On the surface we have lots of "jobs" moving to DFW. Almost everyday some big company announces it's plan to setup an office here. So what can be wrong? Try to attend any cutting edge technology meet up in Dallas and you will see piss poor attendance and low quality audience. There was a summit planned on Kubernetes, Docker on Cloud and it had to be cancelled because no one registered. There was an event organized by DataStax on Cassandra and very few people showed up. One Indian guy was very loud and vocal about the lack of "transactions". If a free event is offered in Seattle, Bay area or even Austin 100s of people show up with their sticker infested MBPs and man-bun hair. Yesterday there was a HackerX recruiting event here and it had very poor local staffing companies looking for contractors. The only big companies was "Infosys" and "bottle rocket". So local corporate participation was totally missing. So while so many jobs are moving here.... the interest in community events and acquiring knowledge about new things is very poor. We don't have any big conferences or tech events here like in Seattle, Bay Area or NY.
All of Texas’ tech is in Austin
The same thing can be said about Austin
About the tech meetups?
I have been to few meetups around town. One thing that hurts is the sprawl. The Last Meetup i attended was a 1.5hr commute for me
1.5hr each way
I mean people have comparable commutes in the bay
Well, it’s dallas...
Also I've noticed in the meetups here that it's mostly boot camp grads trying to get a job vs people actually interested in learning. Don't know if that's the case other places but it wasn't in my last town.
I don’t think Dallas’ culture aligns with that of tech right now; Houston’s is actually closer I think because it’s a more laid back city, but Austin is clearly the most culturally similar
I would disagree about the Houston statement unless you like programming in ada in oil and gas. Houston is more backwards than the defense industry
Lmao you raised a good point about the oil and gas, but then “more backwards than the defense industry” is a big leap
Because they have better things to do. I stopped going to those meetups when I turned 28. Just not my top priority any more. It makes sense because tech in SF and Seattle skews múch younger than many other places. A 24 year old single engineer in the bay area literally doesn't have anything better to do. A 35 year old with kids has 20 other things they HAVE to do instead. I wouldn't use that as a proxy for how strong the tech scene is, it's just an indicator of demographics.
True I think it's a regional thing. People are more family oriented here rather than career. Also they would rather drive their f350s to go see Friday,Saturday and Sunday football games rather than learn/mentor.
Dallas is for ppl who can’t or don’t want to go to big tech.
Unfortunately in tech the general feeling about Dallas is that it’s cheap and only good for back office grunt work. Companies move there to save money, not to pay top dollars to attract the best.
Agreed
I’m in the same boat. I run a meetup in Houston and attendance is piss poor and full of people that haven’t even used the technology in question. I’ve tried throwing happy hours to offset the tech talks on alternative biweekly periods but it’s still poor attendance. The community just sucks
Couldn't agree more!