia, plus the contracting firms who support them.

Isn't Johns Hopkins a medical university? Not exactly a Silicon tech hub.

A "medical university"? Strange, I wonder how I did my PhD in experimental condensed matter physics there :-)

It's a general research-focused university, like MIT. The oldest research-based university in the USA in fact.

Though you're right it's very strong in medicine and all things 'bio' including biochemistry, biophysics, bioinformatics, and biotech.

But it also has a strong astrophysics program, eg the Space Telescope Science Institute is based there.

And the JHU Applied Physics Lab is not too far away too.

But I'm not sure why you feel that med-tech and bio-tech don't contribute to a tech hub. Are you considering tech as purely web tech?

Baltimore has a lot of pure industry, too, totally unrelated to government - though if government work is your style, there's no shortage of it here. Granted, you won't find the same median salary you would in Palo Alto or Mountain View, but you don't have to deal with the same headaches, either.

Johns Hopkins has a medical school. But they have other schools too!

APL, too. And anyway, whence comes the idea that a medical school wouldn't have any use for people in our line of work? Bioinformatics is a thing!

Atlanta is amazing. It has an extremely low cost of living, yet there are tech companies here paying SF wages.

Anecdotally, my rent is $1300/mo for a 900 sqft loft directly on Atlanta's Beltline [1], and my total comp is (edit: decided to remove this since I might get doxed. I'll be happy to talk with anyone seriously considering Atlanta via email).

It's also been really interesting to see Georgia rocket to the #2 location in the US for filmmaking (a personal hobby of mine). The folks I know in the industry say we're poised to overtake LA eventually.

I mention this because Atlanta has a great mix of culture from a variety of different backgrounds. The music and arts scenes are particularly strong.

[1] https://beltline.org

>"It's also been really interesting to see Georgia rocket to the #2 location in the US for filmmaking (a personal hobby of mine). The folks I know in the industry say we're poised to overtake LA eventually."

You realize that this is solely because of Georgia making hundreds of millions of dollars in tax subsidies available to Hollywood right? This is not sustainable. Hollywood previously set up shop in New Orleans("Hollyood South")for the same reasons and then moved on to Georgia when those tax credits were capped in Louisiana. See:

https://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/louisianas-film-indu...

and

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-c...

I really want to like Atlanta, but the whole city makes my skin crawl.

Whenever we go there, usually to take in an MLB game, I just want to turn around and leave immediately. There doesn't seem to be any rational reason for it. When the spouse drives out of town to go stalk Walking Dead filming locations, the overwhelming sense of dread eases up, and I just get bored looking at bits of rural Georgia that were lucky enough to appear on television for one scene.

Maybe I'm allergic to peachtree streets.

In contrast, NYC, Chicago, Boston, Phoenix, Nashville, San Diego, Denver, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and most other US cities I have visited just don't have an aura to them that I can pick up. Baltimore felt like I just walked in on someone who had been crying and was trying to hide it. Washington, DC, felt like someone was following me the whole time, like being hunted. Cincinnati felt great just being around it; it made me want to consider moving there.

Atlanta is just the opposite of that, every time I go. Just being there stresses me out for no readily apparent reason.

On paper, it seems like it should be great. Georgia Tech is close, and the local economy is great. All kinds of television shows and movies have that juicy Georgia peach at the end of the credits now, instead of Vancouver. The weather is decent for 10 months out of the year. Lots of local agriculture. Lots of roads leading out of town, and a hub airport for a relatively decent airline. Diverse, cosmopolitan culture, as long as you stay in the city limits and away from the suburbs. About the only thing it lacks entirely is a seaport. I just can't stand actually being there.

Lived in Atlanta. Glad to get out. I don't think I've disliked any city as much as I did Atlanta, and I have no idea why.

I feel similarly about Atlanta. I have a bunch of family there and have made 10-15 trips there lifetime. Something about the culture there just rubs me the wrong way.

I've lived in Baltimore, NYC, SF, and DC as an adult, and found something to like about all of them (although I laughed out loud at your description of Bmore). I really can't imagine moving to ATL. I think it's a 3rd-tier city that thinks it's a 1st-tier city.

