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

[1] https://www.btaa.org/docs/default-source/reports/btaa-annual...

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.

Tech jobs that pay more than $300,000 -- maybe $350,000 -- simply don't exist in large quantities outside major job markets. And the ones that do aren't the "trusted senior individual contributor with plenty of freedom to choose your projects" roles that exist in spades on the coasts.

Last time I job marketed in the midwest I couldn't even break $250 all-in, the vesting schedule was pure bullshit, and that role would have included a lot of political BS. Basically moving from blissful respected individual contributor to stressed out disrespected middle management, and all for a massive cut in post-tax savings.

I get why jobs are exploding in those areas, but they aren't the sorts of jobs I want.

Obviously not everyone is going to CA and getting a $600k income, but the compensation cap there is dramatically higher for top talent.

Racism isn’t some binary flag where an entire region is or isn’t racist. People can have racist experiences without meaning everyone is shitty or even that someone is likely to have a bad time.

Note this doesn’t mean people who are the subject of racism are racists. I read GP’s comment as meaning that making an overly broad statement that people in the Midwest are friendly to only whites is not accurate or useful.

How much of the midwest, where, for how long; what did they witness firsthand? what did they hear?

It's a stretch to assume so much without projecting your own assumptions about the midwest.

> Have you considered that their experiences may actually be true?

We don't have experiences, we have conclusions. and without knowledge of the experiences that inform them, it's hard to judge their truth. There's also the issue of what "the midwest is unfriendly to non-white people" means; taken to either absolute is crazy: "any racism in the midwest means the midwest is racist", "any tolerance in the midwest means the midwest isn't racist". Clearly, the statement needs qualification to be useful, it's not a matter of "true or false" without clear thresholds.

I grew up in the south in a super backwards small town and now live in a really forward town in the south. It’s a big place and there’s a lot of great places.

Stereotypes are based on common behavior but don’t apply to everyone here or every part of the south.

  someone is always happy to butt in to say ... 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 overgeneralizing your experiences when you say "the South".

People who live in the South get upset that the country likes to pretend that the rest of the country outside a few urban centers is any different. That is, if you had left the South for the rural or suburban Midwest or most of Pennsylvania, you'd likely have had a similar experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_South

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States

The small towns of PA (hey! loved that someone put this here) can be just as racist as the small towns of Colorado but somehow this doesn't extend to the small towns of California.

I say this as someone who has not lived everywhere but has lived in places where the common question (and yes, each town/city I lived in had a common question/conversation about my race)ranges from:

Are you black?

Are you jewish?

Are you honduran?

Are you armenian?

Are you [some subgroup of..] indian

Only in Japan, so far, am I - told - that I am American. Its amazing.

Exposure matters. Certainly there are a smattering of places in the midwest where things are progressive. That being said, they are not as well known and compared to my life in SF/LA/DC (still kinda conservative)/NY, the amount you're allowed to live and let live varies.

I'm more likely to hear some random comment about where I do or do not belong or some idiotic belief I have to disabuse about who I am in the Midwest and South.

P: "Of course everyone isn't racist, and most folks are friendly and accepting."

If these statements are equivalent, you have my apologies. English is not my native language. I think I will have to study for 10 lifetimes to understand.

"Some people are friendly only if you look like them" would be a more defensible claim. Probably that is true everywhere on earth.

But, the text of the original statement is about the behavior of Midwestern people [1] generally towards non white people generally.

[1] Not all Midwestern people are white in any case. Nebraska: 86%, Ohio: 82%, Illinois: 71.5%

And I'm not too fond of rural attitudes on race anywhere - if the rural west coast is somehow different, I'd love to hear your contrasting anecdotes. I know on the east coast it's certainly not the case.

Chicago, infamous MAGA country.

Where the city buses are ruled by white supremacists harassing all innocent people who look different from them!

In a city that is only 31.7% non-Hispanic white, they have a lot of work to do!

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.

There's a variety of reasons for this I could speculate on, and three of the firmer ones are refugee resettlement (Minneapolis and Somalis, pre-cool Cali and Hmong, Michigan and Syrian refugees), Central/South American immigration patterns beyond the border states, and military bases which tend to show up all over the midwest/west/southeast/southwest (Korean, Vietnamese, German and maybe smaller ones but those stand out).

These communities exist alongside the traditional cultural elements of the city and can often be blocks away. But, the areas tend to look a lot less like Chinatown and more like Flushing - maybe more insular, but still plenty authentic.

I've been trying to get out of here and move to a bigger city, but the pandemic put those plans on hold. (Madison is a pretty good place to hunker down now, or was before they re-opened the University.)

For myself I've always been a person of quiet habits. I love visiting the big city and taking in the vibrancy and life (museums! concerts!), but, boy oh boy, the older I get, the more I like to come back to my small/medium-sized city. But there are people who literally live in the middle of nowhere and seem to be just fine. Who knows? The world is mysterious and complex.

Thanks for the reply.

Also, non-consumerist does not imply spiritual.

Of course it'll come back whenever it does, but the "real culture" of the areas that aren't total millennial, college, or medical resident playgrounds is up in Cambridge /Somerville. And those two towns are pretty small ultimately with rough commutes into the city.

Minneapolis and the like start to grow on me, as it's trading one smallish cultural area for another, but at a fraction of the cost.

