Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#171

Post by dogman144 » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

tjr225 wrote: post #160

bmd3991 wrote: post #130

Edit: 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…

I have a family(kid, partner, dogs) and just relocated from the Midwest back to Seattle. I couldn't stand living in the Midwest and lasted just under a year. I grew up there, and have lived in a couple larger cities throughout the midwest. The weather is absolutely terrible and if I lost my remote tech job I'd be SOL until I could find another one. It is harder to find other parents/families/friends with things in co…

Yeah parts of St. Louis past the bridge/river and going west were out of this world. Hard to believe it's the same country.

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#172

Post by thebean11 » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #87

pratik661 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you will find the engineering brain drain from any US region that doesn't (currently) have high paying tech jobs. I went to Georgia Tech and a significant number of CS grads from there moved to NYC, Bay Area, Seattle, or Austin.

When factoring in the cost of living, there isn't much of a pay difference. This is especially true once you have a family and have to care about living in a good school district.

Saving 30% of a 200k salary is a lot better than saving 30% of a 90k salary.

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#173

Post by hardwaregeek » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

bmd3991 wrote: post #130

Edit: 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…

Honestly we see the hate because any opinion to the contrary is punching down. Downvote me all you like, but if a New Yorker says "Milwaukee/St Louis/Cleveland is worse than New York for these reasons" they get seen as elitist, coastal snobs. If the reverse happens and someone says "New York sucks for these reasons", nobody blinks an eye. When really, both options have their pros and cons. I'm not going to claim New York is always better, but I don't think we should assume Cleveland is the best either.

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#174

Post by throwawaygh » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

santaclaus wrote: post #121

dexwiz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 certainly not East Coast, but it’s very North East - the rust belt spans well beyond the Midwest. Even culturally Pittsburgh feels like it has more in common with, say, Buffalo or other North Eastern rust belt cities than Wisconsin or Minnesota.

Exactly. I think Pittsburgh has more in common with non-NYC New York than with Ohio. It feels much more like a non-Boston/NYC Northeastern city than like e.g. Columbus or Indianapolis.

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#175

Post by war1025 » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

bmd3991 wrote: post #166

war1025 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

People like different things is about what it boils down to.

I could give a care less about an authentic ramen shop, or really restaurants in general. Pre-pandemic, I ate out maybe once a month.

Coffee shops are another matter, but coffee is doing just fine around here.

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#176

Post by curiousllama » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

swashboon wrote: post #12

I worked with two developers in Boston who were DINK (Double Income No Kids) and they sold their Boston condo, moved to the Midwest (Minneapolis) and bought a six bedroom house on a lake and two jet-skis for the same price as their condo. Their cost of living went down tremendously. By their own standards they lost nothing compared to Boston (food/services/entertainment actually got better) except that they had to de…

For those jealous: they probably could use their jetskis from mid June to the late August, and stored them the rest of the year.

Minnesota is cold.

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#177

Post by zdragnar » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

q845712 wrote: post #108

jacobriis wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What you will find is that people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white)." Be aware that when people say things like this they often do so to feel virtuous themselves like only they are so enlightened that only they even consider being friendly to non white people. The idea that people in the Midwest (which has a population of over 65 million people similar to France and the UK) are only friendly to whi…

I lived in the midwest for over a decade and am married to a midwesterner. I'm also ethnically one of the 'model minorities' so to some people I'm white, while to white supremacists I'm assuredly not. Most people in most places are basically friendly. However. Even just being recognize you as 'other' can get old, like being asked "where are you from" or riding the bus in Chicago and having to answer questions about m…

I'm white, live in the midwest, and get asked all the time where I'm from. It's a form of small talk around here, where everyone knows everyone, or you might have grown up near someone they knew. Not too different from talking about the weather (though we do that more often, as well).

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#178

Post by scarmig » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #156

scarmig wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tarring an entire region because I say, truthfully, that I left it because I experienced discrimination there? Can you elaborate the ways I'm obligated to caveat and contextualize my experience so I don't hurt other people's feelings by honestly relaying it?

You’re not obligated to do anything, especially not to help me and others better understand you or make your comments useful. “The south” ranges from Virginia to Texas. Maybe you lived everywhere and experienced discrimination everywhere. For me, I grew up in a down of a 1000 people and live just a few hours away in a town with maybe one of the most diverse cultures (including LGBT) in the country. If I said that bec…

To be clear, you're accusing me of tarring an entire region for relaying an experience I had in it. I didn't even make any claim that the South is more discriminatory against LGBT people than elsewhere, though if you're going to project that onto me anyway...

I guarantee you apply this kind of radical stance against all generalization in a very selective way. Do you get upset if someone says that Russia is a repressive country? Or that California is expensive?

Even if I were to give my entire life story, you can always feign offense, claiming "city A 20 miles away from city B is totally different, you can't generalize an entire county!" At some point I'd have to be listing all the individuals I had negative experiences with, and even then, isn't it unfair for me to represent the entirety of their person with a single selective moment of their life?

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#179

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

bmd3991 wrote: post #130

Edit: 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…

>I mean yes, I get that it's expensive. I'm just surprised that SO may people have been seemingly staying in this place that they hate, driving up rent prices for everyone who wants to be in the city, just so they could keep whatever job they have. I mean if you really hated the city wouldn't you have looked elsewhere by now? It's not like it's competitive to get a job in one of these midwestern cities, so surely that great job you had in NYC that tied you there would guarantee you a way out of the city.

The level of divergence of economic growth opportunities between some economic regions over others can make it rational for people to stay in a place they hate. Even if you can get a job in any other city, maybe it might not last for the next 10 years. The real risks in your life start coming around age 50 when your health starts faltering, and your healthcare costs go up and at the same time your employability might go down.

Also, quality of life as you get older in VHCOL like SF and NYC is definitely not as nice if you're not very high income. You spend all your time commuting to work, and I found that people were basically unavailable Mon to Fri. Whatever life they had was all on weekends, and even then it's allocated scheduled events. Whereas in less competitive areas, you can go have dinner at a friend or family's house after work on a weekday, and you can go to the gym, and be there for your kids because you're not spending 90 min + on the subway or train or having to allocate extra time due to public transportation service outages.

Re: Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

#180

Post by scarmig » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #167

scarmig wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a single person here was confused between the Midwest and the South, and you're obfuscating to generate noise.