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

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

#261

Post by asdff »

encorekt wrote: post #10
blakesterz wrote: post #3

I'm not quite sure on the reliability of this site, but assuming it's reliable... "And, as icing on the cake, seven of the top 10 most affordable states in the nation are in the Midwest." Name any big city you've heard of in the Midwest, and it's on the list. Chicago, Detroit, and so on. The list is, for the most part, "rust belt" cities that are all doing pretty well these days. I'd say the one thing they all have w…

That's not wrong, but as a Midwesterner, I think you also have people have legitimately enjoy experiencing all four seasons. And in cities with good public transit systems (like Chicago and Minneapolis) the damper of driving in crappy weather isn't as present.

When I moved from the midwest to southern california, everyone told me I would get bored of the lack of seasons. What a load of crock. There are seasons here and they are quite distinct.

The summer is dry and hot, but it's much more pleasant being out and about in 95* weather with no humidity than 85* after a july thunderstorm in the midwest with humidity you can cut with a knife. I only sweat when I do cardio, whereas in the midwest you could be drenched in sweat sitting in the shade in that humidity.

The fall still happens, you can still drive 45 minutes to an apple orchard and see beautiful fall scenery and get your pumpkins and pick your apples, because there are massive mountain ranges nearby. Winter weather here is perfect fall weather everywhere else. 60-70 degrees by day and light jacket and jeans weather by night.

Winter is also the rainy season, so you will see some dramatic storms and very interesting fog and mist, and the hills will turn to emerald green while the midwest enters its 6 months of brown mud, salt, and dirty snow phase.

Things are in bloom all year at different times, but the spring brings on the jacaranda season, and the region erupts into purple. I've never seen a more glorious spring.

As a former midwestern transit user, crappy weather doesn't go away once you are on transit. You still have to hoof it through the snow to and from your stop and wait for the vehicle which is far worse than driving door to door and spending maybe 30 seconds on each end outside. The vehicles aren't adequately heated. Plus no one ever plowed the sidewalks in the morning, so you are blazing your own trail through the slush, getting your feet wet if you weren't prepared with Sorels.

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

#262

Post by DetroitThrow »

asdff wrote: post #228
zdragnar wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Surely you've experienced personally or seen firsthand the following microagression on a regular basis living in the midwest as I have, in a city that reliably votes 85% democrat no less: "Where are you from?" "Cleveland Heights." "No, but like, where are you from ?" implying that this brown individual must surely have wound up from some far flung corner of the world, and that they couldn't have possibly been a nativ…

This might just be an issue of regional vocabulary though I'm sure it's used in the presumptuous way you describe as well, the underlying question isn't necessarily unfriendly or borne of a discriminatory attitude - in a Midwestern town right now, but I can recall a few weeks ago actually this exact conversation between my American friend who's from a Pakistani background and a female census taker who was from South Asia.

In her case, she used the exact same vocabulary but it was much more obvious she didn't mean to imply that they weren't native born because she herself was not native. Context is important in conversation, but there is such a thing as regional mannerisms. On the west coast my vocabulary was certainly brought up for being just a tinge different.

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

#263

Post by meheleventyone »

scarmig wrote: post #122
learc83 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm making it all up and the South is perfectly open and tolerant. I'm sure you're not. But "the South" is diverse. Atlanta has a very large LGBT community (both in absolute terms and as a percentage) and culture that is completely different from areas just an hour away. It's very possible that you and the people you are talking to had completely different experiences. Both of you are almost certainly overgeneralizi…

Thanks for explaining my experiences to me, as someone who spent twenty years living in exurban Atlanta.

It’s amazing how many people are going out of their way to prove your point.

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

#264

Post by asdff »

whimsicalism wrote: post #66
throwaway713 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the compensation ceiling in these cities. It’s not the Midwest, but when I was searching in Atlanta for tech jobs to stay closer to family, the upper limit was about $150k, which I think was at Square. There are other non-tech companies that offer SWE positions (The Home Depot, Warner Media), but you will always be treated as a cost center and the career growth is limited. Meanwhile, SWE comp at FANG c…

FAANG is currently pretending that the high-pay given to high-quality Bay area engineers is due to the cost-of-living. I think once remote work really starts in full swing, we'll see wages in remote regions rise as companies realize that they are essentially negotiating with the same people, who still expect to be paid highly for their work.

I think you'd sooner see wages fall than rise. People are working those salaries in cheap areas because they couldn't get a higher salary elsewhere, after all. There is a finite amount of these highly paid positions and far more qualified people.

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

#265

Post by asdff »

padseeker wrote: post #146

I work for a sizable consulting firm with multiple offices including one in Chicago. We saw a lull during the early months (april-june) of Covid/quarantine, we froze hiring, and a few projects were cancelled (one was a major airline). We had a heavier bench for a short time, and utilization fell 10-20%. That lull is over, at least in Chicago, and not just our office. We have almost no bench, utilization is reaching 1…

It really makes you wonder how this will go down in the next 5 years. Rents are high in cities because of highly paid workers who are capable of paying those rents. Now the middle class is priced out because their wages have been stagnant despite highly paid workers reliably getting raises. Either wages for the middle class has to go up dramatically, or rents have to crash, and rents aren't going to crash if the whole reason why they went up is because demand from highly paid workers, who haven't gone away. Something will have to give, people can't live in their parents house or commute 3 hours one way forever.

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

#266

Post by DetroitThrow »

cptskippy wrote: post #254
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.

Atlanta has a lot of high paying tech jobs, they just aren't as fashionable as Google or Facebook.

Just curious, are these high paying tech jobs as high paying as G or FB? I know, for example, MailChimp and Microsoft have offices out there but last I saw they were paying significantly less than either of the aforementioned companies - levels.fyi can validate this further, too.

