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The Worst US Cities To Work In IT
bdcny7927 writes with an excerpt from CIO.com to inspire some caution before your next job switch: "IT workers have their choice of many great US cities for work and play (Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle), but what are the cities that you probably should avoid? Here's a very unscientific, highly subjective and unapologetically snarky list of our least favorite US tech job locales."
I was surprised to see Atlanta on the "good" list myself.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I've never seen one proper city that didn't feel like a very suffocating place, full of busy little bees who have no idea what it is to take the time to smell the roses. I could never live in one. Any ideas about which suburban or rural areas are good/bad to work in for IT jobs?
I wish I would be transferred to Alaska. The hunting and fishing is great. There is room to breath. A man can raise a family in a manner more suitable to the American ideal. The commutes cannot be any worse than the suburbs of any major US city.
Sign me up!
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
What a worthless list. What did anything they talked about have anything to do with IT?
Whale
I wouldn't mind working in Alaska - lots of fresh seafood, cheap real estate, small town feel - if I can be sure my job is secure. Just like working in IT in some small midwest town, there aren't many options for switching jobs if you need to switch. How many large companies are hiring if you're an Oracle DBA in Alaska?
That's the beauty of Silicon Valley. I can work at a company for a few years and move to another, similarly-sized company at a higher position without much hesitation or worry. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of small companies looking at hiring IT folks. That kind of job security is what makes California much more appealing than a smaller city.
My reaction has always been that any place that needs to advertise that it is a good place to work/live/start a business is probably a horrible place to work/live/start a business
I love that San Francisco made the list -- I was just thinking last night about how I love everything about San Francisco except for the idea of living there. I'll take the Oakland hills any day and twice on Tuesday.
I'm starting to wonder about California overall. The entire state is slowly sliding downhill (and not in a earthquake-into-the-ocean sense) thanks largely to the proposition system where any shitheaded idea can be made law by a simple majority vote -- I mean, if you ever need evidence that direct democracy is a terrible idea, look no further than CA.
Institutionalized gay bashing? Check. Costly mandates we have no way to pay for? Check. And then there's my personal favorite, a short-sighted effort to limit property taxes whose only real effect is to hurt younger people just starting out and drive the schools into the shitter? You know it.
I mean, maybe having worked with users for all these years, it's a little more obvious to me that people are (by and large) stupid assholes, but I feel there's enough evidence to convince any reasonable person at this point. Which is why we still have the proposition, I suppose.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I wish they'd enlightened us as to some of their 'subjective' reasons for their choices. The Northwest Arkansas metro area (Fayetteville, Springdale, Bentonville & Rogers) regularly makes the top ten of 'best places to live' lists. It's not New York, if that's your thing, but then they listed Boston & SF, too, so WTF?
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
I find it funny that Boston is on both the best and worst list.
I recently was in Boston for the first time on business. I thought it was a great city as there was plenty of good food and night life as well as viable mass transit. Unfortunately there were the downsides too. I thought the city was "old" and "dirtier" than what I am accustomed to in Minneapolis and I definitely didn't feel terribly safe wandering around by myself at night. Would I live there compared to Minneapolis? Probably not but do I see why it's on both the best and the worst, yes.
...the worst cities are those with no jobs. The best cities are the ones with jobs. If you want to pay your bills, you go where the jobs are.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Having worked for 4 different tech companies in Cleveland, I'll speak up for it. Cleveland does have a few things going for it if you're in the tech sector.
There's good higher education to hire from (CWRU (of which I'm an alum) and CSU (from which I've had a couple of excellent co-workers)), good cultural institutions (Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Museum of Art, Playhouse Square, The Cleveland Playhouse), good restaurants, affordable housing, decent enough public transportation, and bearable traffic. There's also a national park within about 30 or 40 minutes of downtown (Cuyahoga Valley National Park).
The tech sector is a little small, but it's fairly close-knit as a result of that. I don't think you need 6 degrees to get from anybody to anybody else. One or two is probably sufficient.
While the professional sports teams are perennially frustrating, that's not what I look for in a city. At the end of the day, a city is what you make of it. Cleveland comes with a lot of big city perks without a lot of big city hassles.
California's problem is not all the "tax and spend liberals", it's that it has the most boneheaded system of government ever devised. It's Constitution is huge and unwieldy, and can be changed by a simple majority vote. Its government can't do anything like raise taxes or cut spending to balance the budget because the referendum system blocks them from doing anything that's unpopular with 51% of the voters.
California is a great study in why populist democracy is a lousy way to run a huge and complex state.
The other point to note is that in my experience (in Rochester, NY), upstate New York actually knows how to handle snow. The roads are clear and safe to drive 99% of the time, with plows deployed the moment snow starts sticking. Contrast with, say, D.C. or Seattle (both of which I've experienced) which regularly run out of salt, fail to plow many streets for up to a week, etc. And of course, the drivers in D.C. and Seattle don't know how to deal with snow/ice: at the first flake, ancient reptilian instincts cause them to drive straight into trees, jersey barriers, other cars, etc.
So yes, there's more snow, but it's not an additional inconvenience, as long as you don't mind the cold in the first place.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Pffft. If people cared the facts, we'd have little to talk about here and action movies would be 10 minutes long.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
yea, but seriously, Boston is a bad place to live because the sports teams win? That's pretty fucking weak.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The funny bit is that they don't much mention anything about IT. It's almost all about the environment. Alaska has moose, and Syracuse gets too much snow, and Detroit is Detroit, etc, ad nauseum.
