

Ask HN: Is there a Houston tech scene? - thomas11

Houston is America&#x27;s fourth largest city, its fastest growing one, and very diverse. It&#x27;s home to NASA&#x27;s mission control center and lots of businesses.<p>Yet I can find very few software development companies, jobs, and startups based in Houston. I&#x27;ve looked at HN Who&#x27;s Hiring, Stackoverflow Careers, and various Google searches.<p>Meetup.com has a bunch of tech meetups, but not all seem to be active.<p>Am I looking in the wrong places, or does Houston have surprisingly little in terms of tech industry?
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sithadmin
Houstonian here.

Houston has a huge tech presence, but it is all about enterprise
infrastructure and auxiliary enterprise services, or highly specialized tech
disciplines (the sort of things that OEM hardware manufacturers, NASA, etc.
want). Most of the devs are either old school or .NET drones, and there's very
little of the sort of dev scene that you see in places like the Bay Area.
There's one notable hackerspace (TX/RX Labs).

There's not a 'scene' per se, and even groups that focus on things like
datacenter/enterprise infrastructure don't really get much traction. Part of
this is because a.) Houston has a multitude of separate central business
districts that are reasonably distant from each other, and that b.) the
greater Houston area is incomprehensibly HUGE (compared to what most people,
even Americans, are used to). On a normal day without rush hour traffic, it
can take nearly 1.5 hours to drive from what most Houstonians consider the
West end of the 'Houston area' (Katy, TX) to the East end (La Porte or
Baytown, TX). It's a 60 mile trip. With tech folks spread out all over this
massive area, most people, especially those outside the inner-loop (I-610)
don't really want to bother with commuting to meetups or events. Especially
because the public transport infrastructure here is piss poor.

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nostrademons
There is, but it's largely connected to the oil industry (and to a much lesser
extent, NASA). The culture is much different too; it's not nearly as free-
wheeling as Silicon Valley, has much more in common with mainstream,
traditional business culture, and has much lower labor mobility. They get paid
a lot and sometimes get to work on cool problems, though.

