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Duolingo To Silicon Valley Workers: Move To Pittsburgh, Where You Can Actually Afford a Home (venturebeat.com)

As the cost of living continues to rise in Silicon Valley, tech companies in other parts of the country are getting more aggressive in pitching workers to move to their cities for a better quality of life. From a report: This week, the language-learning platform Duolingo put up an ad along San Francisco's US Highway 101, encouraging residents to move to Pittsburgh where the company's headquarters are based. In Pittsburgh, you can both "work in tech" and "own a home," the ad touted. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn told VentureBeat in an email that the company was prompted to put up the ad after realizing that most of its Pittsburgh employees who relocated to the city cited the low cost of housing as one of the deciding factors.

Von Ahn said that 85 percent of the company's Pittsburgh-based employees moved to the city from somewhere else. The company has 110 employees, the majority of whom work out of Pittsburgh. "One [employee] who recently joined Duolingo moved from the Bay Area and ended up buying a house almost immediately," von Ahn said. "He said he never would have been able to do that before, but here in Pittsburgh, he found a reasonably priced home on a large plot of land and jumped on the opportunity to be a homeowner and have a huge yard for his dog."

2 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Only the beginning by thePsychologist · · Score: 0, Troll

    People with a six-figure salary complaining about silicon valley living costs would have an easier time of it if they didn't have children.

    This kind of phenomenon is only the beginning. The cost of having children is going up, and it will continue to do so until the population reaches an equilibrium. It has to happen sometime.

    That's not really a bad thing, though.

    --
    "What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
  2. Re: That's racist! by DrLudicrous · · Score: 1, Troll

    What a load of cherry-picked statistics. All of which ignore the systematic biases that have been in place for centuries against people who have more melanin in their skin. See? No ad hominem attacks. A simple dismissal of. Specious argument as just that. If those arguments carried any water, why arenâ(TM)t they making in-roads in a more public forum? Answer: because they are terrible, racist arguments that reach false conclusions based on overly sparse, unrepresentative data points.