
Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/style/pittsburgh-tech-makeover.html
======
pesenti
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.

~~~
nugget
> 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.

~~~
Hydraulix989
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.

~~~
whopa
> 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.

~~~
Hydraulix989
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."

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tejon_Pass](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.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
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.

~~~
whopa
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.

~~~
thesmallestcat
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.

------
bane
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.

~~~
z1mm32m4n
> 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.

~~~
blackguardx
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
blackguardx
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

------
joeblau
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.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
Hydraulix989
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.

~~~
pesenti
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](http://www.coca-
cafe.net/breakfast.php) or
[https://www.facebook.com/B52PGH/menu/](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...

------
thearn4
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.

~~~
moultano
Case Western has to step up its game.

~~~
blackguardx
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.

~~~
Kihashi
> 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.

------
javra
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.

~~~
thesmallestcat
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.

~~~
nickstefan12
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...

~~~
thesmallestcat
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.

------
camerond
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...](https://cmu.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?job=2005738)

------
vm
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](http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html)

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

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

------
melling
Paul Graham essay on Pittsburgh:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html)

------
dmode
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...](http://www.post-gazette.com/business/tech-
news/2015/03/19/Venture-capital-flowing-into-Pittsburgh-
region/stories/201503190077)

That is a 50x difference.

~~~
chapmindustries
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."

------
ta201707
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.

~~~
autokad
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.

~~~
joehosteny
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).

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

------
smaili
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?

~~~
carrendi
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.

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