Might be just the right ingredients of EMF Radiation and Climate which don't agree with you.

> It has an extremely low cost of living, yet there are tech companies here paying SF wages.

I am skeptical of this. I am early in my career, live in SF, and make north of $300k. I do not work for one of the big 4, and I know people making more than me. That's not imaginary money - it's all liquid.

This isn't meant to brag. I just think a lot of people underestimate how much you can make in SF if your skills are in demand.

Very few engineers (as a percentage of all engineers) even in the Bay Area earn that much (base, all-in, or otherwise). Typical non-management compensation (all-in) is going to cap out ~15% or more below $300k.

I've taken several salary surveys and done plenty of research through publicly available sites (e.g. glassdoor, linked in, payscale, etc.). For what it's worth, my all-in compensation is well below $300k/year as a senior engineer and is typically reported as being on or above the very high end of average. Given the propensity to exaggerate in these surveys I expect my salary to be even farther from the average than reported.

I'm not saying these salaries are normal - I understand I am highly paid. My point is you can typically do better financially in the Bay Area if you are great at what you do. And something I think a lot of people don't appreciate is that by moving to the Bay Area you are more likely to open yourself up to those opportunities in the future. I would have a completely different career had I never moved here.

I don't think "being great" is any more of a differentiator here than anywhere else. In fact here in the Bay Area who you knows matters more than what, just like anywhere else, and in some ways more.

Definitely agree with respect to opportunities, though. Even at double the cost of living or slightly more, the doubled salary means one is saving more in absolute terms and has access to a much better job market.

> In fact here in the Bay Area who you knows matters more than what, just like anywhere else, and in some ways more.

I got my current job applying through the website knowing nobody at the company. There are just more (and better) opportunities here.

You and the people you know are definitely outliers.

What are your specialties?

I recently made the switch to management, but before that I built robots - electrical, mechanical, and software engineering. The switch didn't really bump my pay - many of the engineers I work with make more than me. It is definitely easier to command a higher salary working on the software side of robotics, although I do know a handful of people doing hardware making even more (these people are truly outliers though).

What are the main toolsets in use / in demand on the software side?

I'm in the Bay Area and I'm feeling underpaid. Please tell me what to learn.

Off-topic: try a five day water fast for your migraines. You need neuronal autophagy.

Personally what I look at is what someone has built. If someone is a great engineer they can adapt, although there are some limits to this (I wouldn't hire someone who only works with MATLAB for a position that largely involves coding in C++). What I like to see are demos, not papers (although a demo of a paper is excellent).

ROS is something of a standard framework used in many places. AI is largely a buzzword and can mean many things, but ML tends to have more specific meaning. TensorFlow is becoming the commonly used library for all things machine learning. CUDA is becoming an incredibly useful skill, and GPU experts are always appreciated (including outside of robotics).

So play around with OpenCV if you want to work in computer vision, play around with TensorFlow if you want to do machine learning, and play around with ROS for learning how the backend of these systems work. If you want to be more of a specialist, learn CUDA and optimizing GPU code - I suspect that will be highly in demand for some time.

>Off-topic: try a five day water fast for your migraines. You need neuronal autophagy. reply

Tell me more.

Thanks, very helpful.

Most modern illness is caused by a pervasive lack of autophagy, which is basically a cellular cleaning cycle for your body. Since we're all rich and we eat and snack all the time, autophagy cycles are basically never activated. The body needs "feasting" for cellular growth, but is also _needs_ famine for cellular dismantling and re-purposing. Otherwise you'll have cells with damaged mitochondria that keep clinging to life even though they are broken and very inefficient. Sometimes these damaged cells even replicate out of control, AKA cancer.[1] Cancer cells, since they typically rely on sugar fermentation for fuel instead of oxygen, would normally be "marked" as damaged and dismantled during an autophagy cleaning cycle, but since we never stop eating sugar that never happens. Same with migraines.. in my view you basically have a bunch of damaged cells in your brain that need dismantled and cleared out. But unless you fast (or eat keto, however that's a bit less efficient for autophagy) your neural cleaning cycle simply never runs.[2]

https://www.amazon.com/Tripping-Truth-Metabolic-Theory-Cance...

http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2010/09/migraine-sufferers-shou...

Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm626MgpveI

Are these skills possible to acquire if you do not have a university background? I am self taught in everything, also learning math. I am make great money in frontend but would like to work with a more interesting skill set.

I think you can learn a lot if you become very familiar with ROS and just start building things (on the software side at least - much harder to pick up electronics and mechanics if only because of the material and machining costs). My first real foray into robotics was with OpenCV (which is part of ROS) many years ago. There are lots of tutorials online - find something you think is interesting and build it and go from there. If you really like it then start going to meetups (there are enough in the Bay Area for robotics) and meet other people, some of whom are amateurs and some of whom are professionals.

That would be my advice, although I have a university background so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Can you give a ballpark total comp for your ballpark years of experience? Atlanta is one of the places I've thought about moving to since it's not too far from my home town, but I've heard traffic sucks.

> Atlanta is amazing. It has an extremely low cost of living, yet there are tech companies here paying SF wages.

Atlanta is not paying SF wages. Trust me on this. But you are right. The cost of living is far better in Atlanta.

I moved to Raleigh back in '97 under the mistaken impression that it would be a major tech hub. While there are many good tech jobs there, the RTP area fell pretty far short of my expectations. Also, the dot-com crash gutted that area like a fish and I'm not sure the commercial real estate sector there has ever recovered even to this day. It was fun for a brief time in the late '90s. I moved away in '06, but went back to visit recently and now that area feels very overcrowded. I can't speak to the tech sector and how it is doing these days.

It fully recovered. I moved here in '12 from L.A. with a job that had the same pay, but the cost of living is probably close to half of California, so it was like having my salary doubled overnight. IMHO this place is a paradise for engineers who care about actual work life balance.

NC's growth has slipped in the last couple years, though, because of the HB2 nonsense. It'll be a few years before we recover our image.

It's only like doubling your salary if you spend your entire income. When you move to a new area, the change in disposable income is determined by salary - expenses*cost of living.

Example

You make $100k in city A and spend $40k on expenses. That leaves $60k disposable.

You are considering a job in city B with half the cost of living and the same pay.

You still make $100k but your expenses have gone from $40k to $20k. Your new disposable income is $80k.

Cost of living is half but it's not like having 100% more income, it's 33% more .

Your math is right. But, you've got to understand the cost of real estate is much much more than double in SF. Realistically, in Ralleigh regional area you can pay 120$/sq ft vs 1000$/sq ft in the SF Regional area (perhaps 500$/sq ft if your willing to commute for 3 hrs/day).

Now, SF might be a great place if you have no kids, no expenses and rent a tiny little room. But, as soon as you want to have a family and backyard, you better get out! SF and CA in general is no place to raise a family. The key in this strategy is, don't put down roots in the CA bay area.

I live in SF, I understand the cost of real estate. I'm not arguing that lifestyle expectations are very different between cities. So given you move to SF and understand you'll be in a smaller house because that is the market norm, the COLA still is only on what you spend.

When my mortgage for a house on 1/2 an acre costs less than my 650 sqft apartment in L.A. did, it sure feels like my cost of living was cut in half.

When a round of golf at a Davis Love or Fred Couples designed course costs the same as playing at a shitty muni in L.A., it feels like my disposable income has tripled.

I did the opposite in 2011. Got tired of having nothing to do but go to bars and restaurants. Enjoying the LA life of having a beach and nice hiking at my door. Lots of diverse industries that need tech talent as well as a startup scene.

Raleigh felt stagnant when I left, with most of the jobs enterprise software in unsexy industries. Grass is always greener I suppose!

The Downtown Raleigh area picked up a lot after the market recovered. There's been a lot of regentrification and companies started moving into town instead of to RTP. There's Citrix, RedHat, a handful of co-working spaces, and many new stores/restaurants/breweries that have moved into Downtown Raleigh in the past 5 years. Downtown Durham has undergone similar changes.

Between Raleigh and Durham, it's mostly sister-sites for larger tech companies. Personally, I've worked at NetApp, Citrix, and now Nutanix -- all within 25 minutes of my house in Cary.

Not much of a start-up scene, AFAIK.

