For people that work in any of these cities, how have you been enjoying it? What sort of tech companies are around? What do the job interviews and salaries out there look like?
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Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
161–170 of 302 posts
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#162Moved from the Midwest to the Bay Area, and tech comes in two forms: IT departments at major industrial firms (manufacturing, chemical, pharma, etc), or companies that are eventually bought by West Coast companies. The pay cap is much lower. Becoming a millionaire through stocks and wages is harder, but you will still be in the top 10% of earners overall. If you want to live in a mansion, the Midwest makes this dream…
What are the big schools? I always thought that what was holding the Midwest up, not enough high quality schools.
Washington University in St. Louis?
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe they themselves have experienced discriminatory behavior in the Midwest? As an LGBT guy, I'm always direct when pointing out that I left the South partially because of discrimination, and someone is always happy to butt in to say I'm making it all up and the South is perfectly open and tolerant. It gets tiring.
It's important to clarify that you are mixing up two geographic regions here. You seem to mostly be referring to the deep south (especially since you refer to Atlanta in a later comment), which according to generally popular definitions is physically distinct from the midwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_South https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
What's more reasonable:
1) That I'm confusing the Deep South and the Midwest
or
2) That I'm commenting on a tendency of people to discount people's individual experiences because they don't like the idea that a particular region treats different people worse than other regions
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Versus the highly spiritual experience of living in the pod, eating the bugs, paying the $4,500 every month to the landlord of the one bedroom, answering e-mails at 11:24 pm to be able to pay for it etc.
A 6br lakefront house in Minneapolis is just as expensive as a nice condo in Boston (op literally notes they spent the same amount).
In Minneapolis or the close burbs or the fancy farther out burbs (Minnetonka, Wayzata) a 6 br lakefront house in not-great condition is over $1M. If it's a nice house, good shape, way over $1M. But you can go 30 minutes and change outside Minneapolis and get a nice 6 br lakefront for like $750k.
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#165Edit: The below applies to people who don't want kids. I get why you wouldn't want to raise kids in somewhere like NYC (though I can also see the inverse). I don't comment often on HN but I feel like I had to chime in here with a bunch of questions. These may sound inflammatory but I mean them sincerely, I just don't see where people are coming from. I understand that a lot of the things I'm listing are negatives for…
It's a big country I guess, and I don't mean that to be sarcastic and snarky. That's usually the disconnect. There are places between the poles of NYC to Madison, WI, York, PA, and other suburban hell. And, they also aren't millennial ex-pat havens like Austin/Nashville, where the "culture" is a strip of craft breweries and expensive pizza places and basically Brooklyn 2.0. When you throw in cities with more access to the West's geography, you start to see why places like Denver and Bozeman got huge (and joined millennial ex-pat land).
So what do these in-between places offer, besides the cost of living? You tend to get off the beaten path nature where the cost of living in the city means you can actually afford a vacation home (Minneapolis and Chicago get the great lakes northern coast lines), funky college towns that grew some tech talent for various reasons and are college-y and by great natural areas (old Bozeman, old Austin, old Boulder, current Ft. Collins), and lastly I'd say genuine immigrant population and their subcultures, and food to match. There are legitimate Little Italys out there, but they just left NYC because it's too expensive (or also refugee resettlement plans). Minneapolis, Syracuse, parts of Tennessee, parts of TX that aren't Austin, etc.
You throw a tech salary into that mix, and it becomes really fascinating.
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#166Edit: The below applies to people who don't want kids. I get why you wouldn't want to raise kids in somewhere like NYC (though I can also see the inverse). I don't comment often on HN but I feel like I had to chime in here with a bunch of questions. These may sound inflammatory but I mean them sincerely, I just don't see where people are coming from. I understand that a lot of the things I'm listing are negatives for…
You adapt to where you live. The fun things you do in the city are different from the fun things you do not in the city or in a different city. You need to live somewhere for longer than a weekend to settle in and figure out what is noteworthy about an area.
Yeah, I mean it's fair that I haven't lived in every midwest city in America. But I've lived in 3 for multiple years each and I disliked them all for more or less the same reasons. Obviously it all just boils down to what you want out of life, so at a certain point it just becomes "agree to disagree"
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's important to clarify that you are mixing up two geographic regions here. You seem to mostly be referring to the deep south (especially since you refer to Atlanta in a later comment), which according to generally popular definitions is physically distinct from the midwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_South https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
What's more reasonable: 1) That I'm confusing the Deep South and the Midwest or 2) That I'm commenting on a tendency of people to discount people's individual experiences because they don't like the idea that a particular region treats different people worse than other regions
What's reasonable is that you're doing both things simultaneously and probably in the process getting a lot of complicated reactions because of imprecise use of terminology.
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do I know that they aren't giving me misinformation about everything else? Being non-white feels like I have to constantly avoid getting gaslighted in the US about my "race".
I think I would be generally suspicious of people who are soliciting your support or affection by telling you most people are out to get you. (You're right that happens a lot here these days.)
I would be generally suspicious of people who are telling you that no one is out to get you and that your own observations are wrong.
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are plenty FAANG engineers minted from the top Midwestern schools - think CMU and other state schools - even if they rank behind the top schools on the coasts. CMU is a private school, ranked number 1 in CS, and is not in a Midwestern state! That said, there are lots of top CS programs in the Midwest.
CMU is on the wrong side of the Appalachian mountains to best East Coast. Pittsburg has much more in common with neighboring Ohio than it does with Philadelphia. Its regularly included in the Rust Belt which is a subset of the Midwest.
It's Pittsburgh, not Pittsburg.
The "is Pittsburgh midwestern?" debate is irrelevant since the article does not mention Pennsylvania. Also, increasing tech hiring by 100% in Pennsylvania would be really hard since the state also has Philadelphia and because Pittsburgh's tech scene has been strong for years.
Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the big schools? I always thought that what was holding the Midwest up, not enough high quality schools.
Most midwestern states have a world-class research university. Northwestern, U of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Purdue...
The "Big Ten Academic Alliance" does more funded research than the Ivy League and the UC system combined [1].
[1] https://www.btaa.org/docs/default-source/reports/btaa-annual...