MA, CA take the top spots in Bloomberg's index of innovative states

Don't know, as I am in CA. Someone from MA would have to answer this. The reason I won't consider jobs in states where noncompetes are legal is because employers will force them on employees during the hiring process (usually by surprise after the employee has given notice at there previous employer).

Noncompetes would be almost fair if it was required to compensate the employee for the duration of the time it is enforced. In the US, that's rare, but in the EU it not uncommon (gardening leave). In other words, the real underlying reason that noncompetes are used is to limit job-hopping by employees looking for better working conditions or a higher salary, but under the guise of prevent company secrets from being disclosed to a competitor is what is sold to the legislature.

Personally think you dodged a bullet there... Not sure you would be employable after a 2 year hiatus from your industry. I would worry about how the next job interview goes due to the gap and the can of worms opened when explaining matters (if you are dealing with traditional HR).

Would it have been possible to leave the state(MN) and continue to work in your field?

The success record at enforcing them is pretty good, actually. There was a court case some years back enforcing a non-compete and now companies have gotten bolder at going after people. I speak from a little experience, having hired a MA employment lawyer on one of these issues and the non-compete prevented my accepting of either of two job offers.

It happens:

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2015/02/19/electric-car-batter...

http://www.natlawreview.com/article/massachusetts-court-defe...

Emergency Motion, Restraining order, Injunction - these are all very exciting for the lawyers involved and gut wrenching for the employees. Usually you have to be a CxO level or salesperson - or do something that makes someone with money really mad.

Really? Have you or someone you know had their noncompetes held against them? I've never actually seen it done here (MA), which is a good reason alone to abolish them but doesn't equate to them holding back innovation.

As someone who works for a start-up and tries to hire in MA, our biggest issue for innovation is a lack of people. Hiring is extremely hard here due to lack of applicants. The cost of living in the area is relatively high (only about 20% less than SF) and the winter weather is too cold for most people. Thankfully, Boston isn't as opposed to building as SF, so lots of new apartments are coming on the market every year. Hopefully that will drive down rents, or at least justify the high rents with nicer apartments. I'm not sure what to tell people about the weather, though.

I have read somewhere that Santa Clara County's GDP and population is really close to one of Qatar's.

If you haven't lived in California then it's hard to notice the stodginess of the society you live in.

I'd imagine it's sort of like the reciprocal of the new-age flakiness you experience as a northeasterner in California.

I think one thing, at least among working class, is the blue collar vibe you get from many working class in MA, vs CA, where unionism isn't as strong.

I think it's mainly referring to the fact that homeless people on the east coast aren't allowed to shit in the streets.

I've lived in both Boston and California. All of what I'm about to say comes from the small sample size that is personal experience and therefore YMMV, but this is my observation.

The most important difference between Boston (and the East Coast in general) and California is this: On the East Coast and in most other places, business culture has a kind of de-facto caste system in which executives, managers, and owners by definition are separate from and out-rank doers. To do is not to own, and to own is not to do.

In Boston if you roll up your sleeves and actually do the work, this makes you lower class compared to the executives who manage, own, and control. On one occasion I had this actually explained to me explicitly and the explanation included the phrase "CEOs don't do anything" stated as if this were a fact and a law of nature. It was explicitly explained to me that for a CXO-type person to actually get their hands dirty with real work was a dangerous distraction that would negatively impact their ability to lead.

In California, being a maker and a doer is respected equally and in some cases more than being a manager or a hustler. The extreme end of this is the CA startup culture where being a "non-technical founder" is sometimes seen as a liability. A founder might eventually transition to mostly managerial work but having a background and having been the original builder of the product is seen as a good thing and a badge of honor.

At the very least, being a maker and a doer in California does not count against you and mark you as lower class the way it does in Boston. It doesn't by definition mean you can't lead, found, or own.

This is why I left Boston. I couldn't stand it. The message I got from the culture is that I was a sucker for trying to get good at actually doing things. I don't have What It Takes and therefore I can only work for those who do. What It Takes is never quite defined but I gathered it to be a mixture of extroversion, a very dominant personality type, and mild to moderate narcissism. Skills and abilities and experience don't factor into it unless that experience is exclusively within the business realm.

East Coast: "I'll have my people talk to your people." -- the ideal archetype of the East Coast business elite would be Donald Trump or Carl Icahn.

West Coast: "Here let me get on that." -- the ideal archetype here is Elon Musk or Larry Page.

East Coast: "We're looking to hire people from the right schools." (I actually heard this multiple times and even read it in print at least once. Skills were not mentioned.)

West Coast: "We're looking to hire people with the right skills."

I also felt more classism in general on the East Coast. The fact that I'm originally from Ohio and went to a small Midwestern university meant I wasn't fit to mop the floor. The West Coast certainly has its Stanford cult but the Ivy League cult on the East is orders of magnitude more intense and pervasive. I know and do business with a number of high-ranking Stanford types and never have I gotten the sense that I'm a "plebeian" simply because I don't have an impressive university name behind me. If I'm talking to a Stanford Ph.D and what comes out of my mouth is intelligent, it feels like a conversation between equals and I don't get the sense that my opinions are inherently suspect.

Don't get me wrong. There is absolutely class in California, and if you're not from a top-tier university or an otherwise impressive background you will probably have to work harder to achieve a similar level of cred in most circles. But you can. Class is malleable here and if you demonstrate merit I've found that people respond quickly. By contrast out East it feels fixed by birth and education. After being there for years and working really really hard I did gradually feel like I'd risen a bit but it felt like a really slow process with a constant undertow. I did find that if I stopped referring to my educational background or place of origin people started to assume I'd gone to a place like MIT, so I could sort of sneak in under the radar and only reveal my beginnings once I'd thoroughly demonstrated ability. Out East I was actually tempted to lie about my education (never did), while out West the idea seems preposterous and silly.

There are exceptions in both places of course, but that was the general cultural zeitgeist I ran into. I imagine it might be even worse in a place like Washington DC where it's all about political clout.

Yeah, that would be more valuable. "Boston" is a huge portion of "MA", while (for example) "San Francisco" is but a small slice of "CA", so if the Boston area were compared directly against the San Francisco area, the results would no doubt be quite different.

An influential sect of economics is unashamedly founded on beliefs instead of empiricism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology

California and Mass. have been blue, high tax states for decades. If high taxes were as destructive to entrepreneurship and innovation as low-tax proponents usually claim, one would expect that these two states would be in the economic dumps. Instead, the opposite is true.

California has a bunch of great stuff going for it in terms of weather, a variety of landscapes, and so on, but between the NIMBYs and the inability to deal with density... yeah, it's got some serious problems too.

I visited Boston once in the summer. Nice place, but no way would I ever live there.

I've heard that the bird sanctuaries are lovely this time of year.

I have to disagree with you there, but only about the part where you say MA and CA are not desirable. Oregon is a wonderful place, but Massachusetts and California are also great. I'd be happy to live in any of them (I live in California).

You can find some tech stuff anywhere, but relatively speaking, there wasn't too much in Oregon until more recently.

I grew up in Eugene.

Fayetteville and Little Rock are the two innovation centers (hard not to quote those 2 words). Acxiom, Walmart.

I know exactly what you mean, there's a really strong anti-intellectualism that blankets this region. It's mostly in rural areas, but that accounts for probably 95% of the state's geography so they get to call all the shots unfortunately.

Also Arkansas is AR, AK is Alaska. A pretty common mistake, cousin ;D

I'm a born and raised Memphian and I stayed as long as I could before I hit a career ceiling. I never intended to leave, but I'm even happier living in the SF Bay Area.