There are a handful of co-working spaces that house startups around American Tobacco Campus in Durham and Downtown Raleigh. There's not much VC in the Raleigh/Durham area though so most are bootstrapped by founders.

Ok, but to be fair the DC and Baltimore metro areas are, effectively, becoming one big sprawl. The city centers are 50 miles apart and the beltway exburbs where much of the tech facilities are actually located are even closer together.

Atlanta has GT though, which is exploding with both startups and major players investing in on-sight "innovation-centric" locations.

That, and there's some really cool startups in stealth mode I've yet to see mentioned here, some breaking $10m in revenue and others getting funded left and right.

Atlanta is on the rise.

I thought stealth mode meant that a company had yet to launch. Do you mean that they're not pursuing press, just keeping their heads down and making money?

My apologies, I mean that yes their press is non-existent but they're printing money, 2 of which with zero fundraising and 1 who recently passed $1 mil on only $100k investment. They're doing great, GT has several major incubators competing with each other over all the companies being formed by GT's (seemingly recent) push towards startup culture.

Well are you at liberty to say who they are?

Very small companies so.

Be realistic for a minute, they can probably not afford the talents from HN.

Email me?

Toronto has got to be the worst deal on that list in terms of salary vs cost of living.

I grew up in Toronto, and I'm not sure. There are people in SF who make 110k a year, but pay 3000/month for a studio apartment.

Rent in Toronto broke 1600 CAD for a one bedroom apartment recently. Not quite 3000 USD, but also consider you'll get paid significantly less than half and probably get less office benefits (such as free meals) as well.

Those people would be considered bad with money. You can definitely have way better quality of life in San Francisco and 110k total comp is kind of on the low side (at that point you would probably be making 60k in Toronto though).

It also misses several key areas, like Dallas Ft.Worth which is 4th in absolute number of tech talent, before Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, LA, Boston, Houston. With e.g. Austin only half of these numbers.

With the pay stats, it's similar: E.g. Newark is #5 but does not even appear on the op's list.

So those 8 hubs, are not the biggest or highest paid, only the ones which match San Jose statistically the most. It's outright silly. https://mapping.cbre.com/maps/Scoring-Tech-Talent-2017/

Yeah but then you'd be living in Dallas instead of Austin...

I was like, hot damn, cheap housing and good paying jobs, I'm moving to Baltimore!!

You know they censored two-thirds of The Wire because it was too gruesome and horrifying for TV? Those were the parts that accurately depicted what living in my town is like. I personally had half a leg gnawed off by rats in my first week here - and that puts me well ahead of the curve! It's a terrible and terrifying place and you'll be much better off if you stay away.

(Seriously, though, hit me up via my HN profile if you're interested in getting a sense of what the industry and life in general are like here - it's a great town that's been very good to me, and I'm always happy to talk about it!)

I have some friends there, it seems livable :) But I'm in Canada so I'm not seeking U.S. employment "in these turbulent times", if you know what I mean. 8) Thanks for the offer though!

Hey, you do you. And, sure, any time!

you've got John Waters so you're already ahead of the game

I mean I don't, and no wonder. But we do, sure. He's a treasure.

Well you could move to Baltimore and take the MARC train into your DC tech job if cheap housing is what you're optimizing for.

Cheap housing and long travel times are not enviable at all.

As far as long travel times go, trains can be good because you can take your laptop and it's usable time to work on your own projects, watch a movie, play games etc.

I'd be more concerned (with zero knowledge of washington) over whether or not the train + connections would take me near most of the tech jobs.

There is a cost to having to commute more than an hour to work compared to living 5 minutes to work by walk. Once you try the difference you won't go back unless there are serious economic differences between the two choices.

Read this article the other day. Makes my 25 min commute seem like a cakewalk.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/realestate/extreme-commut...

An hour commute by foot and train is not at all the same animal as an hour by car. Only the latter is wasted.

The options available when standing on a train (podcasts) are about the same as driving (radio). If you're talking about a train with 1:1 or better seats per passenger, though, sure.

I've had an hour-long walking and train commute for the last year, and by the end was extremely burnt out. Moved to a smaller and more expensive place in the city with a 15 minute bike ride and couldn't be happier.

