Johns Hopkins APL is not far south on 95 from Baltimore. It does MIC stuff, but is also involved with various space programs. There are a bunch of small and large tech companies in and around Baltimore and Baltimore county. I've worked in Columbia, Linthicum, and Rockville MD. (Rockville commute was insane before the new highway, now it would doable for folks who don't mind driving a lot).
I lived there for 12 years. Generally speaking, Baltimore is good if you want relatively affordable housing. A number of neighborhoods are great for DINKS (dual-income, no kids). Public schooling is a hard no-go unless you really get involved and enroll your kids in a carefully selected charter or magnet school. There are some excellent private schools. Baltimore county has options too if you want something that's more suburban.
As far a crime goes, the city has some really profound problems that are the result of white flight and systematic disinvestment. It was hit hard by the crack epidemic and has not really recovered. The TV shows "The Wire" and especially "The Corner" capture the flavor of the rough parts of Baltimore more than residents would like to admit. As far as safety is concerned, like other big cities, it's not really a problem for folks that would read HN, unless you enjoy hanging out in bars at 2am and getting into arguments with armed drug-trade people. Don't leave anything in your car, get a security system for your house.
> The TV shows "The Wire" and especially "The Corner" capture the flavor of the rough parts of Baltimore more than residents would like to admit.
I think The Wire was pretty accurate and a lot of Baltimoreans aren't in denial about what kind of city it was/is. However, if you're only hanging out and working with folks who don't leave the White L[1], you'd think the rest of Baltimore is pretty awful and if it wasn't for work/family, they'd leave ASAP. Not to discredit the concerns folks have, just saying that the loudest voices also seem to be the most negative without being constructive (just check various FB "safety" groups, e.g., Mt Vernon Safety, or Nextdoor).
I recently moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia and in many ways it seems like a bigger version of Baltimore. Lots of white/black segregation, crime (it's already above 300 homicides for 2021), potholes and generally poor road maintenance, poorly run city gov't, etc. Yet somehow there doesn't seem to be the same level of negativity about the city here.
I think part of the reason is that Baltimore has pumped up murder rates due to it being an independent city. The situation is bad, but that inflates the number.
You mean Jobs? Philly definitely has more. But I found Balto to have more going for it, despite being tiny in comparison. Culture-wise, Baltimore has loads of everything (except the "we're pretending we're NYC-lite" that DC and Philly push). There's loads of green spaces, festivals, multicultural cuisines/neighborhoods, industries. Baltimore even exceeded Philly in things like hackerspaces/makerspaces/tool libraries. And Balt has [some] free public transit! And though the history isn't pushed much, there's a ton of it all around. I'd also argue the Inner Harbor exceeds any Philly tourist district in terms of interesting ways to waste a saturday for a wide range of people. Then you've got the stadiums right near the harbor, the light rail to whisk you up into the lush suburbs, and more quirkiness and charm than practically any city in the US.
All good points, except Baltimore was/is a heroin town, not a crack town, and The Wire was more like 80s/90s Chicago than Baltimore. Baltimore's drug trade (when I lived there) was run by many little gangs largely made up of childhood friends and just claiming a few blocks as territory. This actually makes it more dangerous, not less. The Corner is accurate, however, probably because Charles Dutton was involved.
Just like every city, it works hard to make sure upper-middle class white people are safe, but definitely don't leave anything valuable in your car. Don't even leave pennies in a tray visible from the outside.
The Avon Barksdale gang is a professional, almost corporate empire. The inner circle is family but it runs from neighborhood boys as foot soldiers all the way up through a “COO” type (Stringer Bell) attending business school in the evenings. At one point the various gangs of Baltimore are amalgamated into a trade association that meets in hotel ballrooms and follows the Roberts Rules of Order. Leading to one of the greatest exchanges on TV ever:
“Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?”
“The Roberts Rules say the meeting got to have minutes!”
I love these commments. Now the distric attorney needs to tell the police to do their jobs. (Really tired of resources being wasted on marginal tickets/dui's, instead of zeroing in on real crime.)
> Public schooling is a hard no-go unless you really get involved and enroll your kids in a carefully selected charter or magnet school
You can go to these schools, ultimately it is about whether you are okay with your child being a racial minority. BCC is one such example of a school (maybe you would put that in the carefully selected magnet category).