* A ton of different languages being spoken within earshot at any one time

* Lots of different smells at any one time, some delicious and certainly some much less so

* Lots of music where you do and do not expect it, all sorts of different genres sometimes complementing and sometimes juxtaposing the surroundings

* People physically moving and speaking faster

* The physical tightness of the city probably adds to all of the above

But most importantly, I think the above compose into an overall sense of serendipity. The phrase, "in the city, anything is possible" is frequently interpreted to mean, "you can achieve the highest version of what you want to achieve!" I think that's actually incorrect. It means exactly what it says: anything is possible. Relative to suburban or rural areas, you simply have no idea what is coming next minute-to-minute. That, I think, gives a sensation of constantly anticipating serendipity, which we round out to the word "vibrant."

As an anecdote, I went through a dark time about 10 years ago and living in a big city and being able to see strangers each and every day on public transport helped me tremendously, it meant not having to live with my dark thoughts. I could have not had the same experience had I lived in suburbia or in the countryside.

Hilariously enough my artist friends are moving to the racist white trash neighborhoods because those are the only places where they can afford the rent. Here's hoping an art school drop out doesn't get ideas in such an environment.

If the fundamental unit of value is provided by people, then the potential to get work done scales with the number of people engaged and ready to do it.

In a city like New York, there are a lot of talented people that are engaged in value creation. That creates an economic ecosystem that provides the potential to take an idea and bring it to value delivery with low friction.

Vibrancy, then, is the attribute where idea potential is able to reach value delivery with low friction.

This is evidenced by a lot of what the other posters have mentioned: restaurants, the arts, startups, etc. These are the result of that potential existing within the ecosystem.

In Cleveland, no one walks. It's jarring when I visit home now and sometimes not seeing a soul walking beyond the occasional drunk down on their luck, even downtown. Even the poorest people here save for a $1000 car, and they can manage it because rent is $400 and insurance is dirt cheap. As a result of all this non walking, most restaurants and shops are located in suburban style developments with hundreds of cars parked in the lot. These are extremely popular. The Eaton Chagrin shopping center, for instance, gets so much traffic the exit ramp backs up onto 271 for a mile and the parking lot typically fills up entirely. I've never seen traffic quite like this in LA, spilling out from a highway offramp directly into a shopping center and gridlocking an entire interchange. Things are slow during rush hour in LA, but traffic actually moves, you are never stopped for 10 mins not moving at all unless there has been a serious car accident.

As a result of all this nonwalking, the few commercial corridors that were built in the streetcar era perennially suffer. For lease signs are more common than open signs, but luckily these rare small lot commercial parcels don't get turned over for development into big box agglomerations very often since the population of the metro area has been entirely stagnant for 50 years. This means that every restaurant and every bar is a drive, and this is a drive you have to make yourself as sometimes it takes 20-30 minutes to wait for an Uber to make it's way to your neighborhood, given the low demand and low density of the population. This is a recipe for a neutered nightlife, neutered pedestrian life, and serves to further amplify the feedback loop of clearing more woods in the fringe suburbs for tract housing and developing more suburban shopping centers.

Because of white flight, the city never really recovered. Cleveland used to have 1 million people living in its borders, now it's 380k, and the city is remarkably hollowed out and many historical buildings have been razed for surface parking. Urban development has focused on getting people downtown for a sports game and nothing more. The bars downtown are a recent phenomenom, brought on by millenials being drinking age and having literally no bars beyond suburban family taverns, bowling alleys, and formerlly smokey dive bars to frequent.

Then the winter hits, and things truly die. No public events really happen, and people just stay in their homes and try not to spend much time in the cold. If they want to spend time in the cold, they drive 4+ hours to upstate New York where there are ski resorts that take longer than 30 seconds to go down the hill.

In LA, every single street has someone walking. Every major artery has a bus that comes at least every 10 mins during rush hour, and I made extensive use of the busses before the pandemic. In other words, because of this sprawling high frequency bus network, the streetcar feel of the city never went away. Commercial corridors are sustained if they are on a bus line with decent ridership. My bus stop was even able to sustain a man who would be there every day in a canopy tent, selling solely roasted peanuts and socks (I'd like to think he started with a wider selection then ended up refining his inventory to his best selling commodities). Also on that corner was a cell phone repair store that also sold excellent crepes, my barbershop, a fruit seller, several weekend vendors, two taco trucks, a pizza shop and night club, several filipino restaurants, four markets, and in the evenings a churro vendor. And this is a rather unremarkable corner in the Rampart Village at first glance, but teeming with vibrancy for the pedestrian.

I walk down a random residential street in LA, and I have good odds of encountering someone selling elote, or sliced fruit, or a truck selling whole fruit directly out the back. The city feels like it's teeming with life, teeming with entrepreneurs, teeming with small business. Before the pandemic, it was rare to see a vacant storefront. Even now, local businesses are doing a lot better than I anticipated and few are folding, versus Cleveland where it seemed like in any given commercial corridor that wasn't a brand new strip mall, vacancy might be 80%.

In short, a vibrant city is like a vibrant ocean reef. Teeming with all walks of life everywhere you look.

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.

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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 and 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 more 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.)

Related gripe: The University of Michigan's fight song calls them "the champions of the west". Once upon a time that sort of made sense, because they played in an athletic conference that had "west" in the name. But the name of the conference didn't make sense, because California already was a state.