Slashdot Mirror
Top U.S. Tech Cities
srizah writes "Wired.com claims to have used a 'scientific methodology' to rate the top 10 tech towns in the US. They use some very reliable indexes, like 'Craigslist postings per capita' or 'Number of attendees at local meetings of dorkbot'. The usual suspects (Seattle, San Francisco) show up on the list, but some might surprise you. From the article: 'Raleigh-Duram - The jocks here may get worked up about college hoops, but the tech set is passionate about Linux distros and Mac-PC holy wars. North Carolina's Triangle is ground zero for Red Hat, SAS Institute, and an IBM center. Bonus: The area hosts two World Beer Festivals a year.'"
Come on, nothing about Provo/Orem? Home of SCO AND Novell? Nothing says tech like "Most mentioned on Groklaw".
'Craigslist postings per capita'. Because we all know the number of Craigslist posting is about as scientific as one can get.
The best city in America... like suburbia on crank. Lots of companies, lots of jobs, nice people, lots of money to make. UCI represent!!!!
Does the scientific methodology involve personally sampling the beer festivals? Would be curious to see an equivilant evaluation in england heh :)
The geek that actually likes Windows. I got cookies.
How did this filler article get on Slashdot?
They have icons in the article that don't appear in the legend. AUSTIN has a spot for an icon without an icon. Somehow, the Bay Area doesn't have a university rating, even though it has Stanford and Cal.
I could go on, but I wasted enough of my time, and yours.
What about places like Los Alamos (LANL), Albuquerque (SNL, LM etc.) or Batavia (FNAL).
If by tech they only mean CS related stuff, then sure, that list makes sense.
But Los Alamos has some of the smartest and best people and has a lot of "real" tech.
I mean, if particle accelerators, rocket science and weapons tech. don't constitute real technology while AJAX is counted as a technology, I must be missing something.
Surely that's a negative index. What an utterly useless franchise.
- chad
It's "Durham". Jesus, Slashdot editors can't even copy and paste now? Is that a Linux problem?
But seriously, RDU shouldn't be a surprise. We have Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State all within 30 minutes or so from each other, and we have Research Triangle Park here. Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill was a great, cheap place to enjoy the dot-com boom. We've got IBM (10,000+ employees), Cisco, a small MS office, whatever MCI is now (worldcom?), Nortel, Ericsson, Red Hat, and tons and tons of start ups.
Also, UNC-Chapel Hill is home to Sunsite, which became ibiblio. So yeah, it's dork heaven, but without the SF prices.
It's true that there is a lot of tech jobs but your certainly not a commodity in the RTP. I just moved down to Hilton Head SC from Raleigh and now I'm in demand. My skills are good for a sysadmin but there are just too many people doing that in the RTP area to expect to get paid like you should be paid.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Circuit City is far from a tech store. They could have used Radioshack at least; even that is a stretch now days.
The top US tech city will be home to whomever invents a device that administers an electric shock to Zonk whenever he approves embarrassingly shitty articles.
As for the article, what's the deal with the legend? Are they just trying to create the most confusing display of all time?
Raliegh/Durham is a good choice but don't forget Atlanta. Lots of things happening there and an overabundance of women! I mean the fast kind of women, they don't have to talk to much before the get their clothes off. At least that was true when I went there a couple of times when single.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Assuming we can measure these, of course:
* PC boxes per capita
* Bittorrent activity
* Secured wifi networks per capita
* Wikipedia contributors
* Middle-aged men/women with same legal residence as parents
* Slashdot accounts
* Cowboyneal
*...others?
What about [insert city or region here]?! It has [insert club, university, or company here]!!! Because I live here or went to school here, it MUST be in this list!
Carl
Vote Libertarian
Okay, who's next?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...but it is nothing without Fry's!
Please save us?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Portland, Oregon, had a free wireless project downtown FIVE YEARS AGO.
Is Circuit City really sponsoring this? I'd have thought they'd have chosen Fry's, instead, for a techie store.
The Portland area actually has both, actually.
And wtf is dorkbot? This seems all about promoting pet projects (or sponsors).
It is because the list can't figure out which it is, Most Geek or Most Tech.