>You can go to these schools, ultimately it is about whether you are okay with your child being a racial minority.
You're assuming crispyambulance is white. If crispyambulance is black then crispyambulance wouldn't be a racial minority in these schools (I think that's what you're saying). If crispyambulance is Indian then crispyambulance has no choice and will be a racial minority at every school.
> As far as safety is concerned, like other big cities, it's not really a problem for folks that would read HN, unless you enjoy hanging out in bars at 2am and getting into arguments with armed drug-trade people.
Again, completely inaccurate and misleading statement, despite yourself pointing out how residents don't like to admit how bad Baltimore is. Having worked in IT in Baltimore, a coworker of mine got mugged, a black eye, and had to take the next day off work just because he was strolling through a very popular park on a weekday evening. Wealth and education don't protect you if somebody targets you on the street, and it happens way more than Baltimore residents will admit.
What happened to your coworker can and does happen in any large city with lots of people. Are you saying this could not have happened in NYC, Los Angeles, DC, or Philly?
I perhaps should not have said "not really a problem". Crime/safety is a problem in Baltimore, but it's not drastically different than many other urban areas.
Since you bring up NYC, LA, Philly, Baltimore is top 3 in list of total violent crimes whereas the other cities top out at 24 for DC, 25 for Philly, 32 for LA, and 59 for NYC. So Baltimore is in fact drastically different from NYC/LA/DC/Philly. You only proved my point.
"Total violent crimes" per 100000 population is a very blunt statistic that tell you very little about a city and virtually nothing about any particular neighborhood. It mashes together a lot numbers that mean different things to different demographics. And most importantly, those stats say absolutely nothing about the actual context of these crimes.
Sorry you had a rough time in Baltimore. I was there through the O'Malley years and saw amazing improvement in my old neighborhood, Patterson Park/Butcher's Hill. Some other places didn't fare so well despite occasional promising signs (Sandtown-Winchester, Hollins Market).
Baltimore is not for everyone, and that's OK. We all have/had our reasons for being there. There's no good reason to trash Baltimore or call any city "a hell-scape". It didn't get the way it is overnight, and it won't improve overnight. It will take many years.
I gave numbers and I gave context, and you have shown that you're not genuinely considering the idea that Baltimore might not be a great city for most people, you just have your opinion and aren't entertaining any alternatives. If you love Baltimore, great. But saying Baltimore is just another city when only 2 other cities in the entire country have more violence is like saying some country in the middle east some city in Pakistan isn't so bad because every city has bombings. Glad that comforts you, but it isn't true.
> There's no good reason to trash Baltimore or call any city "a hell-scape"
I will call Baltimore a hellscape 7 days of the week and I consider it 100% justified. I actively hope people don't move their for their own sake; I already left, it doesn't matter to me what happens there anymore.
I also encourage anybody who hasn't visited and doubts me to check for yourself and make your own opinion, not believe me or crispyambulance. Look up crime/violence statistics, reddit.com/r/baltimore, facebook groups, government corruption, illiteracy rates, crime maps, etc and decide for yourself whether what happens in Baltimore is "normal" for the US (let alone the entire world when there are many cities much bigger than Baltimore with a fraction of the crime).
To respond to applications. Even when you have good leads it's 3 months to get a second round of interviews. I'm not so comfortable that I can choose to not work in between moves.
A few off the top of my head. I'm currently working (remotely) for a BigCo that acquired my startup employer last year.
Technical.ly can be a good resource for local postings. I've worked as a SWE in Baltimore for 10 years and have never had employment issues. I don't quite make SV money, but I make solid 6 figures and can afford a very nice home on just my salary and send my kids to private school, etc.
If you (OP of the parent's parent) do interview in the area be sure to dig in to find what the company's lines of business are. CloudTamer, for instance, is ostensibly a commercial product-based company but does business with federal agencies and contractors (per their web site) and was at the AWS Public Sector Summit a few years ago. A different company that I interviewed at in an adjacent space (security vs CloudTamer's compliance) was in a similar position... they were selling their product to the Air Force but swore up and down that they'd never contract with them outside of being a vendor. I was skeptical and my suspicions were proven correct six months later when they put out a press release announcing the award of an Air Force contract.
