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by hotdogs 2373 days ago
What's in Pittsburgh driving the median so high? I know Carnegie Mellon is there, but I was not aware of any sort of commercial tech hub.
5 comments

Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Argo AI & Duolingo are based out of Pittsburgh. Uber & Google also have a decent sized presence. Some more context on their tech scene here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pittsburgh-tech/a-tech-bo...
Huh, it's been about a decade since I last visited Pittsburgh, I had no idea. Thanks for sharing.
Pretty much all the big tech companies have a presence here.

From what I can remember, Microsoft (Azure Storage), Amazon (ML Alexa Teams), Google, Uber (ATG), Argo AI, Aurora, Facebook (Oculus), Duolingo, and Apple are all have offices in the city.

In the suburbs I think Netapp and Oracle have offices.

Significant concentration of AI & ML teams probably raises the median (thanks to CMU). Some of the hottest skills in the market today.
Facebook also has a FAIR office in addition to Oculus in Pittsburgh.
Uber, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all are present. What’s clearly wrong or at least misleading about this data is that they represent only a small fraction of the tech workforce in pgh. Other than Uber and Google these are only small offices. They also happen to be some higher paying jobs within those organizations. The reality is that most tech people in Pittsburgh are looking at jobs at UPMC, PNC, NetApp or a handful of smaller companies and poorly funded startups, few of which pay particularly well nor have worthwhile equity comp even relative to the low COL small markets.

This 170k median doesn’t fit with other stats available, and is only true if your sample is limited to FAANG and unicorns, which exists, but is small in Pittsburgh.

Self-driving cars in part due to its proximity to CMU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_in_Pittsb... Not from the area but could be a ton of drivers.
Lots of AI & robotics companies, as well as FANG + Msft like companies opening offices here.