I mean, they talk about the top 10 Tech Towns, but then it is more about where to be a geek than where to find tech. Thus the inclusion of Circuit City Stores (which IMHO don't belong on a Geek list), because "geeks shop there". Also look at the inclusion of Comic book shops, personal ads, and Dorkbot.
Sorry, but I thought this was a list of top Tech towns. But it is a list of top geek towns, and as a resident of Austin, I am embarrased by its inclusion.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Big tech sector (Qualcomm, Sony, Oracle, IBM, and many others), several major universities, high speed internet county-wide (Cox, Time warner, and DSL avail almost everywhere, not to mention verizon high speed wireless which is UNavailable in most of the cities on the top ten list), and hundreds of very competitive small computer stores (nearly all Asian owned and usually cheaper than the deals in Frys).
I used to live in Santa Cruz ('99-2001) and spent a lotta time in the silicon valley. When I moved to San Diego I incorrectly thought it wouldn't compare to up there tech-wise. Now 5 years later, I think there is more down here, it just isn't hyped up as much because we have so much more going on besides computers (see: weather, girls (omg, the girls!!!), surf, military, mexico, it goes on and on). I love this city and will probably never leave, so I guess I'm a little biased. The average comp nerd probably cant appreciate everything SD has to offer, but they would have to admit we've got it goin on tech-wise.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
This is is going to come up more than a few times, but this just makes no sense whatsoever. Berkeley and Stanford have some of the finest programs in the nation, and are generally regarded as tied with CMU and MIT for #1 PhD program in Computer Science.
And you have BOTH of them. That seems like a considerable oversight, especially for a tech oriented rag.
Slashdot should be able to pull a majority of our IPs and figure out what general area we are browsing the web from. Then you could compare how many unique hits you got from a particular state/providence/country vs the entire population of that area and get a "geek index". Might want to toss something in there for volume as well for corporations/schools, etc. Would not be completely accurate but a hell of a lot closer then the "circuit city index".
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
While it's clearly true that Austin is surrounded by Texas, that's not actually a downside. Texas has some of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen, and the close proximity of many interesting geographical features (Hamilton Pool, Enchanted Rock) is a definite plus for Austin.
Having grown up there, I'd say the actual downside is that Austin is surrounded by Texans.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Wired is merely pseudo tech oriented... more like gadget oriented, so take what they print with a boulder of salt.
http://www.allaboutbeer.com/wbf/
Central Market pwns Whole Foods, and its not even close. Technical, CM is San Antonio-based, but the first one was in Austin.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
NC State fifth-ranked? Is that really true? According to US News, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's engineering program is ranked fifth, NC State is 33rd. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/eng /brief/engrank_brief.php
That's for grad schools. Is NC State really, really better at undergrad than graduate school or what? I don't see where you're getting that number.
NC State does have a great solar house, though.
-- Save Google Answers! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4E5btrmqyA
Durham World Beer Fest... That certainly takes me back. A bunch of drunks under a tent located on the minor league ball diamond where 'Bull Durham' was shot. Lots of mud and lots beer. Good drunken memories of graduate school.
AUSTIN
Inspiration for Slacker, epicenter of the first EFF battle, home to Dell, Whole Foods, and South by Southwest. Not to mention host to the most dorkbot attendees in the country. Only downside: It's surrounded by Texas.
I'm going to have to chime in with the other people who are disagreeing. While it sure is popular to hate on Texas, I'd be willing to be that the vast majority of people who do so have never actually lived here. We've got beautiful landscapes, a low cost-of-living, plenty of space, and three of the top ten largest cities in the US. Yes, the majority of people here consider themselves Republicans, but if you're willing to get past somebody's political views, there are also lots of friendly people. About the only thing I don't like is that the summers get so dang hot.. but the mild winters (unless you live up in the panhandle) make up for it.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
we also all know that no one submitting to /. would ever be sarcastic.
Beer's probably why Pittsburgh made the list.
This seems to be the only tech town in the country where the geeks have made peace with the football players and everyone just goes out to have beer and pierogies.
