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I think it has to do with the kinds of amenities that are necessary to attract each type of crowd. A municipality only has so many resources (tangible, in the form of tax dollars, and intangible, in the form of zoning and general political clout), so they can only do so much. Retirees and vacationers look for different types of places and services than tech workers. For instance, I feel like tourists care far less about parks and greenspaces - maybe same with retirees (not sure). Tech workers, on the other hand, love greenspaces. Retirees and tourists might be looking for more traditional or "local" dining options - typical sit-down dinner places and such. Tech workers want cool, hip, youth-oriented establishments like bars, cafes, and gastropubs. Retirees and tourists don't care about public transit and bike lanes, tech workers care deeply about such things. Etc.
Not saying you definitely can't have both. Just that each requires resources, and Charleston only has so much available.
Yeah, I reckon.
My intuition tells me that it probably has more to do with housing quality, cost and availability than with public investment.
Take, for instance, Mount Pleasant's whole height restriction thing. I don't live there, I have no dog in the hunt, and I know little about it other than what I've read. On the surface it seems totally unrelated to tech. But the sort of mid-rise apartments in walkable areas are exactly where younger tech workers would live, and it is the political / age composition of Mt. Pleasant that seems to be the primary reason there is opposition against that sort of density.
San Francisco can probably get away with things like this, and still be very attractive to techies. But Charleston is competing with places like Raleigh, where the housing market is more balanced, and techies can actually afford to buy or rent the high-end real estate. You don't have to compete with so many retired millionaires.
I was wondering when they were going to bring that here. Our neighborhood was built with AT&T's fiber network. The installers told us it was to accomadate Gigapower when they decide to turn it on down here.
It's good this seems to be happening sooner rather than later.
I work in dev, and bandwidth requirements have changed a bit.
Most companies are no longer pulling large data local, so lots of dev is done via ssh to cloud hosted boxes. Bandwidth requirements obviously still exists, but the idea that you need massive bandwidth for a start-up is not completely true. Realiable, yes - thats huge. You might need more if you whole family is watching 4 different episodes on Netflix on different boxes, than 45 developers
Just to put this all in perspective, San Francisco - where I live/work - had no tech scene in the 90's. Now companies are flocking to San Francisco, not only from abroad, but from Silicon Valley 1 hour away. VC's and private equity too...Here is my theory on the mass migration of talent to SF, and perhaps something to chew on for Charleston:
1. Quality of life: Walk-ability. Bike-ability. Rejection of chain stores. Natural beauty.
2. Transportation: BART <--HUGE. 400,000 people use the system on weekdays and it has allowed access to a mixed income talent pool for hiring high to low wages. It was genius for SF, and a lot of the Bay Area. Freeways are well laid out, but are certainly congested.
3. Liberal: I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say it is a HUGE asset attracting talent from the rest of the country (world). It also goes along with out of the box thinking and team cohesion.
That all said, having Berkeley and Stanford close at hand was seminal, but the phenomena of San Francisco has a slightly more nuanced story arc. Very few people I meet in the SF tech scene are from here or Berkeley/Stanford (VC's from stand ford do seem over represented tho).
I think there is a lot of promise for that industry in Charleston as I hear all the right buzz-words coming from elected officials.
To close though, the tourist focused city is sort of anathema to building a tech scene IMO. Watching sun burnt people walking off a cruise ship in floral shorts taking photos with grandma standing in the middle of the busy sidewalk is a net-negative for a business community...and hospitality is not a great way to build up the wage base in a city either. It is good for a few developers, bankers and private equity folks (who tend to be politically connected). This is shooting from the hip, but I might consider raining the hotel tax if it keep reaching full occupancy to fund transportation measure - as long as demand is inelastic - why not raise revenue?
The use of SSH isn't exactly a new technology . While cloud based development has shifted on prem requirements and allowed for a more global approach to development, the bandwidth capacity needs are dependent on the type of technology that's being developed or researched. If all you're doing it writing web pages then yes a lot isn't required. But if you're doing medical technology development, graphic design, CAD development, statistical aggregation with interpretive computing the data sets get really big. Even if you are leveraging cloud based Hadoop clusters for processing you're moving a lot of data back and forth. For your local systems, do you maintain a hot or cold site?
While many systems are moving to a browser based interface, that doesn't mean every technology uses that. There are plenty of fat client applications still being developed in a local manner.
