The American Midwest Is Quickly Becoming a Blue-Collar Version of Silicon Valley (qz.com) 171
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: The economic engine of Silicon Valley seems to have driven right by the midwest. America's urban coastal cities have enjoyed an explosion in their technology sectors. New York's Silicon Alley and Boston's biotech corridor are world-class incubators of talent and startups. Austin (Texas), Seattle (Washington), Washington, D.C, and even Miami Beach claim a piece of the digital economy (and Silicon-something monikers). But what about Columbus and Indianapolis and Kansas City? After years in the doldrums, their fortunes are rising. Venture capital firms are setting up shop. Startups are clustering in old industrial strongholds. But the region's tech sectors look different than their coastal cousins. The midwest is seeing the rise of "mid-tech."
Alongside the traditional high-flying software jobs that are plentiful in Silicon Valley, mid-tech jobs, loosely defined as tech jobs requiring less than a college degree, are growing fast in the Midwest. While not an official designation, mid-tech jobs can be defined as skilled tech work that doesn't require a college degree: just intense, focused training on the job or in vocational programs like those of blue-collar trades of the industrial past. [...] Mid-tech jobs composed more than a quarter of all tech employment in major midwestern metropolitan areas, including Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota-Wisconsin. More than 100,000 people were employed in such jobs in these cities alone. That proportion never cracked 20% in Bay Area metropolises, the heart of Silicon Valley. While the analyses did not include all cities, it reveals the tech sector's evolution in the Midwest along different lines than Silicon Valley. The findings come from the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit public policy research group, which crunched data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. High and mid-tech jobs in midwestern cities also grew at an annual compounded rate of about 5%. What do these jobs look like? "In Kentucky, the technical skills once applied to things like calculating blast trajectories in mines are going into Javascript," reports Quartz. "The software firm Interapt has set up a training program in Eastern Kentucky to turn former coal miners and others with technical aptitude into software developers."
Alongside the traditional high-flying software jobs that are plentiful in Silicon Valley, mid-tech jobs, loosely defined as tech jobs requiring less than a college degree, are growing fast in the Midwest. While not an official designation, mid-tech jobs can be defined as skilled tech work that doesn't require a college degree: just intense, focused training on the job or in vocational programs like those of blue-collar trades of the industrial past. [...] Mid-tech jobs composed more than a quarter of all tech employment in major midwestern metropolitan areas, including Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota-Wisconsin. More than 100,000 people were employed in such jobs in these cities alone. That proportion never cracked 20% in Bay Area metropolises, the heart of Silicon Valley. While the analyses did not include all cities, it reveals the tech sector's evolution in the Midwest along different lines than Silicon Valley. The findings come from the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit public policy research group, which crunched data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. High and mid-tech jobs in midwestern cities also grew at an annual compounded rate of about 5%. What do these jobs look like? "In Kentucky, the technical skills once applied to things like calculating blast trajectories in mines are going into Javascript," reports Quartz. "The software firm Interapt has set up a training program in Eastern Kentucky to turn former coal miners and others with technical aptitude into software developers."
Specific achievements? (Score:5, Insightful)
"America's urban coastal cities have enjoyed an explosion in their technology sectors. New York's Silicon Alley and Boston's biotech corridor are world-class incubators of talent and startups".
I must be way out of touch, because I just can't think of many specific achievements that all that world-class talent has brought about.
Processor chips - well, I think it's clear that a lot of useful progress has not been made there. GPUs, perhaps some advances. What's new in software, though? When was there last a really important new operating system? It all seems to be apps for extracting money from consumers.
Low Visibility (Score:5, Insightful)
In my neck of the woods, most of the IT companies focus on manufacturing. Their main innovations are in controls, resource planning, quality control, logistics, etc... These innovations, from the outside, are totally opaque and probably pretty boring to most end-users. However, they mean that stores can easily get the products they need to sell, stuff is easier to make, cheaper to build, and of higher quality.
The company I work for, for instance, makes software to automate regulatory filings with the FDA, which is an incredibly cumbersome process. The only electronic filing method, for instance, is formatting data using a custom XML DTD into separate files, zipping them together in a specific directory format, then uploading it, manually, via a Java 2 *swing* based desktop application.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
But we both know the process is "cumbersome" because of the FDA, not your company.