(Actually, I suspect we made the list because of the "per capita" measurements. There's an awful lot of high tech-- from bio to hardware and software-- for a small city tucked in amongst a few rivers and woods.)
E pluribus unum
If there's not an engine of some kind producing new tech businesses, you can now fuck off please and go back to your wanna-be status. New York City - I'm looking at YOU. Got any lawyers deferring up to 50,000.00 dollars worth of business to help seed-service new shops or are you still nickle and dimeing them to death? Feh, Bah, and mmmmMMMMeh!
Why don't they post a story about who's dad can beat up another dad
I found a lovebird hiding in a bush one day a few years ago, in a row of hedges just outside work; obviously someone's pet had escaped. I forget what I originally used to capture it; I think I got it into a paper bag and brought it in. That bird was freaked.
I went on Craigslist and found someone in the neighborhood who was advertising free bird cages that he was throwing away. So I emailed the guy and he replied with his address, saying he was leaving for work, but the cages would be out front with the trash. I went over to his house with a friend of mine and they were by the curb like he said. We took one and left.
With the bird now in its free cage I posted "FOUND LOVEBIRD" on Craigslist and a guy up the street responded. He said he kept love birds and canaries in cages outside his business (he ran a day care), and that he was missing one of his two lovebirds. A few people in the office who were in the habit of taking walks confirmed this, saying yes, they remembered seeing birds there, it's obviously one of those.
So case closed. We took our lovebird in its free cage, and walked over to this guy's business. Lovebirds don't like being alone; they want to be in pairs. And they use a species-specific call to find other lovebirds. So as we approached, the birds started "pinging" each other back and forth with this call, which became more frequent as we approached. And they went nuts in their cages as they became fully aware of each other. It was actually a pretty cool thing to see. We let our bird hop into the cage with the other one, and they started chatting with each other and flying around like mad.
The guy was puzzled, because it wasn't the same lovebird that he lost. But we left it there anyway. It worked out well for everybody. My friend and I got to skip work for a while, didn't pay for anything, the guy got his free replacement lovebird, and the replacement lovebird not only survived but found a good home with his other lovebird. All thanks to Craigslist. I hope his original lovebird also found a good home.
NCSU was ranked 5th for Best Value, I'm not sure how the engineering school ranks, but their new building is really nice.
Los Alamos is full of nerds. You know, smart people who actually make stuff. AS opposed to people who thing they are smart and just use or read about stuff.
Las Alamos nerds debate what's the best chemical compound to use to power their laser.
Geeks debate who is going to replace "The Question".
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
remember, everything in Texas is big.
36-40-48
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Zonk plays WoW all day, then he suddenly relize he needs to post something to keep his jobs post the next 5 things in the list.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have two friends who are NCSU grads who now work for Google and make a pile of money. There are good things happening at NC State.
Is that like US world sports championships? You know, where all the beers are from the US, except a token beer from Canada?
Only a true geek would describe lovebird calls as "pinging."
Well done! But you should have continued and called it the lovebird "handshake" protocol.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
The usual suspects (Seattle, San Francisco) show up on the list, but some might surprise you.
I looked at the list, and in fact it was mostly the usual suspects. I mean everyone knows there is a big tech presence in Raleigh/Durham and Austin. About the only really surprising inclusion is Orlando, and it was the most poorly justified of all of them. Substitute Portland, OR for Orlando on their list and you have basically the conventional wisdom on what the major tech centers in the US are.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Actually, here in Dallas, they've gotten better over the last year, and are now sometimes the price leader.
I bought my premium 360 there in November for $100 off. ($300 after rebate)
OTOH, I am still waiting on that rebate...
The city itself doesn't know what it has. The old-school eastern inner-city politics tries to screw Pitt and CMU every chance they get. And they can't get over one of the city's tallest buildings has "Ariba" on the top - instead of one of the bankrupt or long-gone steel companies the locals once knew.
I'm not sure why Pittsburgh makes the list. I'm here and I would rank quality of life as very poor.
* It's a very bad city for singles - most people are married couples or students, and of course the students mate with other students. It's an exceptionally lonely place if you are not in one of the above groups, and of course geeks generally are not.