To say technology companies and technology workers don't demand inexpensive high speed internet connectivity is just wrong in my experience. If you're in the bay area, your workers aren't paying far more for far less on a capped service. Tiny startups may only need a 50mb connection, but mid to large tech companies or branches need far more. And as a required resource a company needs to do business, they want it reliable and for the least amount possible. If it's unreliable and they have to pay twice as much for it, what's the incentive?
The political environment of being liberal or conservative is a "meh" issue. Tech hubs exist in many different political areas. The typical trend is people's views change over time. Younger people tend to be more liberal and idealistic, until they start to have families and get larger incomes. Then they start to become more conservative as they realize they're having to pay for all that stuff they wanted before. High density housing and urbanization also has a tendency to follow this trend. They want this stuff when they're younger... and often when their older. But as they have kids they want to move out of those areas into places that have better schools and more space. They want the house with the yard in the neighborhood where their kids can go out and safely play. Of course this doesn't happen universally as there are plenty of older liberals with families, but it remains a typical trend.
I will grant you that smaller startups tend to employ younger workers. Even larger companies that have a larger stable of senior analysts and business managers want to tap a younger work force because it's cheap labor and without family ties they can push the merging of work and life.. which gets more labor out of the worker further pushing down labor costs. So I agree it's a recognizable point, but not a necessity of the business.
I'm not sure how I see tourism as a problem for business. There are plenty of tech hubs that are high on tourism list and they get by just fine. Retirees, well I agree... I can see some incompatibilities there.
The public transportation is more of a function of population and size than tech industry must have. While I would like to see a better system than we have, we've noted in other threads we're at a point where it's hard to justify the expense required based on the current need. I realize that's not hugely forward thinking, but as far as a priority list for tech industry recruiting I wouldn't place it at the top.
@le roi.. MtP's push back on high density housing isn't about politics (liberal vs conservative) or age. It's about the residents being happy with suburbia rather than metro. They want shopping, restaurants, neighborhoods with single family homes, green spaces, and rec centers. They want most of the retail areas centered in locations with any high density houses in those areas. They want walkability/bike-ability inside their neighborhoods with mixed small retail and local restaurants. And because a majority of residents in MtP have families.. they want really good schools. They don't want high rise housing filling up natural space cramming more and more people into smaller and smaller spaces. I'm sure North Charleston would be happy to allow that. But the residents of MtP are willing to pay the higher prices and higher taxes not to.
Personally, I see this a win for both MtP and Charleston if North Charleston would develop the higher density housing and lay out the public transportation options. You'd get the more liberal areas of Charleston with higher density for the younger tech people and have Summerville and MtP as a more family oriented suburbia with more conservative values for those wanting that. It's hard to put a finger on James and John's Island. It's historically been more "rural", but with the development going on out there I can't say what it's going to become in the next 10 years.
We'll see just how many homes gets passed with this service, how capped it is, and if they just stick to areas they've already cherry picked with U-Verse.
We'll see just how many homes gets passed with this service, how capped it is, and if they just stick to areas they've already cherry picked with U-Verse.
It'll probably be limited to areas that were just built in the last few years. I wouldn't say it's "cherry picked", rather it just makes sense to lay down new neighborhoods with the latest infrastructure. Once ATT and Google start competing in every market, they'll probably go back through and rewire all the old neighborhoods to try and get more customers.
@le roi.. MtP's push back on high density housing isn't about politics (liberal vs conservative) or age. It's about the residents being happy with suburbia rather than metro. They want shopping, restaurants, neighborhoods with single family homes, green spaces, and rec centers. They want most of the retail areas centered in locations with any high density houses in those areas. They want walkability/bike-ability inside their neighborhoods with mixed small retail and local restaurants. And because a majority of residents in MtP have families.. they want really good schools. They don't want high rise housing filling up natural space cramming more and more people into smaller and smaller spaces.
Land development restrictions are "political," but that was certainly not the point of my post.
Again, I don't care what the outcome of all this is. My point was more that Charleston area residents don't really want Charleston to be a tech hub, as shown by the choices they make.
And that's fine. Even Seattle and San Francisco have huge backlashes against techies. They have taken steps to restrict new housing units, too, and generally drive up the cost of market housing. Being a tech hub is not 'a good thing' for everyone.
It'll probably be limited to areas that were just built in the last few years. I wouldn't say it's "cherry picked", rather it just makes sense to lay down new neighborhoods with the latest infrastructure. Once ATT and Google start competing in every market, they'll probably go back through and rewire all the old neighborhoods to try and get more customers.
