13 ms·
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
by ynniv 9y ago
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-Talent-2017 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
- frandroid 9y agoI was like, hot damn, cheap housing and good paying jobs, I'm moving to Baltimore!!
- ynniv 9y agoYou could legitimately say similar things about Atlanta though.
- jdavis703 9y agoWell you could move to Baltimore and take the MARC train into your DC tech job if cheap housing is what you're optimizing for.
- cakedoggie 9y agoCheap housing and long travel times are not enviable at all.
- flukus 9y agoAs 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.
- j7ake 9y agoThere 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.
- throwanem 9y agoAn hour commute by foot and train is not at all the same animal as an hour by car. Only the latter is wasted.
- closeparen 9y agoThe 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.
- camiller 9y agoRead this article the other day. Makes my 25 min commute seem like a cakewalk. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/realestate/extreme-commuting.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/realestate/extreme-commut...
- throwanem 9y agoMARC 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.
- vonmoltke 9y ago> 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.
- throwanem 9y agoYou 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!)
- liveoneggs 9y agoyou've got John Waters so you're already ahead of the game
- throwanem 9y agoI mean I don't, and no wonder. But we do, sure. He's a treasure.
- frandroid 9y agoI 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!
- throwanem 9y agoHey, you do you. And, sure, any time!
- chrshawkes 9y agoBaltimore is on pace for record murders this year. It's a great place for tech startups.
- bognition 9y agoYeah, 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.
- grahamburger 9y agoLehi 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.
- cookiecaper 9y agoUtah 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.
- cglouch 9y agoI'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.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoBut 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.
- 9y ago
- r-s 9y agoToronto has got to be the worst deal on that list in terms of salary vs cost of living.
- cbhl 9y agoI 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.
- canadian123456 9y agoThose 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).
- myusernameisok 9y agoRent 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.
- autokad 9y agoI just searched for open jobs in Baltimore and was surprised. It has more than Atlanta FYI (not a thorough search though)
- Hydraulix989 9y agoWasn't there a front page article on here about Pittsburgh the other day?
- dzink 9y agoAtlanta 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.
- fweespeech 9y agoI'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.
- _qbxp 9y agoI 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.
- chronic8k 9y ago> 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.
- jeffwass 9y agoAs 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/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/12/07/research-spending-hopkins-nsf...)
- gpawl 9y agoOther cities on the list have ~half the research spending, plus ALSO large tech industries.
- jldugger 9y agoIsn't Johns Hopkins a medical university? Not exactly a Silicon tech hub.
- anonu 9y agoJohns Hopkins has a medical school. But they have other schools too!
- throwanem 9y agoAPL, 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!
- throwanem 9y agoBaltimore 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.
- jeffwass 9y agoA "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?
- theWatcher37 9y agoAtlanta 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.
- ynniv 9y agoEmail me?
- CoachRufus87 9y agoI 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?
- theWatcher37 9y agoMy 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.
- dsacco 9y agoWell are you at liberty to say who they are?
- user5994461 9y agoVery small companies so. Be realistic for a minute, they can probably not afford the talents from HN.
- chrshawkes 9y agoSo is Richmond, Virginia
- Spooky23 9y agoThink about a major employer of engineers that is just a few exits south on the Baltimore Washington Parkway.
- gpawl 9y agoHint in username.
- Zach_the_Lizard 9y agoThere is No Such Agency
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoThe 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.
- heartbreak 9y agoThe 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.
- acchow 9y agoTheir 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 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
- walshemj 9y agoIndeed 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
- stult 9y agoWhere do they advertise?
- kcorbitt 9y agoTop-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.
- heartbreak 9y agoSo recruiters and referral bonuses.
- acchow 9y agoExactly. 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.
- rurban 9y agoIt 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/ https://mapping.cbre.com/maps/Scoring-Tech-Talent-2017/
- kod 9y agoYeah but then you'd be living in Dallas instead of Austin...
- justadeveloper2 9y agoI 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.
- 5trokerac3 9y agoIt 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.
- base698 9y agoI 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!
- caleblloyd 9y agoThe 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.
- base698 9y ago
- crispyambulance 9y agoOk, 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.
- rublev 9y agoToronto 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.
- lhorie 9y agoIn 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.
- echelon 9y agoAtlanta 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 https://beltline.org
- logfromblammo 9y agoI 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.
- 9y ago
- GVIrish 9y ago> 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.
- pascalxus 9y agoI 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.
- burger_moon 9y agoI 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]