A new report from technical interviewing company Karat found that, for the second year in a row, Pittsburgh has ranked as the No. 1 city to hire remote software engineers outside of tech hubs like San Francisco, New York and Seattle, where Karat is based.
To reach its findings, Karat ranked each metro by how respondents from a given area performed on its technical interviews. Since its founding in 2014, the company has conducted more than 150,000 technical interviews for technology companies, including Pittsburgh-based Duolingo Inc. (NASDAQ: DUOL), to help organizations narrow down a field of candidates for open positions within the company, some of which can get hundreds of applicants per role.
For Pittsburgh, about 40% of those who participate in Karat's technical interviews end up with a passing score, outranking those who take the same interviews but live in cities like Washington, D.C., Los Angeles or Boston, among other larger metros. Those 40% of interviewees are then, according to Karat's data, more likely to end up moving further along in the hiring selection process and, ultimately, are more likely to get hired for remote work at a tech company.
"We look at where developers are based, and what that data tells you is that the engineers who live in Pittsburgh perform at the highest levels for what we consider remote cities," Mo Bhende, founder and CEO of Karat who also happens to be a Pittsburgh native, said. "That's really impressive. Honestly, if you are an engineering leader sitting at some Bay Area company and you were trying to figure out where to go hire from, you should probably hire from Pittsburgh."
Bhende attributes the performance of Pittsburgh residents in the company's interviewing process to a few factors, one of the biggest among them being the success of Carnegie Mellon University's computer science program, from which Bhende said Karat has interviewed over 1,000 potential recent graduate candidates. According to Karat's data, CMU graduates perform the best compared to those who attend other U.S. and Canadian computer science programs.
But Bhende also noted that Pittsburgh's growing tech industry could also play into why residents in the region are performing better than those from other cities, though Bhende said those efforts will likely need to continue if Pittsburgh wants to keep its rank at the top.
"I would love to continue to see even more success stories out of Pittsburgh itself. I think the Duolingo success story is great, they're a client of Karat's, we do their interviews. But beyond Duolingo, I'm waiting for the world where I see 15 Duolingos or 20 Duolingos because I do think that creates a matter of city pride that will attract talent," Bhende said. "Clearly there's talent being attracted at the university level. The challenge and opportunity for Pittsburgh is to retain that talent, so that when they're in their 30s and 40s that they live in Pittsburgh."
Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; and Atlanta, Georgia, rounded out the top five cities for hiring remote software engineers, respectively, the report found. It can be accessed here.
