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Comment by thehappypm | Hacker News Reader

I see Boston as the tech hub of the East more than NYC. New York obviously has a large number of tech jobs, but Boston and DC both have a higher concentration of tech; in NYC the big fish is obviously finance.

I discount DC a little because a lot of that is government and defense related (not a bad thing, just not my cup of tea).

Boston has a lot of diversity in tech, lots of health/pharma like Moderna, web companies like TripAdvisor and Wayfair, robotics like Boston Dynamics, tons of startups doing ai/ml, and it seems like every big company has a substantial presence here (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce…)

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NYC has the second most number of people with software development jobs in the US outside of the bay area although the number is about the same as Seattle which is a much smaller region than NYC, and within NYC the majority of developers work at banks in back office roles.

Boston is definitely bigger for every other type of engineering though than NYC. Most non programming engineering jobs in NYC would either be for a niche startup or would have something to do with real estate.

I don't know how anyone who has spent considerable time around SV/SF, NYC and Boston could see Boston anywhere close to the others.

The Boston tech scene and culture (outside of physically being on the MIT campus) is awful. TripAdvisor and Wayfair, your examples, are two companies I would aggressively advise any friends from even talking to. While all the major players are there now it took them a long time to get there. Comp in Boston still lags NY and SF considerably, and in general Boston has always had a resistance to anything "new", it's politically liberal but otherwise a very conservative city. The biotech companies there have always been way more heavy on the bio than the tech. I've worked for Boston area tech companies multiple times , before and after the tech boom, and would never work for a Boston area tech company again.

NYC is on a whole other level. Not only do you have all the major players with much larger campuses there are far more startups and early IPO companies. There is the also entire world of HFT companies (Boston's finance scene is largely very old school investment management companies) which alone would be worthy of making NYC a techhub. I also disagree with your claims about the concentrate of tech companies. Tech related meetups and events in NYC are much larger, more active and have more exciting participants than in the Boston area.

As somebody with no dog in this fight (I live in the south east), I'd tend to agree with the Boston take.

Simply being in the orbit of MIT can have that effect, along with everything else you listed.

The issue with NYC from a perception as a hub of any one thing is that it's just so big with so many different things going on that tech just seems like one of many things going on there simply because of all the people.

MIT is part of it but Massachusetts is also home to a large number of other research universities including BU, Northeastern, Harvard, the UMass system, etc.

As you say, NYC (like Silicon Valley) has always been more concentrated in terms of technology focus.

I'd agree with this. Boston area has a lot of high quality post secondary educations that feed business and talent. I would argue bay area has some of the same dynamics (Stanford, UCB & UCSF amongst others).

Silicon Valley has a high degree of tech but also a fair bit of climate tech which shouldn't be discounted.

Yeah, the Bay Area is probably the one other place in the US that has comparable higher-ed quantity and quality to the Boston area/Massachusetts. Other good institutions are scattered around of course but they're more diffuse.

I think that there's a tendency on the part of a lot of people to view "tech" through the lens of web-related tech but obviously there's a lot more interesting/important work going on than just that--whether in the Boston area, Silicon Valley, or somewhere else.

The amount of top colleges in the Boston area is astounding. A school like Tufts (ranked #28 by US news) would be the crown jewel of almost every city in America, but it’s totally overshadowed in Boston.

Especially if you include Massachusetts as a whole it’s absurd:

MIT

Harvard

Tufts

Williams

Amherst

Brandeis

UMass Amherst

Boston University

Boston College

Northeastern

Wellesley

Olin

Babson

Smith

WPI

Boston's interesting in that it feels more low-key than NYC or Silicon Valley. Most of the biotech companies feel a lot more secretive and I don't see as many public events.

The valley has a vibe in that everyone you meet is involved in tech work in some way and will talk about it to you or in public. It doesn't feel that way here, or you have to be a part of certain circles maybe. There are some small biotech meetup groups, but maybe they all do communication at the universities?

That vibe definitely exist, in Cambridge and Somerville, and maybe the Seaport, where the tech folks love to live. Everyone in Camberville seems to be in tech or tech adjacent.

In my neighborhood the branded swag has shifted from mostly tech to mostly biotech over the last several years.

A lot of computer-related tech (and defense sector) in the Boston area has historically been out in the suburbs, e.g. the "Route 128" companies. After Teradyne moved out, there was very little tech presence left in the actual city. That shifted with biotech/pharma and, more recently, with companies in the Seaport and Cambridge and the outposts of the big West Coast-HQd companies. But a lot of the tech industry is still well to the West and North of the city.

Indeed, the amount of VC dollars invested in Boston companies per years is 3x the per capita of New York's. So while NY may have slightly more total dollars invested, a much higher percentage of Boston metro area workers (something like 30%) work in tech. New York will never really be a tech hub in the same way as SF or Boston because tech plays second fiddle to other industries.

Still true today: http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

"while NY may have slightly more total dollars invested"

NYC is 50% higher in terms of total VC dollars.

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