Yeah, our company automates that part. It's basically a workflow/compliance package that handles all the submission requirements, scheduling and data gathering (which it pulls in from your existing systems.) The end user never sees the awful Java applet.
Re: (Score:1)
It's more pointlessly verbose than even Visual Basic. It's trash.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They've developed the best marketing software *ever*.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Specific achievements? (Score:5, Insightful)
Biotech has had amazing benefits. Protein based drugs have massively increased cancer survival rates along with many other diseases like hemophilia.
CPUs have gotten much faster than they where. For HPC applications cpus have increased about 10x in the last 5 years or so and it looks like AVX-512 is continuing that trend. Neural nets are also proving to be extremely useful in science as surrogate models. Neural nets as surrogate models often execute tens of thousands of times faster than the base models.
Most of the reason you don't see regular software benefiting much from faster CPUs is most software is not written to take advantage of what CPUs can do. Most software is designed to be easier to write and maintain and not to run fast. It also turns out that if you want software to run REALLY fast you do need to understand linear algebra.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh wow. It has been a long time since I have seen something so thoughtful on Slashdot.
Well put.
Re: (Score:2)
Most software is designed to be easier to write and maintain and not to run fast. It also turns out that if you want software to run REALLY fast you do need to understand linear algebra..
In that domain, if you've moved beyond using the "Fortran Lobster", you're doing OK maintainability-wise. Thanks goodness for hardware acceleration (CUDA and othewise) for matrix operations, or that ancient Fortran code base would still be the fastest proven option.
Re:Specific achievements? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are working with things like molecular dynamics there is a limit to how much speed you can trade off to make the code easier to write and maintain. For many of these problems we can't just buy more hardware to solve the problem since we are already at the limits of hardware. I work on a chromatography simulator which takes several minutes to do a single simulation and millions of simulations could be needed. In the end many of our runs takes a few days to work. Most of the simpler simulators run 1/100th the speed or less. Taking something from a few days to most of a year is just not going to work.
Languages like C++ are just inherently harder than languages like Python. If you want high performance you have to pay for it with something like C++ and your code will be harder to write and maintain. We work to make our code as clear and maintainable as possible in C++ but still not as simple as Python.
Re: (Score:2)
Right now everything is parallelized using TBB. I did look into parallelizing with a GPU however the switching from solver to matrix construction happens quite quickly and matrix construction looks very inefficient on a GPU. On the whole it looks like the system runs slower if we try to run it with a GPU compared to highly optimized CPU code. I do have a usage for GPUs later though for a different part of the process.
Re:Specific achievements? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's new in software, though?
Depends on how far back you want to go for something to be "new".
I consider virtualization to be a complete game changer. I know it's existed since the '60's, but only if you forked out huge sums to IBM. We now have virtualization for the masses.
Re: (Score:3)
This is mostly just IT support stuff. Shoving more applications onto a server than normal, load balancing, migrating servers, etc. it makes IT's life easier, but maybe not the life of the users. The benefits beyond that are not immediately obvious and they're not necessarily game changing except for the niche of sysadmins.
It's still not new though, despite people forgetting about it. Has there been anything NEW in software rather than just re-discovered by those unaware of computer history? I know ther
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Specific achievements? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much, all I see coming from Silicon Valley are apps that try to shove ads in a new way, slurp up user data and phone home with it, be it "metadata", "telemetry", or whatever, or nickel/dime the consumer to death (F2P/P2W games, which most games tend to be.) I'm not really seeing anything that will help the quality of life across the board, but more ways to con the end user. I also don't really see much innovation either, other than buzzword-style monetization.
Even IoT devices tend to be this way, where the device is mainly used as a way to slurp data to be sent home, as opposed to something useful for the consumer. This seems to be the case when the devices have security issues and the maker tells the people who own them, "just buy our version 1.1 device to fix the problem. We don't care to fix what is wrong with the version 1.0, and you agreed in the EULA that you won't sue us, so buy our stuff or bugger off."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Specific achievements? (Score:1)
Electric cars. Private space launches. Solar efficiencies keep increasing. Some pretty good stuff.
