Hacker News Reader

Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

Moved from the Midwest to the Bay Area, and tech comes in two forms: IT departments at major industrial firms (manufacturing, chemical, pharma, etc), or companies that are eventually bought by West Coast companies. The pay cap is much lower. Becoming a millionaire through stocks and wages is harder, but you will still be in the top 10% of earners overall.

If you want to live in a mansion, the Midwest makes this dream obtainable. Buy a 6 bedroom, lake (reservoir) side, 4k sqr ft home for less than a million. Of if you want an acre of lawn, but not live too far in the country.

What you will find is that people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white). (EDIT: This gets more pronounced the more rural you are. Cities tend to be more accepting. What you will find is that rural areas have more relative sway on thought compared to the West Coast.) Towns outside of major metropolitan areas are dying as most major industries that supported that last two generations have left. Drugs are a huge issue, but its not as obvious because the floor for homelessness is so much lower. The only major infrastructure and building projects that get approved are sports stadiums, because idiots in local government rather have sports teams than functioning schools.

What the Midwest does have is solid engineering and research universities, that graduate thousands of STEM oriented students a year. Unfortunately there are often over an hour from the nearest 250k+ city. I went to one, and I think less than 25% of my friends stayed in state. The brain drain is real.

View on HN

"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 white people is pretty crazy.

Yes, people who have seen trends of racism in the Midwest against minorities firsthand should be disregarded. They are the real racists.

Have you considered that their experiences may actually be true?

Have you considered that their experiences may be true AND people are friendly to non-whites.

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.

It is possible for someone to experience racism but apply a similarly out of touch generalization. I've experienced racism in Midwestern cities, but relative to other cities I've lived in the US? Talking in relative terms let's your anecdotes become broadly meaningful.

sarcastic hyperbole is unhelpful at the best of times, but in this case it isn't really established to what extent "trends of racism in the Midwest against minorities firsthand" has been seen. The sole reason we might assume is that dexwiz mentions that they "Moved from the Midwest to the Bay Area" with no more detail than that.

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.

Or maybe they themselves have experienced discriminatory behavior in the Midwest?

As an LGBT guy, I'm always direct when pointing out that I left the South partially because of discrimination, and someone is always happy to butt in to say I'm making it all up and the South is perfectly open and tolerant. It gets tiring.

“The south” is a really big region so maybe someone pops up because you’re tarring an entire region based on your individual experience. As an LGBT person, I grew up with people telling urban legends about gerbils and whatnot. Perhaps they witnessed a single person doing this, but attributing it to a large group is not very accurate.

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.

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 because I experienced discrimination in my shitkicker little town that the entire south was similar, that would be wrong, and not very helpful to anyone trying to understand the south.

I suppose you can avoid absolutes and generalizations if you want to help others. But you definitely aren’t obligated to help anyone.

But generalizations jump out at me and annoy me because I’ve frequently encountered jerks saying something about perverts or crime stats and then just fall back on that they were just honestly relating their experience. But there is a difference between my experience and me saying that my experience applies to others. Especially if not backed by data and a suitable generalization.

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?

It's like when people hear a statement like you've made they recoil and assume that 100% of your interactions in a region involve discrimination. What they fail to understand is that the rate you experienced discrimination is higher in these areas than in others. It's a probability, it's clear to me from the context that surely not every interaction of yours in the south is bad, but given drawing a random interaction out of a hat, you are more likely to have a bad one living in Virginia than in New York. Given this reality, I wouldn't want to live in the American South either.

There must be some sort of logical block that prevents people from understanding the nuance in these comments, and rushing to defend against absolutes that no one implied existed. I blame a lack of understanding of statistics and probability.

Exactly. I've also experienced discrimination in San Francisco, for what it's worth! But as soon as you make any statement that it tends to be more common in the South (or even if it's merely implied), people end up triggered and rise up in defense of it.

I’m not defending the south, per se, I’m defending statements like “it tends to be more common in the South.”

The experience you described doesn’t seem to me that it justifies saying the south is worse or better than other regions.

The reason why you see people jump in the defend the south is that you are making a general statement about an entire region.

Here’s what I mean. Someone said that midwesterners are nice to people if they are white. Downthread you share that part of the reason you left the south is because of discrimination you experienced and I think you were pointing out that it was odd that people jumped in to defend the south.

It seems reasonable that people would try to more accurately describe the south and share their experiences as well.

Saying people are triggered seems to belittle their input. If I want more input I don’t call you triggered for feeling compelled to share info.

This is totally different if you think that there actually is some higher level of discrimination in the south or midwest or wherever. But I don’t think your anecdote isn’t really that helpful for tarring or exonerating a region. Despite how true or honest it may be.

So, first point: I reject the idea that in my first comment I made any general statements about the South. I recounted a particular experience I had, and some people extrapolated that into a claim that all of the South is uniformly homophobic or some other statement I'm being held to which I didn't make.