* Most Pittsburgh residents who are not students or professors in the university are highly conservative in a "hidebound, stick in the mud", anti-intellectual kind of way. This is the kind of place where innovation is treated with suspicion.
* The winter isn't all that cold compared to the rest of the East Coast, but it's much colder than Los Angeles, drab and extremely depressing. Living here on the whole is a mild depressant and little about the place is capable of remedying that problem.
* The dreadful road network will take you anywhere you want to go, slowly. The two-lane winding roads and hills look cool, especially in the summer, but they make navigation confusing and slow, and one heavy truck ahead of you can ruin your whole trip. A sporty car is rewarding to drive here; don't get a pickup truck like the locals do.
* An unusually large percentage of food establishments are of exceptionally poor quality. Pizza is vile. There are a couple of great places like Pan Asia on Route 51 and Cambodi-can and Thai me up on the Southside. But most food is all but inedible. The locals are not discriminating and will not be reliable guides in finding the best places. You have to find them yourself.
* Real estate prices are reasonable, but your house won't be anything special. Tract homes in California, especially on the hills, are so superior to tract homes here, whether on the hills or not, that the comparison is embarassing. Homes were designed in a practical, no-nonsense way that ignored the mamby-pamby virtues of orienting houses for views or even putting in non-puny windows.
* Real estate taxes are very high. A $500,000 house in California has lower taxes than a $100,000 house in Pittsburgh. Buyer beware, and note that there are several different kinds of taxes (school tax, township tax, etc, etc).
Google probably wanted to find an academically sound place with low real estate prices. That's here. But it's a lousy place to live. I'm still working on my formula to escape, and I can only recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that you not move here. You'll be as miserable as I am, and you don't want that.
D
(To be fair, I loathe cold weather [temperature under 65degF during winter] with a passion and that's a huge strike against this place for me.)
Someone hire me! I am graduating in 6 months, I want a challenging development job, and none of this contract work crud!
Lots of jobs around here, now if someone would just reply to my resume with a cool and stable position... Getting recognized in a city with this many developers in it is hard.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
As long as the wind isn't blowing in from the cow fields it isn't that bad :P
I lived in LA for a dozen years (Brea, Redondo Beach, and Burbank) before moving to Pittsburgh to take a job with Fisher Scientific. I agree with the parents factual comments about Pittsburgh, but I actually enjoyed living there. It was a dynamic change from life in LA, and I found it invigorating. If it wasn't for my father's deteriorating health forcing me to move to the mid-west, I'd still be there.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
At first glance I was surprised to see that Fort Collins, CO didn't make the list. Looking at the criteria I see why, the study is kind of lame. Soooo... anyone who's been to Fort Collins lately would see the place is crawling with nerds. Most of the population of 130,000 work for or are family of the engineers at HP, Intel, AMD, Avago (formerly Agilent), Broadcom, Microsoft, LSI Logic and others ( I think there's a small NVidia site somewhere ). Perhaps "number of EE's per capita" would've put Ft Collins in the list ( even the MS site is full of EE's, it's where they design the optical mice ). For the university factor there's Colorado State, but it's kind of pathetic as far as tech goes. But then there's the beer factor. I'd put up a large wager that Ft Collins has the highest number of microbreweries per capita. The whole microbrew movement practically started in Ft Fun at New Belgium (mmmm... Fat Tire). After the micros, Budweiser also has one of it's top five largest breweries in Ft Collins. Not too shabby for a little mountain town...
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
Redondo Beach is a great place. I don't know how anyone could possibly prefer Pittsburgh to having the beauty of the beach, warm weather, great shopping, etc.
:-(.
I'm curious as to what you mean by "a dynamic change" - what aspects of it did you find better than LA? I find it so un-dynamic it's not even funny.
I'm stuck here for a few more months still, so I'd love to find something better about the place
D
Well, seasons for one. I got tired of only having two of them, 'brown' and 'wet'. And when I lived in Redondo (90-93) it was being encroached with gang activity from Hermosa and Venice. Even King Harbor got to be pretty crudy and skanky. Brea was nice, but the summers were brutal. Especially being up against the hills there, all the smog would flow up against them.