Nope.. Cherry picking... U-Verse deployment is dead, has been for over two years. ATT and Verizon are quickly trying to abandon copper lines. Verizon is offloading theirs to Frontier. What you'll see is a portion of their existing U-Verse build out will get the speed upgrades. They'll then run to the press and say how they lit up Charleston with Gigabit speeds. Politicians will point to it with great enthusiasm on how competition is live and well. The majority of Charlestons will remain with the choice of one cable provider and one DSL provider that offers speeds that don't even meet the FCC's latest definition of broadband.
[SOMEWHAT OFF-TOPIC]
Agree. There are industries that require tons of on-prem bandwidth...or if you have a campus of 250+ people.
Or if you want an on-prem data-center. I have worked with many companies (a number most people here have heard of) and it would surprise you how limited their bandwidth was when they started. And that's the point I was making - start-ups require less bandwidth than most people not in tech would imagine. Literally a house with a family of 4 streaming a couple 4K streams for two hours is heavier net usage than "most" sub 20 folks start-ups in a day...And that is the early market for Charleston IMO - especially if they outsource some portion of the dev or devOps.
Not sure what you mean local systems, but if you mean build servers or staging, we use 100% cloud based if we can and for iOS have a local build/QA environment. We try to keep as little local as possible, and commit often. As far as fat Apps, and I am building some now, basically the same, as we are moving to a service based cloud infrastructure with multiple front ends (web, fat, phone) and moving as much business and functional logic into the cloud as micro-services and asynchronous API calls. There is a place for logic heavy fat apps, but its shrinking as far as I am concerned and I have not worked on one in years.
Everyone wants more bandwidth. I get texted screen shots from friends bragging about their bandwidth or their new office bandwidth all the time, lol, but I bet it would surprise you that Bandwidth in the Bay Area has never been cheap nor wide-spread (specifically in San Fran). That includes silicon valley to some extent until very recently. When I hear the low bandwidth prices for other non-tech municipalities in the nation I am always shocked. But one thing is that even paying $3K a month for Fiber is still a fraction of the pay roll if you have 20+ employees at $175K+ per year fully burdened and the CEO that makes $20K/month...that $3k enables the $312,500+ in HR to work.
My point is that bandwidth is not a primary driver of tech companies to an area. Sure, it may be an incentive, but not the main draw. It was not in Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Santa Monica, Austin, New York, or (early) Silicon Valley. Those sprung up for others reasons, and my thesis was in my earlier post...
Also, getting local school in on CS at the HS and college level is a big deal as well. No reason high school kids should not graduate having basic proficiency in at least one programming language like Javascript and a basic understanding of networking.
As far as Liberal, I disagree. A lot of the top programmers I know are not interested in moving to a seriously conservative city/area, and by and large complain about the culture where they came from if it was deeply conservative. And at large national conferences, many talk about moving if they can lol. And ask for recs
Younger folks are more prone to take risks as they can sleep on couches and don't have kids. The calculus changes when you get older. So from a net new standpoint, that's a nice driver of new companies. That is not to stay mature leadership is not valuable, but a mix.
Again, a tourist based economy is just a bummer all around, and cities with very high percentages of tourist revenue are ones I avoid except Hawaii , and even that at times feels off.
As far as public transportation, its always a risk, but it can transform a region. BART is such a classic example of good forward thinking. I can't imagine how much it would cost now to build, and it has been neglected since inception to some extent, but it really has turned the San Francisco Bay area into a Juggernaut of an economic engine.
Anyway again, I think your are missing the point for early tech recruiting for cities that don't have a super vibrant community existing (which is itself a draw to compete with). But bear in mind I am talking startups not a branch office of the Koch brothers with a VPN to Wichita...
Quote:
Originally Posted by IsNull
The use of SSH isn't exactly a new technology . While cloud based development has shifted on prem requirements and allowed for a more global approach to development, the bandwidth capacity needs are dependent on the type of technology that's being developed or researched. If all you're doing it writing web pages then yes a lot isn't required. But if you're doing medical technology development, graphic design, CAD development, statistical aggregation with interpretive computing the data sets get really big. Even if you are leveraging cloud based Hadoop clusters for processing you're moving a lot of data back and forth. For your local systems, do you maintain a hot or cold site?
While many systems are moving to a browser based interface, that doesn't mean every technology uses that. There are plenty of fat client applications still being developed in a local manner.
