Bringing Silicon Valley to the Midwest

Less, because those people have to live there where it's more expensive. While you live where you live where it is less expensive.

You're thinking of this as advantaging you, getting SF pay for working in Idaho Falls, but you need to think of is that salary in Idaho Falls is the "normal" base salary, everybody earns at that rate, and cost of living adjustments are paid on top of that base salary for people in expensive areas to create as equal of living conditions as possible in more expensive areas.

This is so commonly understood that nobody bothers to break it out that way except for the Federal Government pay scale. Everybody from Podunk, Nowhere gets excited when they get a job in the big city because of this pay differential on what they'd make where they live. Except the cost differential is similar and when they arrive they suddenly realize it doesn't buy them anything more.

By paying people "the same" at the base salary, your salary model would disadvantage people working and living in cities such that they could not do it and companies that need to be in cities would be unable to function.

Companies with large workforces in cheaper areas could also not pay their workers SF/NYC salaries or their costs would simply overcome their revenue or if they can manage it, they may as well have just hired in SF/NYC in the first place and realized better efficiencies of physically working together. Your robot is a poor substitute for actual face-to-face interaction and introduces lots of inefficiencies into communication.

Not all jobs for a company need to be in the expensive areas, so it would make more sense for companies to push those jobs to cheaper areas. But some jobs do need to be in expensive areas for efficiency. Cities exist because of those efficiencies. However, being a city with 5x population of Idaho Falls doesn't mean you have 5x the resources, so demand drives up the cost of goods and thus the cost of services rise and thus it simply costs more to live there.

Companies wish to continue operating, so they need people to be able to afford to live near where the company needs to be (which is dictated by the efficiencies of the city). This is reflected by pay differentials for people that need to live and work in these cities. Nobody can live in SF or NYC on Idaho Falls pay.

Good QA people are incredibly hard to find, especially ones that can do automated testing. One of my old managers started at Apple in QA and then transitioned over to being a developer after a year or two. I’ve seen this pattern a number of times. The potential risk is that many organizations won’t allow you to leave QA. That may not be a problem if thats what you want to do. QA can pay quite well if you are doing the right thing.

The way to play this is to go into an organization with a good brand name, work hard, focus on automation as much as possible and if they won’t help you transition over to being a developer leave after two years for a place that will. Having a good brand on your resume will open a lot of doors. Also, if you are going down this road its a good idea to build a portfolio of software on github.

Devops is also a good option to consider. It really depends on what your background is and what skills you bring to the table.

Although I won't be moving to the midwest, I am rooting for this. I'm in SF because I grew up here and have a lot of family in the area. I don't live here because of the excellent salaries, because while the average software developer here earns (according to sfgate and us news best jobs) between $110,000 and $120,000 a year, the median 3br house costs 1.1 million.

It would be a great triumph if the tech industry found a way to function without needing to move every software developer internationally into a the 48 square miles of SF plus a small corridor down the peninsula.

I've read about startups in Baltimore, St. Louis. These are bustling, interesting old cities with cool architecture, walkable downtowns, great old gardens and museums, and vastly lower rents. If the tech industry could find a way to convert some of those 110K a year jobs in SF into a large number of $95k a year jobs in cincinatti or st. louis, it would have an exceptional effect on the world.

And you know, if you are paying $110k in a place where a reasonably nice 3br house can be had for $300k, I'd be a lot more receptive to worries of a worker "shortage" than if you're offering that salary in a place where a 3br house is $1.1.

So all I'm really saying here is good luck, I hope this works for everyone involved.

Twin Cities and Chicago areas are exceptions to the rule, when it comes to Midwest. Both have a healthy mix of old-school industrial giants, financial, retail, and new tech and bio companies. This is different from other big metros in the region like Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Indianapolis. Pittsburgh is another (arguably) Midwestern city that has a growing new-tech/bio industry (Google and Intel + recently, old-school Bosch Research Center + several medical-sector startups).