Why All The Fuss?

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle regarding Uber hiring away 40 plus Carnegie Mellon staffers from CMU’s National Robotics Center for Uber’s new, and welcomed, driverless car engineering office in Pittsburgh.  Is there a problem here?  I don’t get it.  What’s not to like?  Isn’t “the new economy” all about disruptions such as this.  That’s a declaration, not a question.

A dynamic economy at any geographic level is constantly changing.  This is precisely what Pittsburgh lacked for two or more generations: a chance for individuals to reinvent themselves, let alone the city and region.  It’s why the now talked about “Diaspora” of the young and the talented happened when they moved to the East Coast, the Research Triangle, Texas and Florida, and about every other point beyond.  All they [we] were trying to do was find a place to best use talents.

And that’s the chance Uber is giving to those CMU engineers.  I’ve read the comments coming from CMU upper level managers and they are surprisingly [to me] chary with their enthusiasm for this turn of events.  I would think they should be thrilled that their staff has opportunities to move into what must be higher paying jobs in the private sector.  But it seems not; which is all too typical of an industrial era management style reminiscent of indentured worker conditions.  In contrast let’s particularly note that Robotics Institute’s managers are very enthusiastic about this enterprise.

Of course CMU’s high level managers, as management types anywhere would be, are concerned that they now have to replace these engineers.  That’s management’s job – hiring and staffing.  In the nationwide robotics market, these folks are in demand.  So maybe Pittsburgh’s notoriously lower wage scale needs to finally, FINALLY, start rising.  It’s the only way the region will compete to keep the aforementioned young and talented in the area.  And forget the BS about “well we can pay less in Pittsburgh because the cost of living is lower”.  The cost of living is lower because income levels are depressed.  Those incomes provide only so much anyone can pay for a mortgage, as one example, thereby keeping Pittsburgh housing values, and overall cost of living, depressingly low.  But trust me, as a former young person I can tell you, after you graduate from college, the last thing on your mind are single family housing prices.  A $3 flat white or a $7 craft beer is the same price on University Avenue in Palo Alto as it is on Penn Avenue in East Liberty.

So let’s celebrate a too-rare big name, national headlines win for Pittsburgh.  The future is creeping into the local job market, disrupting the all too comfortable lives of organization managers in the region.  Finally.