Slashdot Mirror
On Keeping Geeks in a Metropolitan Area
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)?"
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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?"
I think that cheap high bandwidth internet access would be a major plus since most people want connectivity and usually go where it is the best.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Research jobs are a good start, but they aren't enough to keep a large population of geeks happy. The real success to geek freedom are software companies, doing active development, and lots of them. Branches which do marketing or sales only aren't of any help, besides recruiting young geeks to wherever the real work is done. And you need more than one or two major companies in the area to give geeks the freedom of choice, and make them feel they can walk away from their current job and get rehired without having to move halfway across the country. One thing I have noticed is that the east coast is short of non-consulting programming jobs - and some of us don't want to be flying around the country four days out of five on 60 hour a week jobs (cough, no company names here!). That's why Silicon Valley and Redmond have taken off - you need two or three major companies and a whole slew of new startups to make a geek truely happy - the critical mass of availible work. Just my $.02
Tepp
A person will stay in an area if he is happy there. Period.
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.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
My thoughts:
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.
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
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
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Have a good sized convention center. Without it you cant attract things like the Worldcon 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 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.
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.
No Zen is good zen
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.
Finding God in a Dog
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)