That was true during the pipeline construction era, but it's far closer to 55-45 male/female now.
That's still pretty unfavorable. It means that if every woman hooks up with a guy, there's still 10% of the population that's single and male.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
It's a really scary time to work in the tech industry. If you have a job, and it pays enough to support your family, thank the lucky stars you're still working. Not everyone is as lucky as you right now.
I really hate the phrase "you're lucky to have a job".
I have my job because I know what I'm doing, luck has nothing to do with it. If I lose my job, then I'll go beat out somebody for a new one because I've taken the time to learn what I need to learn and be damned good at it.
I keep my job because I'm an asset to the company I work for, not because they like my face or I carry a rabbits foot around.
As a commuter who rides the train that feeds Fenway, I can say that's a major detriment. Nothing like 30 minutes in a packed train with sweaty drunk fans to end your day in the office 2-3 times a week.
Lucky stars? My ass. I thank the hard work, diligence, years of earning a rock solid reputation and maintaining social contacts.
The stars can kiss my ass.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Remember that these articles are written by people who have only a passing interest in IT or technology. They like and buy gadgets. They never choose the OS their computer runs. They have no clue what geeks really like (for example quality import or locally brewed beer, instead of massive quantities of major brand junk).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
They point out the high real estate prices (legit point) but they are high because everyone wants to live here.
If he doesn't like all those winning teams then I'm surprised he didn't also take a shot about having too many good schools (Harvard, MIT, BU, BC, etc).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
>Of everyone who was in my circle of friends working in the IT and computer industry in the mid-to-late 1990s, the only people who have jobs today are in middle management.
Not surprised. The 1990s drew in tons of unqualified unprofessional people into IT. Anyone who could install ICQ and reboot an Win98 machine got some kind of job by clueless hiring managers. These people didnt develop professionally, they didnt finish school, they couldnt write a basic admin script, didnt know any OS9 or OSX let alone any linux, and they didnt know much outside of the most basic level 1 support tasks.
Ive met these people and they really dont belong in the industry. Im not saying your friends are these people but there might be some overlap here. The culling in the last few years has sent a lot of people who dont belong in IT back to school or in different industries where they belong. Its more competitive now and when I mention, say, ssh I dont get a clueless look from the guy Im talking to. Having to work with unqualified bullshitters isnt desirable at all.
Yea, I don't believe that, sorry. Unless you were getting utterly raped on rent. Housing in ATL is retardedly overpriced. I hope the bubble bursts another 10 times. 920k for a house in brookhaven, when I pay 580 in rent literally right down the street is stupid. You'll never recover your costs anywhere near the city. Renting is cheaper right now...in every scenario I calculated.
And buying is a gamble unlike renting. You are not guaranteed anything once you buy. I've seen areas like Duluth go from being nice suburbs to overrun with outward moving inner-city trash. Your foundation may split, you could have a water-runoff problem, or a thousand other issues like termites. What guarantee are you referring to?
They sarcastically slam Boston, but then list it as one of the 10 cities where "all the IT jobs are". So make up your mind already.
And as someone living in Boston, screw you and your list :-)
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
When I was planning to move here to Denver, I had countless people on forums tell me how annoying it is that it's sunny all the time, how you have to practically ration your water, and other tales of woe. Only had one come right out and say that the residents don't want other people moving here (particularly Californians who drive up property values).
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
They don't typically post pay rates. But it isn't unusual to also see them demand expert knowledge in six or seven obscure and unrelated technologies, I'm sad to say.
Still, if experience requirements mean anything, it is very unusual to see a job posting willing to hire anyone younger than 35 or 40. You can say anti-old-people-ageism exists, but all of my experience suggests the opposite.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Yes, and to quote a friend, the only two good things in Dallas are good restaurants and good strip clubs.
To me, a 1000 sq ft apartment is plenty big. If I had a house, I'd have to worry about a garage, about garbage disposal, doing my laundry, gym and pool membership, maintenance and ad infinitum. An apartment or a condo? Compact, and all those amenities are usually part of the package. Hell, the place in Cambridge is 400 sq ft and that in itself works just fine.
Besides, it's not just the summer (and honestly, I'd rather spend all 12 months having a Boston winter than a single week of Dallas summer). Dallas just looks and feels very superficial. You can perceive character and depth to some cities, and I don't feel that in Dallas.
Boston has age and character, and there are a ton of things to do - art galleries, museums, book stores, music concerts, public libraries, sailing, climbing etc. Hell, if you are still bored, just take a train to New York over the weekend. I mean, there are *things* to do. This is probably one of the few places where if you walked into a book store in Cambridge, the guy working there could offer you a discourse on Jean Paul Sartre or John Stuart Mill or a barista talk to you about theoretical comp sci (real incidents both).
Boston (and specifically Cambridge) also feels very, very entrepreneurial. A lot of my friends doing startups, using their graduate thesis to get seed funding, working for VCs etc. And there is a lot of youthful energetic feel, which is inspiring - and which reminds me of the Silicon Valley.
Hell, even the bumper stickers tell me more - one place is full of religious mumbo jumbo and right-wing political stickers, while the other has bumper stickers along the lines of "I stop for aliens!". Go figure.