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

#267

Post by dredmorbius »

curiousllama wrote: post #190
dredmorbius wrote: post #132

1. Chicago: 8th overall US, 344,146 positions, 17.9% growth 2010--2018. 2. Detroit: 11th , 241,135, 37.2% 3. Minneapolis, 14th, 196,151, 17% 4. Kansas City, 24th, 100,782, 17.3% 5. Cincinnati, 28th, 82,088, 23.9% 6. Cleveland, 29th, 76,698, 16.3% 7. Indianapolis, 31st, 74,615, 24.2% 8. Milwaukee, 32nd, 71,755, 9.2% 9. Omaha, 40th, 37,508, 10.7% 10. Des Moines, 42nd, 28,693, 26.9% TFW article is basically a textualise…

They should normalize by population/ Chicago has a lot of tech jobs, but also a lot of people. 3rd in population and 8th in tech suggests it's the opposite of a hub. I wonder how much of the hiring is companies like McDonalds, United, or Boeing rather than FAANG.

Maybe, but I think probably not. Market rates (a measure of local supply and demand) would be more useful.

Applying network theory, though up to a substantial fraction of total employment, it's absolute and not relative size that matters.

As of May 2019, total SF Bay Area tech employment was 835,600, an increase of 116,900 over the December 2000 dot-com peak. That increase alone would rank 4th on this midwest list.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/05/tech-jobs-soar-all-ti...

In that 835,600 Bay Area workforce, what you're going to find is both breadth 8and* depth. Need the best, or a top-ten, or the top-ten devs in a specific skill? You'll likely find it. Need 10, or 100, or 1,000, or 10,000 bodies within a given specialty or skillset? Likely there as well, certainly more8 likely than elsewhere.

Want to attract* remote talent? Pretty good odds. At least until housing got too rich and smoke too thick. Want to swipe local talent? Noncompetes illegal FTFW, just make a good enough offer.

It's not as if tech talent competes against non-tech talent. It doesn't. At least not for jobs. For housing and transport, yes, but that's where the SF Bay Area by and large loses.

And I'm not making the case for the midwest hubs, mostly the opposite. Unless there's some specific centre of excellence ... they're simply not going to attract talent. The body counts are likely for basic tech skills generally.

The West coast offers entertainment (VFX/CGI/gaming), search, social, ads, business automation (Oracle, Salesforce), commerce, HW & devices (Apple), and some relic defense tech, plus modest manufacturing. NYC has more ads & entertainment, and finance. DC has government, defence, and surveillance.

The midwest has ... relic manufacturing, some new manufacturing, healthcare, food & ag, a lot of back-office work, and ... not too much else that really comes to mind. Real estate? (Cratering.)

Plus a lot of tech-unfriendly legal and political legacy.

Chicago ... kind of has scale? But at 40% the size of the Bay Area's scale, even if equally complex and skilled, by Metcalf's law it would have one sixth the net value.

(There are plenty of issues with Metcalfe's law, this just illustrates how much scale effects alone might affect net prospects.)

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

#268

Post by whimsicalism »

asdff wrote: post #264
whimsicalism wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG is currently pretending that the high-pay given to high-quality Bay area engineers is due to the cost-of-living. I think once remote work really starts in full swing, we'll see wages in remote regions rise as companies realize that they are essentially negotiating with the same people, who still expect to be paid highly for their work.

I think you'd sooner see wages fall than rise. People are working those salaries in cheap areas because they couldn't get a higher salary elsewhere, after all. There is a finite amount of these highly paid positions and far more qualified people.

> There is a finite amount of these highly paid positions and far more qualified people.

Disagree - I think that the reality is that most of those in the US who are qualified are already living on the West coast. People underestimate the entry barriers to tech because they are already good at tech.

Salaries will fall as more Gen Z (grew up with tech) enter the labor market, but I'm already seeing higher offers in LCOL areas because the tech labor market remains tight in tech right now.

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

#269

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #132

1. Chicago: 8th overall US, 344,146 positions, 17.9% growth 2010--2018. 2. Detroit: 11th , 241,135, 37.2% 3. Minneapolis, 14th, 196,151, 17% 4. Kansas City, 24th, 100,782, 17.3% 5. Cincinnati, 28th, 82,088, 23.9% 6. Cleveland, 29th, 76,698, 16.3% 7. Indianapolis, 31st, 74,615, 24.2% 8. Milwaukee, 32nd, 71,755, 9.2% 9. Omaha, 40th, 37,508, 10.7% 10. Des Moines, 42nd, 28,693, 26.9% TFW article is basically a textualise…

SF Bay area, May 2019: 835,000.

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

#270

Post by asdff »

zdragnar wrote: post #245
asdff wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you've experienced personally or seen firsthand the following microagression on a regular basis living in the midwest as I have, in a city that reliably votes 85% democrat no less: "Where are you from?" "Cleveland Heights." "No, but like, where are you from ?" implying that this brown individual must surely have wound up from some far flung corner of the world, and that they couldn't have possibly been a nativ…

I actually have been asked what country I am from. I don't have a heavy accent (there are far heavier than mine further out in the boonies) but apparently enough of one. What of it? If you have some characteristic that is unusual (within a group such as local community) people will notice and be curious. That is basic human nature, not lack of friendliness or malice.

It's prodding into personal details that many draw the line with. You might not have a problem with it, but I've personally heard from a few different people how they get annoyed with those sorts of questions being leveled at them all the time, simply because they didn't look white. Aziz Ansari even joked about this a few times during Parks and Recreation, it's such a common phenomenon. Imagine seeing someone who might have some sort of disability then asking them if they were insert disability you are unqualified to diagnose but assume they have. That would be considered pretty rude.
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