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On Keeping Geeks in a Metropolitan Area
Posted by
Cliff
on Thu Dec 30, 1999 01:53 PM
from the what-makes-a-city-a-geek-nirvana dept.
from the what-makes-a-city-a-geek-nirvana dept.
apocalypse_now asks: "I live in Pittsburgh, and the city is trying its damnest to attract young people, especially those involved in high-tech -- much like every other city in the country. My question is, how can they do this effectively? I know that they are trying, but they just don't seem to understand the concept of attracting geeks. What would an optimal geek city be?" Interesting thought. What keeps you folks where you are at the moment (especially you Pittsburgh readers)?"
(More)
apocalypse_now continues:
"...Just so you know, I don't work for the city -- I am a resident geek at a local university.
Pittsburgh has large research institutions in various high-tech fields -- robotics, computer engineering, bioengineering, and so on. CMU and UPMC are two of the largest and most well-known research institutions in the country. There are jobs. And yet, Pittsburgh loses people every year. Almost all graduates leave the city and region. So what can the city do to make geeks feel at home -- to make them feel that they are not only needed, but truly wanted? And would this even be enough to get people to move somewhere?"
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On Keeping Geeks in a Metropolitan Area
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High bandwidth internet access!! (Score:4)
Fry's (Score:3)
-russ
It's not research which attracts the young 'uns... (Score:4)
Profile of a geek... (Score:5)
Happiness is brought about in various ways, to various people.
For example, I just graduated from school in May. Now, I'm getting paid a lot to do a job that I find quite easy. I live in a good neighborhood, where it's relatively quiet. After 5 years of living in a fraternity house, I figure I could really enjoy a couple of years of peace and quiet. I'm pretty happy with it. There's some minor things to bar my happiness, such as all this damn debt I've accumlated over 5 years of school, but still, life is good.
However, that's me. Other people graduating look for other things, and what they look for is as varied as the people themselves. There is no one true "geek" profile to go by.
---
Rent, Environment, Etc. (Score:4)
Corporate culture in a city is important. California is more enjoyable than Boston(where I'm at now) because it is more relaxed / less suit-and-tie.
Rent!!! I was working in Phoenix for a while, and it was spectacular. $750 / month for a split-level second floor 2 bedroom apartment in a really nice complex. Compare that to sillycon valley or Boston or DC metro.
Entertainment and all of the other nice things help, but if I could find somewhere that had a good cost of living / corporate culture combination, I would be much more likely to stick around.
Ideal Geek City (Score:3)
Boston: Intellectual climate. Where else can you
attend a Rivest or Chomsky lecture on your lunch hour? Great public transportation.
SV: Weather, vast ocean of different jobs, vast ocean period. When you are in the SV you are two
hours tops away from any type of terrain/activity.
Intellectual climate: Stanford, Berkeley.
San Diego: Weather.
NYC: It _is_ the center of the world.
Atlanta: CNN, lots of telecom.
It requires a seed group of people to create a place of interest. What seeds were planted in Pittsburgh?
Why I left Pittsburgh (and stayed away!) (Score:5)
I _STAYED_ away this long for much different reasons. I will thus attempt to define one view of the Lifestyle of the Geek.
Geeks like living in places where they can be both plugged-in, close to the heart of it all, and yet hide away from society for hours/days/months without being harassed every 5 minutes. After reaching a certain "success point," many geeks move to the suburbs where there's readily available cheap eats, less expensive DSL service, movie theaters, drive-through beer joints, and a better chance of picking up cute girls/guys.
Pittsburgh's (and many other city's) suburbs are still, and for a likely long time will be, run by old Steel-era codgers who think that computers are for playing Pong, and word processors are cheap knockoffs of an Underwood manual typewriter. Unions control the city/local governments (ever been to Clairton?), taxes are far too high (Allegheny County's RAD tax), there is practically NO nightlife in ANY of the south hills suburbs, and Bell Atlantic has such a stranglehold on the market that it takes over 2 months just to get T1's installed.