But mostly vastly improved advertising delivery.
Re: (Score:3)
When was there last a really important new operating system?
Hi, I'm a kernel developer. And I'd like to say that operating systems aren't important anymore. They used to be. but now they are just a very minor part of a system's design. What is important is paralllel processing on a cluster of multiple computers, and much of these projects are OS-agnostic or hybrids that contain nodes with different environments and hardware. The remaining hard problems in computing aren't going to be solved by us operating system developers. (certainly there is some deep technical e
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In 1900 a family needed a full-time home worker just to acquire unrefrigerated food and prepare three meals and clean the chamber pots.
Preferably in that order.
California pricing itself out (Score:5, Insightful)
I know a few people out in California silicon valley who say these companies and liberal California is pricing itself out of the business market. I think the escape to a more affordable market is in play and California may eventually be abandon by many tech companies or never considered as a place to do business.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Nope, it will never happen. People will never leave California no matter how much it costs, because they are not embarrassed in the least to be classists. Typical attitude:
Re:California pricing itself out (Score:5, Insightful)
Waffel House (Score:2)
Ironically, the Waffle House is considered by some top Chefs (Anthony Bourdain for instance) to be an outstanding example of American comfort food [firstwefeast.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
And those are the kinds of people that will find themselves jobless at some point. If some "flyover" state becomes the next tech hub, they will have cheaper land/rent/labor than the existing tech hubs. They will be able to better compete with the big guys on the coasts. At some point the big guys will have to make a choice to relocate where those 3 are cheaper as well or find some other way to be more profitable.
Relocating out of the liberal hell hole of the west coast probably won't be a choice, but a nece
Re:California pricing itself out (Score:5, Insightful)
" If some "flyover" state becomes the next tech hub"
It's not gonna happen, and it's been tried with the help of various states in attempts to grow their tech. You've got a chicken/egg problem. There is no tech hub now, and you don't have the talent to start one.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The ironic thing is that people are leaving California... so much of Austin and the surrounding area are "refugees" from there, and tend to be extremely disliked by the locals, especially come SXSW. Of course, they complain continuously that Texas sucks compared to California, why don't the locals hold them in higher regard for coming from a far, superior state, and the only reason they are in Austin is because their paycheck is in Austin.
The ironic thing is that "flyover" states have plenty of culture, an
Re:California pricing itself out (Score:5, Interesting)
Last official census was in 2010. There were some estimates in recent years that show the state is still growing, but a bit slower than usual: http://worldpopulationreview.c... [worldpopul...review.com] http://journal.firsttuesday.us... [firsttuesday.us]
But the ironic thing [1] is our conservative friends say many interesting things about California, but you can forget most of them. They were, for example very interested when the state's finances were in trouble, but dropped the story when we fixed it by electing Democrats.
[1] Actually that isn't ironic. The ironic thing is you need to look up the word ironic and think about it. But then, that wasn't actually ironic either.
Re: (Score:2)
Which isn't a bad thing. We are overcrowded here. The infrastructure can't keep up with the load, including electricity roads and especially water. Especially with the internet many of these people could work from elsewhere if they don't need access to local materials or resources. Remote shared offices would be a good idea for those who don't like to work at home.
I am biased though, I was born here. Of course, we have families who have been here for three centuries who would say I was the interloper. So I
Re: (Score:2)
Ironic since most Texans are extremely up front and forward about how their state is the best, even when you don't ask. I don't consider Texas a flyover state though. And there's still the huge gap between city and rural, just the same as in California.
Re: (Score:2)
Ironic since most Texans are extremely up front and forward about how their state is the best....
And all generalizations are true! /natch
Re: (Score:2)
The ironic thing is that people are leaving California... so much of Austin and the surrounding area are "refugees" from there, and tend to be extremely disliked by the locals, especially come SXSW. Of course, they complain continuously that Texas sucks compared to California, why don't the locals hold them in higher regard for coming from a far, superior state, and the only reason they are in Austin is because their paycheck is in Austin.
Funny, we have that same problem in Missouri.