To say technology companies and technology workers don't demand inexpensive high speed internet connectivity is just wrong in my experience. If you're in the bay area, your workers aren't paying far more for far less on a capped service. Tiny startups may only need a 50mb connection, but mid to large tech companies or branches need far more. And as a required resource a company needs to do business, they want it reliable and for the least amount possible. If it's unreliable and they have to pay twice as much for it, what's the incentive?
The political environment of being liberal or conservative is a "meh" issue. Tech hubs exist in many different political areas. The typical trend is people's views change over time. Younger people tend to be more liberal and idealistic, until they start to have families and get larger incomes. Then they start to become more conservative as they realize they're having to pay for all that stuff they wanted before. High density housing and urbanization also has a tendency to follow this trend. They want this stuff when they're younger... and often when their older. But as they have kids they want to move out of those areas into places that have better schools and more space. They want the house with the yard in the neighborhood where their kids can go out and safely play. Of course this doesn't happen universally as there are plenty of older liberals with families, but it remains a typical trend.
I will grant you that smaller startups tend to employ younger workers. Even larger companies that have a larger stable of senior analysts and business managers want to tap a younger work force because it's cheap labor and without family ties they can push the merging of work and life.. which gets more labor out of the worker further pushing down labor costs. So I agree it's a recognizable point, but not a necessity of the business.
I'm not sure how I see tourism as a problem for business. There are plenty of tech hubs that are high on tourism list and they get by just fine. Retirees, well I agree... I can see some incompatibilities there.
The public transportation is more of a function of population and size than tech industry must have. While I would like to see a better system than we have, we've noted in other threads we're at a point where it's hard to justify the expense required based on the current need. I realize that's not hugely forward thinking, but as far as a priority list for tech industry recruiting I wouldn't place it at the top.
@le roi.. MtP's push back on high density housing isn't about politics (liberal vs conservative) or age. It's about the residents being happy with suburbia rather than metro. They want shopping, restaurants, neighborhoods with single family homes, green spaces, and rec centers. They want most of the retail areas centered in locations with any high density houses in those areas. They want walkability/bike-ability inside their neighborhoods with mixed small retail and local restaurants. And because a majority of residents in MtP have families.. they want really good schools. They don't want high rise housing filling up natural space cramming more and more people into smaller and smaller spaces. I'm sure North Charleston would be happy to allow that. But the residents of MtP are willing to pay the higher prices and higher taxes not to.
Personally, I see this a win for both MtP and Charleston if North Charleston would develop the higher density housing and lay out the public transportation options. You'd get the more liberal areas of Charleston with higher density for the younger tech people and have Summerville and MtP as a more family oriented suburbia with more conservative values for those wanting that. It's hard to put a finger on James and John's Island. It's historically been more "rural", but with the development going on out there I can't say what it's going to become in the next 10 years.
Funny how San Fran has FIOS... things seem much more competitive there. We live in an environment where most have the option of one cable service or 3mb DSL. There's no incentive for them. That's why our cable company decided to make Charleston one of their "test" beds for capped data service. Drive 30 mins South of downtown and you're in satellite territory.
Remember Charleston wages are much much much lower. Average developers here are pulling maybe $75k and that $3k is going to cost more like $5k. My point being it's a not only a driver to the business as an expense based on the size and complexity of the development focus, but it's also a quality of life issue for employees who live in the area. I VPN back to work over a Comcast business line and the screen refreshes on Citrix VDI can make you want to pull your hair out at times. The issue is on my end as work has plenty of bandwidth, but the actual delivered capacity that my 50Mb delivers sucks @ $110/month. But what can I do? I don't have any other choice... they're the only game in town.
My experiences come from a more mature development IT environment vs startups. And I say mature in that the business is older, larger, and more established.... not "responsibility" type mature. I would want Charleston to draw a diverse mix of tech. Just like in investing I want to balance my portfolio. Start ups are great and some will pop. But they need to be balanced against the mid tier firms i.e. Benefitfocus and Blackbaud and maybe a larger branch office of a "Blue Chip" like RSA, BMC, Salesforce, VMWare, etc.
Are you claiming San Fransisco isn't a tourist destination?
Just say no to Java. Ruby, Python, C++... even .Net before Java.
I guess my experience with the political outlook issue is perhaps based on the differences in businesses we deal with. I meet people who are liberal, conservative, and most who are relatively centralists. While Charleston proper is one of the more liberal areas of the state.. it's liberal for SC, which is a deep red state. I don't see that changing any time soon. Which brings me back to recruiting businesses that are less start up and more established.
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, and even that at times feels off. 