Maryland/Northern Virginia are _not_ the places to be if you want career options outside of government [contracting] work. It's not un-doable but you'll be much better served looking for work in a place where 80% of the value of the economy doesn't revolve around Washington-type work.
Maryland/Northern Virginia are _not_ the places to be if you want career options outside of government [contracting] work.
While it's true that .gov work is huge in DC metro (and extending to Baltimore), there are MANY companies completely outside, or on the periphery, and even more if you just want to eliminate military jobs.
Amazon has large AWS offices, plus HQ2 is spinning up.
Google and Microsoft both have substantial presences (albeit much of that is .gov work). Walmart has their innovation centre here (Walmart Labs?).
Oracle. VW of A. Several universities. Smaller companies like Ellucian (my employer). Freddie and Fannie (.gov-adjacent). The list is long.
I would add that there are financial technical jobs at T Rowe Price, Legg Mason, Morgan Stanley etc. Not to mention that there are computer security jobs at those places where the stakes are high.
Oh yeah, info-sec jobs abound. Many are .gov consulting gigs, but lots of law firms, banks, and hospitals too.
And Capital One Bank has a massive complex in McLean/Tysons. It's not their HQ (which is in Richmond), but there has to be a few thousand employees here.
TBF, "Washington-type" work also includes journalism and NGOs, so it could be the place to live (along with NYC) if you want to do tech in either of those fields.
Can anyone give a perspective why is it the case? In Europe it seems impossible not to have commercial software positions in a big local hub city - and in US whole areas seem to be devoid of them as HN crowd implies.
It's because Washington, DC is the nation's capital and where our legislative bodies, heads of state, and our various departments (ministries) are based out of. There are also many military bases in close proximity and the military headquarters (Pentagon) is across the river in Virginia.
I think people are misinterpreting my comment... there _are_ non-defense/government jobs in the area but they are dwarfed by the number of such jobs because of the pervasive nature of the aforementioned entities. When I lived in the area more than 90% of LinkedIn recruiter messages that I got were about these jobs. This ceased being the case after I moved even when I was still in the defense contracting industry.
See my sibling comment. I think the OP overstated the lack of non-government jobs in the area. I've lived here (Dulles tech corridor) most of my life and work in non-government software.
There are quite a large number of well regarded universities and hospitals. In addition, Under Armour and a few other Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Baltimore.
Baltimore is a cool town. People have a perception of it based on national media, and don’t get me wrong, it has it’s share of issues, but every city does. It is one of the quirkiest, weirdest cities in the US. It is not quite a northern city and not quite southern either.
Columbia is 22 miles south of Baltimore, home to an entity sometimes known as The Fort. 40 miles south is DC if you want to work GovTech. TRowePrice has/had a datacenter in Owings Mills, 20-some miles northwest of Baltimore. CapitalOne has offices in Baltimore but HQ in Virginia. Constellation Energy (not sure what they're known as now) used to have a datacenter south of Baltimore as well. It's not SV or Boston or NYC, to be sure.
Our startup (Cortx) does natural language generation work, is located in Fells Point, and is currently hiring Machine Learning Engineers and Full Stack Engineers :)
I am living in Baltimore and work out of DC as an ML engineer. The commute sucks, but with because of covid, I have been WFH. DC has a lot of tech companies, but lots of connections to defense.
The city. I considered the MARC, but I have to go out to Herndon, VA and Fairfax, VA area so its just more convenient to drive. It's a tough commute at times, but a good podcast gets me through the drive. I have been WFH for all of 2020 an 2021, so now I just stay in Baltimore. WFH shift is working out great!
Yep, that's the case for me. The plausible choices for me personally are basically remote work, commuting to DC on MARC, or starting a company with a remote cofounder.
A fair amount for someone on the hardware side, surprisingly. Analog Devices and a mixed bag of test/measurement and signal integrity companies.
The answer is the one you would most likely guess: two body problem. We both miss NH quite a bit, but we're along for the ride until they finish their PhD.
What is there to do for tech work in Baltimore? All jobs I've seen are in the MIC, which I dislike.