On the other hand, the weather here is wild and unpredictable (I've seen temps drop 30 degrees then regain 20 in the span of 6 hours), and we have pretty harsh winters, so the nuisance is tempered with a bit of schadenfruede - watching Coasties totally lose their shit when a 70 degree week in December is immediately followed by an apocalyptic ice storm the next.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, it will never happen. People will never leave California no matter how much it costs, because they are not embarrassed in the least to be classists. Typical attitude:
This is one of the mild ones that doesn't include profanity or wishing for death. Plenty of those out there should you wish to look.
Good; more waffles for me!
Re: (Score:2)
Chicken and waffles? Chicken and waffles.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
As a counterpoint to your MAGA infused viewpoint, let me give you mine.
I'm originally from the Bay Area, but now live in a flyover state. I have actually lived in a flyover state now longer than I lived in California. However, most of my relatives still are in Cali and can't understand why/how I can live someplace besides the west coast. So I have experience with both the ultra lib Cali attitude and the ultra conservative flyover mentality. My politics and approach actually fall somewhere in the middle.
Re: (Score:2)
The "flyover" states include some pretty large cities, where you will find culture, diversity, and frequently liberalism. The rural vs. city divide is one of the most fundamental in the US, more important than coast vs. inland.
Re: (Score:2)
...the weather is perfect and there's an ocean.
Don't undervalue the importance of living somewhere that's absolutely beautiful. There is a reason creative and innovative people have been rolling Westward for as long as we've been a nation.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
...the weather is perfect and there's an ocean.
When tens of thousands of acres burst into flames annually, and vast swaths of earth arbitrarily decide it's time to slide off into the ocean, I don't think you can really call the weather "perfect." Unless you're into death and destruction, I suppose; then it probably would seem ideal.
Re: (Score:2)
Son, California covers 104,765,165 acres. That's one hundred and four million, seven hundred and sixty-five thousand, one hundred and sixty five acres.
Re: (Score:2)
To a certain degree...what he said. But then, I do know many people who have, or are leaving CA because of the high cost of living, the overpopulation, the far left attitude, etc. I don't live there, but I manage people in CA, so I hear the reasons. On the other hand, where do geeks typically want to live? You're not going to find outstanding tech centers outside of the coasts, well with very few exceptions. Yes, companies are trying, my own included, to move jobs out of the higher cost areas, but then
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Large geographical portions of CA are rather conservative, but the state as a whole is now about as left as it can get. As a conservative, I love a lot about CA except the political climate. It's beautiful...I've been all over, from San Diego, Newport Beach, Palmdale, SF, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, etc...spent close to two years of my life during multiple visits. It's hard not to like the mountains, ocean and sunshine. But, maybe you hang around a different group of people who love the traffic, taxes, and
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I may not leave, but because the weather is nice. I've lived in California my entire life, it's home. I have never met anyone outside of San Francisco who had the sort of attitude you describe. There are those who prefer the city to the rural, and some who seem to despise suburbia (which I think means silicon valley). But I don't see many classists in tech down in the valley.
Sure, I don't want to live in someplace small minded, that's where I grow up (rural California). Diversity is nice.
My guess is tha
Re: (Score:1)
I don't know what's funnier about that quote - the masturbatory narcissism,
Re: (Score:2)
The flip side of your liberal stereotype viewpoint would be something like, "I don't want to live on the coast with anti-family atheists, socialists, gays, sodomites, and AIDS-infected homeless who come for the weather, which also inflates real-estate prices to high-heaven, which Californians will never see anyhow."
Re: (Score:2)
Humans in general tend to be tribalistic and say that their own "kind" are the best. It's not just red's or blue's. It's similar in sports where the visitor teams are always cheaters and thugs who manipulate the referees.
I try to take what I believe is the high-minded approach and simply say "I personally prefer X" rather than "X is special and the best" from absolute sense.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Back in late 90s there was a rumor our medical company might relocate out of silicon valley to save on costs. The idea was to move to Pleasanton. Most people strongly objected because of the awful commute. Fast forward, and some people probalby consider Pleasanton to actually be a part of Silicon Valley, and people regularly commute from much further away than ever.
