SOME budding entrepreneurs and computer whizzes based here in the Pacific Northwest are starting to turn heads down in Silicon Valley. They are professors and students at the University of Washington, home to what may be the best computer science department you’ve never heard of. Although Stanford is considered the Hogwarts of techdom, U.W. has quietly established itself as the other West Coast nexus of the information economy. And while Seattle-area tech icons like Microsoft and Amazon have long relied on U.W. — pronounced “U-dub” by locals — as an incubator of talent and ideas, the Valley’s hottest companies have been getting the message, too. Their executives have begun streaming up the coast to Seattle, fueled by a talent arms race for programmers. Facebook, Zynga and Google have opened offices in the area, trying to woo U.W. engineers who’d rather live here, where taxes and home prices are lower, even if mist and dark skies envelop the scenery for much of the year. “It’s the most underrated computer science department I’ve seen,” said Ari Steinberg, a Facebook engineer who runs the company’s Seattle office, which opened in early 2010. The university’s computer science and engineering department, ensconced on a patch of land near Husky Stadium and Lake Washington, has come a long way since the early 1970s. During that time, two Seattle teenagers, Bill Gates and Paul G. Allen, honed programming skills by sneaking into the department to tinker on its computers. The department’s stature began to pick up in the 90s, as the university began to significantly expand its computer science faculty with new stars like Oren Etzioni. At the same time, Microsoft, the company that Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen founded, jump-started the Seattle technology scene and many fortunes along with it. Mr. Gates, Mr. Allen and others became big contributors, helping the university build a new home for its computer science program. In recent years, the department has deepened its ties with tech companies like Google, helping to gain an edge in teaching programming for the cloud, a big trend in computing. In the most recent rankings by U.S. News & World Report, the graduate program placed seventh in the nation, right behind Cornell and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (Tied for first were Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley.) The U.W. department’s growing recognition has been a blessing for its students, who are getting juicier job offers with top companies. But some Seattle technology executives say the competition is crimping the city’s homegrown technology scene, making it into something like a colony of Silicon Valley. According to the university, some 35 percent of its computer science graduates end up working at Amazon, Google or Microsoft in a typical year; 15 percent go to other big companies and 30 percent to small companies or start-ups. More than 80 percent of the program’s students come from Washington State, and the same percentage end up staying in the state after graduating, even if they work for companies based in Silicon Valley. The biggest problem with the university’s program is that it can’t turn out graduates fast enough. Engineers are in short supply in the computer field generally, but this is a particular concern in the Seattle tech market. “We need that program to be a lot bigger,” says Spencer Rascoff, chief executive of Zillow, a real estate Web site based in Seattle. IN a conference room at the university, overlooking the sparkling waters of Lake Washington, Christophe Bisciglia told a crowd of dozens of students what his secret weapon was: them. Mr. Bisciglia, 31, an entrepreneur and former star Google engineer, was visiting during the spring to speak on a panel about start-ups to computer science students. He said he has gained an “unfair advantage” for WibiData, his new San Francisco-based company, by recruiting from the university’s computer science department, where two-thirds of his employees once studied. “Down in the Valley, it’s all Stanford this and that,” said Mr. Bisciglia, himself a U.W. graduate. “While they turn out students that are good, U.W. turns out students that are every bit as good.” The deep connections between U.W.’s computer science program and the Seattle tech scene are written on the wall, literally. The department is housed in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering, a brick-and-glass building with a soaring, six-story atrium in the center of campus. The building, which opened in 2003, provided a big boost to the program, adding lab space for robotics experiments and replacing a structure that “was falling down around us,” said Ed Lazowska, who joined the computer science department in 1977, and was chairman for eight years. Mr. Allen was the leading donor for the construction of the building, along with Mr. Gates. Mr. Lazowska holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering. Many other notables from Seattle tech companies have also contributed money. Like their peers at Stanford, U.W.’s computer science faculty members say that one of their program’s strengths is the engagement between professors and the tech industry that will one day employ most of the graduates. Henry M. Levy, the current department chairman, is a co-founder of two tech start-ups. Mr. Etzioni is a co-founder of several Internet companies that were later acquired, including Farecast, an airfare price prediction service that Microsoft bought for $115 million in 2008. Along with four Washington graduates, Mr. Etzioni recently formed another company, Decide.com, which helps consumers time their purchases of iPads and other electronics to avoid missing price drops. He is a venture partner at Madrona, a Seattle venture capital firm that invested in Decide.
No comments:
Post a Comment