Geeks like controlling at least a portion of their own destiny. In Pittsburgh, more so than many other places I've been, it is difficult bordering on impossible to get any sort of representation or advance any cause that isn't popular with big labor or the old folks.
We geeks need a city built from scratch with geeks in government, geeks in utilities, and geeks in Public Planning. Since we might as well try to move to the Land of Oz, or some other pipe dream, I think we'll just have to wait...
My $.02
Keeping your geeks happy (Score:4)
Have a good sized convention center. Without it you cant attract things like the Worldcon [worldcon.org] or any of the computer expos.
Have good colleges, including science and liberal arts. Geeks need schools, and when we're not learning cryptography we're learning egyptology. Don't skip on the science or the arts.
Realize that having a liberal police department and a liberal political system may become political realities. Geeks tend not to run with the herd. That skate punk the cops are harassing may be a lead analyst for one of your local corps.
Watch your parks and recs. Geeks like skateparks and disc golf courses [home.com] just as much, if not more, than traditional sports.
Forget the curfews. Make sure there's at least a taco bell open at 3 am. It's better if there's a pizza place that takes internet orders [pizzanet.net].
Watch your taxes. We make money, serious money, and we hate losing it to the government. We know you want us for our money, so play that game carefully. We're much more likely to consider taxes an investment and want a good return on it than most citizens.
Watch your P.R. We're better connected than you think we are. We know B.S. and have a tendancy to want to find the "truth" out. Normals don't get as nosy as geeks on a rampage.
Most importantly, make sure you really want us. We may be serious income for a city, but we're also a headache. If you want our cash without being willing to seriously cater to us, then forget it. On the other hand, if you really cater to us, we'll hand over our money in the form of taxes without much worry.
Not all cities can go high tech. (Score:5)
The first thing you should be asking yourself is, "Is Pittsberg really a good place to have a computer business culture in the first place?"
In order to encourage a good culture for computer-related businesses, you need to have a lot of bandwidth, clean electricity, very good universities, and a good tax and regulations environment for start-ups. If even one of these is missing, you will have problems. If two of these or more are missing, forget it. I can't emphasise this enough.
Let's use Chicago as an example. Chicago, where I grew up, is trying like hell to support local high tech industry through the idea of a "silicon prairie." It's not working. Ameritech has no unlimited local calling, and the Chicago area has poor DSL and ISDN access. This means that Internet access is very expensive. Commonwealth Edison can't keep the damn lights on in the summer, because their transmission and distribution systems are crud and Edison doesn't seem to realize this. Local regulations require that Ethernet cable be strung through metal conduit, which is very labor intensive (read: expensive) and not neccesary. So, despite having several major universities with very good CS departments (University of Chicago, Northwestern, DePaul, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Loyola University), not one but two nearby national research laboratories, and recently starting up a new communications center in the old Donnelly Directory building, Chicago will probably never become a center of computer business. Chicago has Motorola in the suburbs and that's about as good as it's going to get.
On the other hand, Chicago has very good resources for another industry entirely: biotech.
Biotech requires, first of all, a fertile field for medical research. Chicago has five major research and teaching hospitals (Loyola Medical, University of Chicago, Rush Pres-St. Luke's, Northwestern Memorial and University of Illinois at Chicago) and every day you hear about another medical advancement in the area.
Biotech doesn't require good bandwidth. It does require clean electricity, which means they'll have to set up a special deal with Commonwealth Edison to get power transmission up to spec. There are probably fewer business regulations to affect biotech than there would be to affect a computer business, especially since biotech requires a hell of a lot more starting capital.
The problem is, every time I try to tell someone who might listen that the city should concentrate on Biotech, my words seem to fall on deaf ears. They've got this bandwagon mentality: "We have to get in on this dot-com computer thing, and we have to do it now. This is the future." In the process, they will probably miss another potential future, and the opportunity to become a major world center of a new revolution ten years from now.
Therefore, let me turn your question around. Instead of asking, what can you do to make my city good for geeks; ask, what kind of geeks can we attract to this city? Not all geeks are computer geeks, and your city may have more to offer some other potentially very profitable industry than it has to offer the computer industry. Just my $0.02.