The cost of living in LA was the deal breaker. In Van Nuys, I was paying 950 for a decent, two bedroom apartment, that just happened to be in the flight line of the airport.
In Pittsburgh, (well technically Arnold) for a three-bedroom house, I paid $350. Off street parking, two story + full basement, and a nice sized yard. 20 miles from downtown, and an hour drive to work (out by the airport) After live in LA, a 1-hour drive seemed like heaven.
I really enjoyed the people in PGH, too. Everywhere I went, they were helpful and pleasent. In Brea, I lived at the end of a cul-de-sac with 6 other houses. After 4 years, I only knew 1 of them by name, and he was our local pastor. People were pretty insular-minded there. My new neighbors in PGH helped me move in, we poured sidewalks together, and many a night we shared a six-pack while chatting over the fence.
The comradery, the civic and community spirit in Pittsburgh really impressed me. Very much like a small-town feeling.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Redmond is part of the greater Seattle area, dufus.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I loathe seasons. I just want one season, the one that's comfortable. That's why I really should be living in a tropical climate like Florida or the Philippines. My master plan is to get my web site working and then move to the Philippines where you can live well for about $2k a month and there is a huge surplus of young, attractive single women, which I don't think is true anywhere in the US.
:-(. I lost my job and had to leave; my best friend's a Pittsburgher and he got me a job here, thus the move.
It's interesting that you mention the friendly nature of Pittsburghers. It exists, but I have always been more an airy-fairy type than a down to earth type, and so having no fellow airy-fairy types isn't conducive to happiness.
More to the point, I finally found a neighborhood in Los Angeles that's just as you describe Pittsburgh neighborhoods. It's Woodland Hills, South of the Boulevard, in the hills. I knew several of my neighbors and they were all fantastic. I think in general that in Los Angeles, the hills are the place to be. You get a beautiful natural setting and people really pull for each other there. I think it might have to do with some of the hazards (fires, mudslides, etc) that we all face, or just from the fact that we took a special effort to live in a place that's beautiful.
Of course my house cost $428k and would sell for about $550k today. Unfortunately, most of my profit on it got eaten by termites and real estate commissions
If it hadn't been for that, I would have been happy staying in Woodland Hills forever, or at least until I could afford Malibu. To give you some perspective, at the time I bought my house for $428k, a drab house in the flats was selling for $349k. By any standard, what I paid was a bargain even though it was 1000 square feet and as you say would probably rent in Pittsburgh for $350 a month.
D
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The most of the cities with the big pay are also cities that are expensive to live in too.
an $80,000 work in New York City or Boston or you can live just as well with $60,000 job in Upstate NY. My cheap $70,000 house in Upstate NY, for the same size and condition can go for over $400,000 in Boston or NYC. $600 for a good 2 bedroom apartment in Upstate NY vs. over $1000 a month. For the same size and quality. I know people who make significantly more then me in these big cities and yet their quality of life is much lower. Before you rush to these locations for a high paying job, make sure that it will offset any increase in living.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It is entirely possible to be a geek and like basketball.
Go Duke!
Wired magazine these days is nothing but one long advertisement after another. Circuit city probably paid them to be included in the rankings.
The days where Wired could be seen as a credible source of information on technology is long over. I mean these are the same people who proudly declared that the Internet was no longer important enough to be granted proper noun status.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
At least gimme a Fry's index, although some people would consider that "points off".
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Personally, I feel that A) the author inserting his own opinions about any geographical area and B) Wired supporting such views, is unprofessional and poor journalism.
If you live in Texas, love Texas or disagree with the way that opinion was presented in general, write a letter to rants@wired.com, editor@wired.com and maybe patrick@dijusto.com (the author), politely expressing your disappointment with the poorly expressed opinion. Comments like that should be kept to a blog and don't belong on a national tech oriented publication.
I've been there. It's imperfect, like all places. It's dirty and there are problems with poor food and most people live in miserable conditions.
The women are like women everywhere! Some exquisite, some cute, some ugly. But certainly as a paunchy 44 year old man who time has passed by in the US, the odds of me finding an attractive and loving wife is about 100 times plus better than it is in the US.