Today my company has been recently acquired from a company not based in California, with many offices in other states and countries. So part
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Considering Stanford is ranked either #1, 2 or 3 in the nation, can you explain how that could be true?
I understand that there is tremendous jealousy toward California, but don't start making stuff up just so you can feel better about it.
Re: (Score:2)
He couldn't even get "non-compete's right. They've been around for decades, long before anyone knew what a "startup" was.
Re:California pricing itself out (Score:5, Informative)
Is that why there are so many songs about California? Why the ideal of success is "loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.. Hills that is."?
You will notice that the Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff did not move in with their auntie and uncle in Rolla, Missouri. When Tom Joad and his family left the Dust Bowl, they did not try to move to Canton, Ohio. Tony Bennett did not leave his heart in Des Moines. There is not a Led Zeppelin song about "Going to Indiana".
Brian Wilson did not sing about girls from Kentucky being, "the cutest girls in the world". You're totally jelly, dude. Face it.
Even the most New York of New York bands sang about "going out West where I belong".
https://youtu.be/1Z9iUdiS3hI [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:3)
I know it because early in my career I lived and worked there. It is a shithole, filled with god-botherers and moralistic church ladies who fuck each others' husbands. They put on a permanent protest in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic (which is across the road from a Catholic Church and next to a Panera Bread) but then put scarves over their faces when they sneak their knocked-up high-school age dau
Re: (Score:2)
I know a few people out in California silicon valley who say these companies and liberal California is pricing itself out of the business market.
Yeah, it's like the old saying: It's gotten so crowded that nobody goes there any more.
PS: What does "liberal" have to do with this conversation?
Re: (Score:1)
CA and big cities often specialize in fast-changing areas where collaboration is paramount, and thus talent and specialists are stuffed into a small geographical area so that they are readily available, including between gigs.
But there are down-sides to such density, such as high housing prices. It's hard to be everything to every industry such that certain kind of technology may indeed find a better fit elsewhere. It's merely Adam Smith's/David Ricardo's "Comparative Advantage" principle in action.
Demand increases supply. (Score:2)
This isn't all that surprising IMHO.
I'm liking this... (Score:2)
... from TFA:
"While not an official designation, mid-tech jobs can be defined as skilled tech work that doesn’t require a college degree..."
The kind of work Bill Gates does, then?
This is not going quite according to plan (Score:3)
I heard about some of the retraining programs setup under the Obama Administration that are finding their funding cut as well as students no longer showing up because those lucrative coal jobs are coming back.
While I support the idea of vocational jobs getting their due value, I also see this as any one particular area becoming too flooded is likely to devalue that job. Over supply and lack of demand will destroy any industry.
That being said, I am aware of some areas where not enough technical jobs exist and companies would rather pay more in an urban area than to pay the same amount and bring high paying jobs to a rural area. Don't ask why this is, I don't get it. I am just saying I have witnessed this and have yet to reconcile why such happens.
Re: (Score:3)
Speaking as an employer, my perspective is that some work is parallelizable, where productivity scales approximately linearly with the number of employees assigned to it, and other work is inherently collaborative, to put it positively, or entangled in a hairball of ambiguity and unresolved dependencies, to more accurately describe how I feel about managing it. I believe the euphemism for it is "white-collar" or "professional" work. =)
The classic example of parallelizable work I've seen in management books
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Plenty of urban centers are not on either coast.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ha, coal jobs are declining, they are moving towards increased automation with fewer workers. That's even without the decreased demand for coal.
Re: (Score:2)
Did they walk into a bar? I am waiting for your punch line. I don't think anyone is moving to the coal fields for a coal job. The coal industry only added 8,000 jobs in 2017 based on preliminary Bureau of Labor Statistics figures in December. Not exactly a huge number of jobs.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
W or HW?
Re: (Score:1)
I find it's often easier to just buy new keyboards and minor equipment yourself and don't make an issue of it. Ask for a replacement, but if it doesn't show up, then just go get one.
Re: (Score:2)
What about our families that used to make a good living harpooning whales, or the other side of my family that made horseshoe nails? People with those fancy high school degrees looking down at me and mine, screw em all!