Repelling geek-hostile individuals (Score:3)
There's a wide variety of things that geeks like and some of them are mutually exclusive. But I suspect very few geeks would enjoy living or working in an environment where a majority (or even a vocal minority) see science and technology as the literal or figurative work of the Devil.
Kansas springs to mind. Whatever its virtues (clean air, low crime, etc.), they fade because of the Kansas school board and its decision regarding the teaching of science.
Re:It's not research which attracts the young 'uns (Score:3)
The thing is that if you're a tech, you have to work for IBM. There really aren't any other options for techs. Unfortunately, IBM knows this, and they use it to their advantage.
It's somewhat analagous to Eugene OR (OR being often referred to as Vermont on the west coast), where you've got a decent city, a gorgeous area, and just one tech company (Symantec) to deal with.
It's really sad the way all of the companies are going to SilVal. I'd checked SilVal out as well, and I'd rather be dipped in tar and rolled in roofing tacks before I'd live there. The accmulation of wealth and growth of individual companies is seriously destroying the area, while a lot of cities in this country aren't pulling in any big names at all.
If you want to pull in the geeks, you need:
a) fast, cheap high-bandwidth net access
b) tech jobs -- programming, networking, design at several possible companies
c) wages that are enough to keep geeks somewhat confortable in their ->
d) readily available affordable housing -- apartments, condos, whatever.
d)
Some suggestions (Score:4)
But, first and foremost, you NEED public transport. Cars are OK for a holiday, or a fishing trip, but there NEEDS to be a cheap, efficient, and (above all) FAST method of getting to and from work. A traffic jam is what you should be putting on bread to make a traffic sandwich, not something you fume in whilst your radiator explodes and your engine runs off into the sunset with the next car's fan belt.
Re:Some suggestions (Score:3)
Space: my apartment is right on the Chattahoochee river.
ADSL/cable: My complex can get both xDSL and cable modem. I currently run a 1.1MB sdsl line from covad.
Decent wages: hells yeah
A decent name: Roswell. Waht's more geek than that? hehe
Innovation: Atlanta has been growing since the Olympics.
On the public transportation tip it's somewhat negative. MARTA runs all over the city fairly well but In the Metro Atlanta counties like Gwinnett, they refuse marta because they feel it will bring in "undesirables and crime" (read: we don't like them folk cause they's different). The other side is that Cobb county decided they could make money by running their OWN mass transit system and link up with MARTA at a single point. This of course sucks and does not work. When I was without a car for a year, I had a two hour commute to the other side of the city JUST because I had to transfer from CCT (Cobb County Transit) to MARTA. Of course now I'm cool if I have to use public transportation because the bus stops at the front of my complex and is about 10 minutes to the train station.
The Vermont Corridor in Los Angeles... (Score:3)
So I'd say that it's all about convenience.
Generation Geek likes to be able to have everything within walking distance - food, laundry, entertainment, etc.
There are 2 very cool movie theatres within walking distance of my office here, the subway (as pitiful as the LA subway system is, it is often useful for quick jaunts downtown for access to Little Tokyo and China Town) is accessible and easy to get to, and there are a number of video arcades within walking distance as well for those late-night decompression sessions.
There are plenty of 'expendable income' supporting stores along the Vermont corridor, including a very good record store (Vinyl Fetish), a tattoo parlour, an *excellent* hair salon (Purple Circle, specializing in dreads and dyes), and tons of cool clothing shops. Not to mention Wacko, just down the street, for all that a Geek would ever need for his or her desktop entertainment needs.
Until recently, the only thing missing in my area was a good quality coffee shop - but this has since been resolved, much to my (and my Geek friends) delight, with the new "Psychobabble" coffeeshop just up Vermont - again, within walking distance.
In addition to all of this, a big part of the Geek scene that's evolving here on Vermont is the community aspect.
