How to Bring Tech Jobs Back to the United States 

Commentary about business and finance.
Nov. 5 2014 5:10 PM

Urban Onshoring

How to bring tech jobs back to the United States.

Majora Carter, the founder of Startup Box, a company that's bringing tech jobs to the South Bronx.
Majora Carter, the founder of Startup Box.

Photo courtesy Dina Litovsky

Reprinted from

This article originally appeared in Wired.

There’s not much to see when you walk out of the subway station at Hunts Point in the South Bronx. A check cashing outfit, a few auto body shops, a weather-worn sign for Bella Vista Fried Chicken, and a billboard advertising $399 divorces, “no signature needed.” This New York neighborhood has a landscape as bleak as its reputation. If you Google it, related searches include “Hunts Point crime,” “Hunts Point junkyards,” and “Hunts Point prostitution.”

But if you keep walking south on Hunts Point Avenue, past the 99-Cent Dreams store and the smiley-face mural that reads “You Can Do It” in both English and Spanish, you’ll come to a notably new storefront that’s all windows and exposed brick. From the street, you can see the L-shaped window seat, filled with colorful pillows to match the rainbow-hued pipes overhead.

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Inside, seven young men and women are hunched over laptops and smartphones, headphones and hoodies on. Every so often, they’ll scribble something on the paper spreadsheets beside them. They’re flipping through a smartphone app called GameChaser, an online service that advertises itself as a one-stop shop for gaming news and updates, but this isn’t just for fun. They’re looking for bugs in the app, and each time they find one—a slow-loading page here, an irrelevant search result there—they make a note.

This is the home of Startup Box, a company that aims to transform Hunts Points into a new hub for computer software testing. Over the past 20 years, so much of the country’s “quality assurance” testing—QA, in industry lingo—has moved overseas to places like India and the Philippines. But Startup Box seeks to bring many of these jobs back to the US—specifically to places like Hunts Point, where they’re needed most.

Sitting at a plastic folding table inside the company’s offices one crisp but sunny morning in early fall is Jermaine Rampersant, 21. He describes himself as a “hardcore gamer,” and he doesn’t use these words lightly. “It’s a lifelong journey,” he says, “and it’s been evolving everyday.”

He’s not alone. Desiree Aultman, 30, has a bachelor’s degree in video game programming. Leon Sterling, 24, plays fighting games competitively, and he says that when he heard about Startup Box, he was “like a shark smelling blood.” And then there’s 24-year-old Kevin Gumbs, who insists he’s been gaming “since birth.”

This is by design. In building Startup Box, husband and wife team Majora Carter and James Chase are focusing on QA testing for games and game-related apps like GameChaser—at least initially. To recruit testers, they even hold gaming tournaments in and around Hunts Point. If the company wants to compete with dirt-cheap testing centers in India or the Philippines, Carter and Chase know they must offer clients something extra. By hiring gamers to test games, they’re selling not just a testing service, but a kind of focus group.

For the last year, Startup Box has been hiring small teams like this one, putting them to work on jobs that last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months and paying them about $12 an hour to test apps during a standard 30-hour work week. Carter and Chase call it “urban onshoring,” a way of tackling the area’s massive unemployment problem, while simultaneously giving the tech startups down in Manhattan an alternative to the inefficient and often low-quality testing services they find overseas.

It’s a lofty goal, but Carter and Chase aren’t alone in pursuing it. Just down the road from the storefront, work is underway on a new 45,000-square-foot facility called the Urban Development Center, which will soon be filled with hundreds of testers from around New York City. It’s the result of a partnership between Per Scholas, a local IT workforce development non-profit, and Doran Jones, a startup consulting firm that does testing work for some of the largest banks and media companies in Manhattan.

“This is probably one of the largest, if not the largest, infusions of good paying jobs in this area in a very, very long time,” says Plinio Ayala, who has been president and CEO of Per Scholas since 2003. “It could really transform this community.”

But both operations—Startup Box and Doran Jones—paint their new operations as more than just charity projects. As offshoring becomes more and more problematic in the ever-changing tech world, they say, onshoring is a major market opportunity. They can make outsourcing more efficient and diversify the talent pipeline in tech, in addition to bringing some much needed jobs back to the U.S.

Both StartupBox and Doran Jones have plans to replicate this urban onshoring thing in other cities. But first, they have to prove that it’s more than just a nice idea, and they have to do here, in the place that StartupBox co-founder Majora Carter calls “the land of promises not kept.”

No Place Like Home

Majora Carter grew up in Hunts Point. It’s where, as a kid, she saw a wave of arson burn two buildings on her block to the ground in one summer and where her older brother, a recently returned Vietnam veteran, was shot to death in a drug war. From an early age, Carter remembers being told that she was one of the “bright ones” and that, as such, she should leave the Bronx as soon as she could.

There was a notion, she says, that success was measured by how far away you got from the community. “It’s engrained in your head that good things do not stay,” she says, sitting in her light-filled office, just a few blocks from Startup Box. “Good things do not stay.”