Oh Good (Score:2)
"In Kentucky, the technical skills once applied to things like calculating blast trajectories in mines are going into Javascript,"
so that they can asplode your browser.
Where are the jobs? A software firm doesn't need so much headcount.
Clueless folks on the coasts (Score:5, Insightful)
The economic engine of Silicon Valley seems to have driven right by the midwest
No it hasn't. It only seems so to clueless people on the coasts because the people who live in Silicon Valley live in a bubble. If you are looking for tech jobs, Southeast Michigan routinely outperforms Silicon Valley in R&D spending, revenue, and hiring. Why? The automotive industry uses a HUGE amount of tech. People tend to forget how much technology goes into designing and making cars. Oakland County just outside of Detroit City is one of the richest counties in the entire US. Michigan has a ridiculous amount of engineering talent - but it isn't centered around PCs and phones. It's in robots, automation, chemicals, controls, metalworking, etc.
Venture capital firms are setting up shop. Startups are clustering in old industrial strongholds. But the region's tech sectors look different than their coastal cousins. The midwest is seeing the rise of "mid-tech."
Venture capital firms have always been here in the midwest. So have startups. The culture is different and the economy doesn't look the same but none of that is anything new. It's kind of amazing how condescending folks from the coasts are about parts of the country they never bother to visit and know little about. They hear that the City of Detroit is having a hard time so they assume that the entire midwest is a desolate hell hole with no jobs and no technology.
Mid-tech jobs composed more than a quarter of all tech employment in major midwestern metropolitan areas, including Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota-Wisconsin. More than 100,000 people were employed in such jobs in these cities alone.
Detroit metro alone has a population of over 4 million. 100,000 people is kind of a rounding error. Plus those jobs have always been there. If you didn't know that you weren't paying attention. You don't need a four year degree to learn how to program a robot or a CNC mill but those definitely are technical jobs.
Re: (Score:2)
Michigan has some top notch universities, and that spawns some high tech industries too. It's things like medical, biotech, hiightech. Automotive seems almost like an after thought sometimes.
Re: (Score:2)
Detroit metro alone has a population of over 4 million. 100,000 people is kind of a rounding error.
25% is a rounding error now?
Math skills FTW!
Re: (Score:2)
Math is hard
Midwest jobs (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I ended up with an offer in NY, which I eventually ended up declining to take a position at a tech oriented late stage startup in town.
Devs aren't "trained" (Score:2)
Shh... Don't Tell Them! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, the Midwest has always been a hub of technological innovation, it's just not the sexy kind that makes news. SE Michigan (where I am) has a large amount of talented engineers because of all the automotive companies and suppliers. We also have a lot of biotech and high tech manufacturing communities. It just seems that unless it's related to one of the major west coast tech companies no one cares. Personally I love it out here, the people are friendly and way more welcoming (my wife is from CA and seemed surprised by this when she moved here), the cost of living is low, and while we're not as trendy as the coasts, we do have a lot of trendy areas (check out Ann Arbor sometime). The only thing that sucks here is the weather, but it's not as bad as it's made out to be. There really is more to the US than the coasts.
Re: (Score:2)
When people complain about the weather, I remind them that's what keeps our cost of living very low. Winter kinda sucks but for 9 months it's not all that bad. The worst part for us is the high volatility. I'm sure this holds true for most of the region but as the saying goes around here, "if you don't like the weather just wait 4 hours." It could snow today and have tornado watc
Re:Shh... Don't Tell Them! AGREE..well, maybe not (Score:2)
They might start moving here. Keep your nuttiness over on the coast where it belongs. ;)
Seriously though, the Midwest has always been a hub of technological innovation, it's just not the sexy kind that makes news. SE Michigan (where I am) has a large amount of talented engineers because of all the automotive companies and suppliers. We also have a lot of biotech and high tech manufacturing communities. It just seems that unless it's related to one of the major west coast tech companies no one cares. Personally I love it out here, the people are friendly and way more welcoming (my wife is from CA and seemed surprised by this when she moved here), the cost of living is low, and while we're not as trendy as the coasts, we do have a lot of trendy areas (check out Ann Arbor sometime). The only thing that sucks here is the weather, but it's not as bad as it's made out to be. There really is more to the US than the coasts.