It's warm and sunny almost all the time, and they have beautiful tropical plants growing everywhere, and there are nice shopping malls and even good restaurants if you look hard enough.
You have to make compromises in life. Sure, I'd probably like the Florida Keys better. But it would take 10+k/month or more to live there well. If I could live something close to my dream for $2k, that sure looks like a steal, even accepting a lot of problems.
The Filipina attitude is so much better than the gloomy, sad-sack, depressed attitude I see in the US. People in the Philippines make a determined effort to be cheerful even if they are having problems. Here it's the non-stop gloom channel. I'm tired of the gloom channel. It seems like all of America's optimism and verve has faded away.
I'd like to find more of it and I've never seen more of it than in the Philippines, despite the country's many problems and intense poverty.
D
I live here, love it a lot, and can't think of anywhere else I'd want to live. But this place has changed quite a bit in the past 10 years, and not by just an infinite percentage increase in Stanley Cups.
The Tragedy of the Commons is starting to occur here, as the highways get wider, the traffic slower, and the big-box stores even more daunting. And Wake County just voted for a $930M bond issue to upgrade the school system. (I voted for it myself, since it was the cheapest option, but the growth implications are sobering to say the least.)
And oh the refugees from California and New Jersey are still streaming into this place.
So please do me and everyone else here a big favor. Post to Craigslist with the following subject line: "RALEIGH SUCKS". And believe it.
We don't necessarily want you here. Stay home. If you helped to mess up California irrevocably, made the Boswash strip uninhabitable, and won't even bother to fix Pittsburgh, we really have NO use for your kind around here. (There is a very good reason why the natives say "We don't care how you do it up north.")
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Oh, and we invented dorkbot
--
make install -not war
Though Boston is the big city (650,000 people) Cambridge (120,000 people) is actually the geeky place. MIT is in Cambridge, the home of the FSF, and other institutions like Harvard, which is more famous, also have many high tech stuff. As anybody there knows: Boston is an overpopulated suburb of Cambridge. Plus Harvard square has everything, including CarTalk, which is geeky in the sense that those guys can't think of anything but fixing weird car parts. At least list both in the title of the area.
D/FW is a great tech megalopolis. Technology jobs abound most plentifully here, and living expenses are very reasonable. Plus, we have five Fry's Electronics stores here, a Microcenter, dozens of CircuitCity, Bestbuy, CompUSA, etc chain stores, plus stores like Tanner Electronics (sponsor of annual robot shows) and Tucker Electronics for test equipment and specialized electronics lab instruments.
Sorry you feel that way. I did meet my wife at CMU here so I don't know about the singles scene, but I had the opposite experience for all your other points. While in California a $500K house has lower taxes, there are few houses as cheap as $500K where I was living (south bay) when I lived out there. And taxes would have to be awfully high to make up the 10x difference in purchase price over a reasonable time span.
Also, I wouldn't know about "tract homes". $150K will buy you a near mansion here with all the character of houses built in the earlier part of the century, when they used real building materials. In my house, every door (interior and exterior) is hardwood, the whole exterior is Italian stone, 2 car garage, half the basement is finished, etc., and the $125K price tag was a little high for the neighborhood. Compared to the paper mache, cookie-cutter houses in California that cost $750K, there's no contest.
And it sounds like you have different taste in food than the Pittsburgh norm, but that doesn't make your tastes better.
Maybe you just picked the wrong neighborhood to live and work. Pittsburgh is very, very different from neighborhood to neighborhood. I live in the east side and work on south side, and enjoy it here. If it was closer to my and my wife's family I'd probably settle here indefinitely. Or maybe this just isn't your town. You can't please everyone. But considering the huge tech industry here, especially per capita, it's no wonder it's on the list.
E pluribus unum
In the 90's Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Utah, Idaho were thought to be the next employment centers. What happened? There were using telecommuting to do back office work. Today that work is done in Asia.
If you make under $120,000 in NYC, you my friend are a dead duck.
I'm not saying it should've been at the top, but if Seattle got in, Denver should've got in on merit of the DTC alone. Let alone School of Mines, CU Boulder (record number of nobel winners and laureates), DU, all that fun jazz.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last