I've been working hard at getting similarly minded geeks moved into the small and quaint office complex that I occupy, and so far its been quite successful - I'm already very happy to have similarly minded Geek neighbours. Right next door I have a friend who owns an electronic music studio, which is nice for me because I write music software for a living, and just down the hall is another friend who is a computer consultant with similar interests (Linux, music, etc), as well as a DJ for a lot of local clubs - so there's a veritable community feel going in this complex right now.
These are all things that make up the high tech startup experience, and while the Vermont corridor may not exactly be a "Sillicon [V]Alley", its certainly got all the makings for a viable Geek ecosystem...
FWIW, if anyone in the Los Angeles area is looking for a cool place to set up shop, I'd be more than happy to give you a guided tour around this neighbourhood and show you why it's a great place for a small high tech startup!
My suggestions.... (Score:3)
1) Investors: You need people with money who are willing to risk a bit of it on Pittsburgh. Silicon Valley works because it's got a rep and the money flows rather freely around here. Seattle's got the rep because M$ has the money. You need rich folks in Pittsburgh who are willing to play VC/angels to someone who has a few "cool ideas." Right now, the rich are playing the stock market to further line their pockets. Convince them to invest in a couple of startups. Between the research places and graduates, you should be able to mine a few good products out.
2) Atmosphere: For the most part, people can be very lazy. Inertia is a great non-motivator. I've never visited the area around CMU or even Pittsburgh itself, but you need to develop a place where people feel bad about leaving. You can't control the weather, but you can conrol the crime, street conditions, schools, traffic, hosuing, and other infrastructure. Improve and invest in a more "pleasant" atmosphere.
3) High-paying jobs for the area: One thing about the Valley, New York, and now Seattle is that it's very expensive to live in the area. For what most people pay for rent, you can be paying off the mortgage on a mansion elsewhere. Emphasize the "more bang for your buck" lifestyle. You might not be making $100K, but you can afford to buy as opposed to rent.
4) Promote small geek business: Got geeks? Show them off. Promote successful, innovative businesses in the area. Show you're bleeding edge tech. Be geeky, be proud. People will stick around if you promise they'll have a shot at the Next Big Thing.
5) Infrastructure: DSL, cable modems. Cheap and available. 'nuff said.
6) West Coast style: This one is harder to do because it's attitude rather than anything in particular. Employers need to have a less heavyhanded approach towards employees. Fewer constraints towards their time, promoting innovation/free thinking, progressive attitudes. Geeks and nerds hate working The Man and they don't like Him telling them what to do in their offtime.
7) Social interaction: Culture. Sure you got football, hockey, and baseball (barely...), but what else? I'm not talking ballet and museums necessarily, but you need to form an, please forgive the term, "intelligensia" society. Doesn't mean just cafes, bookstores, juice bars, and nightclubs. But it couldn't hurt.
8) Live for the future: In all the high tech hotspots, people are convinced the best is still to come and they are going to be creating it. Pittburgh was a steel town. You can remember that, but don't destroy your future living that over and over again.
Just a few ideas.
-S. Louie
my short list (Score:3)
Anyway, this is my shortlist:
- transit should run late, ideally all night
- bike lanes
- diverse live music scene & dance clubs
- funky coffee houses, and restaurants without vallet parking
In short, it's important to me to live in a place where I feel like things are really happening, as opposed to a museum of a city, glorifying the things that used to happen (both NY and SF are in danger of going that route).Things that once would have been on my list:
- Lots of interesting, unattached women (the Valley loses on this one, including Stanford, which has lots of women married to their careers and/or their insecurities).
- Proximity of ocean and mountains.
- Lots of tech jobs.
The reasons these aren't on my list any more: (1) got a babe already, don't need another (though they do improve the scenery); (2) Geographic proximity doesn't help if car traffic will always turn any outing into an ordeal that you can only endure a few times a year; (3) good people are more important than "good jobs", everything is interesting from a certain point of view.There you have it, though it's not like anyone is going to read this. (Is there anything more quixotic than posting to a slashdot discussion with more than 300 responses?)