I am in the St. Louis area, and there are quite a few good companies to work for here. I am at one now that has built a very complex system that was built over the span of 15 years, and was acquired by a larger company. The problem is that we are a total Windows shop. As many companies do, they think the smart thing to do is to go with all Microsoft technology because... Microsoft! So instead of trying to fix all of our technical debt (IE-only, SQL Server only, Silverlight, and even a bit of VB6) becaus
Re: (Score:2)
Here in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, I've worked for two highly innovative small companies that pretty much were (or are) the best in the world at what they did (or do).
Re: (Score:2)
This is old news. (Score:3)
My first job was in a tech startup in Naperville, Illinois. In 1992. (Right down the street from Bell Labs. The founder of this startup was a former Bell Labs employee).
This company was literally bought by a competitor (who sold inferior products), and shut down. That's what happens to tech workers who choose jobs not in Silicon Valley or WDC. You get bought and shut down. That's IF your startup is successful. Same goes for companies that open satellite offices in other cities. They may not shut down these remote offices, but they are used as an accounting tool to relieve payroll pressure during a downturn. (that means these offices bear the brunt of layoffs).
You want a hiccup-free career in tech? Don't start it in the midwest. Or any place else. The big money will come along and fuck you over. You stand a better chance in Seattle, of course, and the WDC area (if you are into Fed. Contracting), and I think New York and Boston are starting to look good too.
Plenty of work in Chicago (Score:2)
You talk like there aren't other employers that need help. If you're any good then it's no problem to get another tech job if your employer goes under or is bought out.
I've been working tech jobs in Chicago for 20 years now; I've never ever had a problem finding work in less than a month of looking. It's ranged from 3 days to maybe 3 weeks.
They key is having actual skills. If you're an experienced system or network admin and have a programming background in languages like C, Perl, Python or Java you wi
No coasties (Score:3)
It seems I am a polar opposite to those who are in love with the expensive living on the coasts. I live and work in the Midwest and will certainly retire here. By living in the middle of the country, I can easily visit both coasts, and the lower cost of living is going to allow me to retire early. Despite the claims that there is no culture or a diverse community, I would say that most Midwest college towns defy that notion. I have everything but an ocean and a large local lake can take care of that need. I grew up in Florida and survived the drug-addled rat race for many years before venturing west. It was the best decision I made in my life. I almost didn't write this because frankly, I would rather the coasties not know how good us "blue collar" IT folks have it.
Re: (Score:3)
There is a lot to be said for life in the midwest; you can have your liberal enclaves in college towns, you do have lower costs, and there is better patronage of the arts making for free museums and accessible arts in St. Louis. I left and could never move back because of the weather. I remember days where you leave in the morning in shorts and it is snowing on the way home. Many of the long-standing political decisions also cause the problems with crime as well.
Everybody has different needs; smart emplo
Sounds like BS to me.. and I am from a cattle town (Score:1)
This person seems completely out of touch with the tech sector in the Mid-West.
"Austin (Texas), Seattle (Washington), Washington, D.C, and even Miami Beach claim a piece of the digital economy (and Silicon-something monikers). But what about Columbus and Indianapolis and Kansas City?"
Trust me, I wish Kansas City WASN'T given the moniker Silicon-Prairie.
"...mid-tech jobs can be defined as skilled tech work that doesn't require a college degree: just intense, focused training on the job or in vocational progr
College degree required? Says who? (Score:2)
While not an official designation, mid-tech jobs can be defined as skilled tech work that doesnâ(TM)t require a college degree: just intense, focused training on the job or in vocational programs like those of blue-collar trades of the industrial past.
Companies in my region don't require college degrees for the high-tech jobs, you just need to have the skills and experience to get the job done. The only companies that require degrees tend to be large corporations. Sometimes they won't promote people above a certain level without a degree, but that's just their policy and they lose good workers because of it.
Re: (Score:2)
Degrees help with the promotions though. I've seen skilled people hit their ceilings often because a lack of a degree.
Also important is adaptability. College is good training for that. Because the job you do today will not be anything like the job you do 10 years from now.