MARC gets you to the DC metro, and the DC metro gets you to the places where you'd likely be working. You might walk as much as half a mile or a mile from your stop if you're somewhere unusually far-flung, but that's not too likely in the first place and, assuming a modicum of fitness, hardly a problem in any case.

> As far as long travel times go, trains can be good because you can take your laptop and it's usable time to work on your own projects, watch a movie, play games etc.

Can be, but often aren't. The trains in the three busiest commuter rail lines are not really conducive to laptop use if you are my height (6'4") because of the seat pitch. I have tried to use my XPS 13 on NJTransit trains, but I need to hope I get a row to myself so I can slant sideways to actually get my laptop at a usable angle.

You could legitimately say similar things about Atlanta though.

Think about a major employer of engineers that is just a few exits south on the Baltimore Washington Parkway.

There is No Such Agency

Hint in username.

Wasn't there a front page article on here about Pittsburgh the other day?

Toronto is not a tech hub haha. We have a huge financial district and lots of "financial startups". The salaries are absolute bottom tier though. 50-60k USD at the high level.

In my experience, 50k USD is entry level pay (~1-2 yr experience). Tech salaries tend to cap out at around 100-120k USD for director/VP roles, but you can reasonably expect to find 80k USD jobs if you're a software dev who's reasonably up-to-date with one of the in-demand tech stacks and have a few years of experience.

80k CAD = 64k USD. I can make 2-2.5x more for the same job, remotely. Around 140-160k USD.

In my experience, a 80k CAD position would translate to a ~100k USD position. A 140-160k USD position would translate to a ~120k-140k CAD position.

I can't stop thinking about moving to Austin, Raleigh or Atlanta. The cost of housing difference is truely vast. For a typical 2K sq ft with nice backyard the difference is 3m$ vs 300K. It's like getting 2.7 million$ signing bonus! Google and facebook can't compete with that - the best facebook can muster is 100K signing bonus.

I have no idea where you live now, but the weather can be vastly different in those states than what you're used to. Atlanta weather, on top of lots of other factors did not bode well for me and I left after less than 2 years.

I just searched for open jobs in Baltimore and was surprised. It has more than Atlanta FYI (not a thorough search though)

> but a ranking that places Baltimore in the top three tech hubs fails the sniff test

NSA headquarters is in between Baltimore and Washington DC and there is a lot of other major government contracting work along that corridor. There is a lot of IT work available in the area, even if it isn't in Baltimore proper.

Yeah, theres something wrong here. It put Orem/Provo on the list when all of the tech jobs in Utah are actually further north. Mainly in Lehi and Salt Lake City.

Utah County is definitely the center of the Utah tech boom. Between UVU and BYU there are lots of small college-fueled startups in Orem/Provo, and many more mature companies formerly based in SLC are moving farther south, at least to Draper/SoJo if not over the point of the mountain.

This move has been underway at least since the mid-oughts, but it has accelerated lately after Adobe's investment in the Thanksgiving Point area and as Utah County's outskirts (Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs) have started to recover from the mortgage crash.

I'm more concerned about SLC's long-term prospects at this point; no one seems to want to go further north than 7200 S anymore.

I'm guessing the reason so many companies are in Utah County is because of tax incentives, but it's still weird to me. I would think that it's harder to attract talent to an office in Provo, seeing as the stereotypical tech worker is probably going to prefer living in SLC where there's less Mormon influence and more going on socially.

But Mormons are very well represented in the tech labor market, so it probably isn't that hard to attract talent in Utah county, it's just not the same mix of people who are working in SLC.

I would guess it's more real estate. Between South Draper and Lehi there is tons of room for new construction (especially now that the prison is moving). There has been a huge amount of office construction there over the last ten years and continuing today. Office space in SLC proper has to cost a fortune by comparison. Building/renting there gives you good geographic positioning to attract employees from both the SLC valley (about one million people) and the Utah county valley (about 500,000 people).

Lehi is part of Orem / Provo MTA which I'm guessing is how these are split up.

I'll bet Provo / Orem beats SLC on a lot of these metrics just because of Vivint and a few other bigger names.

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