If I'm actually making general statements, I would say that big cities in the South are more gay friendly, though they're still impacted by state politics and as you enter the suburbs and especially rural areas you encounter much more bias. Two hours north of Atlanta is much worse than two hours north of San Francisco. If push came to shove, I'd feel more welcomed in Atlanta ITP than in many parts of the Central Valley; but I'm also not particularly interested in grading on a curve. But everyone's mileage will vary, and all the tradeoffs involved are complicated and will differ between different people and even in the same person at different times in their life.

These subtleties are lost, though, because my comment wasn't intended to provide a comprehensive overview of life as an LGBT person in the South, but to counter someone who was writing off someone else's experience as merely a way to feel virtuous about their self instead of anything real. It's a common response to many negative experiences from marginalized groups, so I see it as perfectly natural that I drew on my own experiences to call it out.

> Russia is a repressive country?

This is usually interpreted as a statement about the russian government, which is an abstract entity, unlike "the midwest" which is interpreted as referring to the people living there which is not.

> At some point I'd have to be listing all the individuals I had negative experiences with

This paradox is the subject of "statistics" which resolves this problem with ideas of "representative" samples. I think the issue here is that most people would consider a sample size big enough to represent an area as big as the midwest would exceed the lifetime of any individual, such that no one could prove anything from their own experiences alone.

Being more specific about the locale would help. Nashville is not Atlanta, NOLA is not Tampa when it comes to flavors of discriminatory attitudes - and rural or suburban attitudes are different as well. Describing where you went to for relief also adds even more context.

Not to mention Houston, for instance, is one of the most diverse cities in the entire country -- more diverse than much of CA. It's also one of the largest and most iconic cities of the South.

Houston remains one of the most segregated cities in the entire country.

This page ranks it 18th in that regard: https://cityobservatory.org/most_segregated/

Of note, LA is measured as being more segregated than Houston.

Memo: There's a gradient from liberal urban islands to the surrounding regressive rural areas. With some exceptions.

Surprised?

Not tarring, maybe he was just pointing out the unconscious bias of the statement not being more elusive.

  someone is always happy to butt in to say ... the South is perfectly open and tolerant

which would be a generalisation, which is exactly what jacobriis is warning of

No, jacobriis is not doing that. He's stating

> when people say things like this they often do so to feel virtuous themselves

You're laundering his comment into some abstract statement about how you can't make generalizations about anyone, when he was the one making a generalization that people who say that they experienced X are making things up.

Yes he is, here is the relevant quote:

  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 white people is pretty crazy.

You quoted a different part. I'm not "laundering" anything, there are multiple statements there. I didn't get the link between "someone is always happy to butt in" and whether or not OP experienced racism in the Midwest, but I am speaking of the generalisation of those experiences to the whole area, which jacobriis covers in the above quote.

> how you can't make generalizations about anyone, when he was the one making a generalization

generalisation in original post:

  people are friendly, as long as you look like them

generalisation by jacobriis:

  when people say things like this they *often* do so to feel virtuous

unless that's a silent "often", the generalisation is qualified, versus the unqualified generalisation in the first case.

But it's not just that - "generalisation", or specifically "bad" generalisation takes a particular form, otherwise how do you distinguish it from a metaphor? The way the first characterises a specific area based on personal experience, versus the second which talks of "people" in general based on some personal judgment makes them different kinds of statement: the first as an objective account, the second an explicitly subjective opinion.

> that people who say that they experienced X are making things up

No, he said they "do so to feel virtuous themselves" i.e. their motivation, they didn't say anything about the actual truth of the statement. They did not say anything to suggest that they are "making things up".

Given you just accused jacobriis of saying this, I now have to wonder about your original statement: "someone is always happy to butt in to say I'm making it all up" - did they specifically say that, or was that your interpretation?

>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 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.

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

Your comments indicated that such an explanation was necessary to improve your understanding.

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

What point? That living in one small exurb in the South gives them enough experience to generalize a region of 125 million people?

I'm not explaining your experience to you. I'm telling you that your experience growing up in 1 place doesn't give you the ability to generalize a entire region.

>exurban Atlanta

Exurban Atlanta is not Atlanta. That's like saying the Jersey Shore is Manhattan.

> I'm telling you that your experience growing up in 1 place doesn't give you the ability to generalize a entire region.

And where did I do that? I am actually quite happy to generalize, but the only thing I've said in the comment you were replying to is that I experienced discrimination in the South. A simple factual statement that says nothing in general about the South, aside from the fact that at least one person experienced discrimination there. You're inventing statements in your head ("he's saying every last person in the South is homophobic!") and attributing them to me, based off of... nothing.

All that said, I do think there are accurate generalizations you can make about the South, or any large region. To take an extreme example, if someone said they had left the Middle East because the people around them were homophobic, you wouldn't be jumping in to defend the region because Beirut has a comparatively bustling gay scene right now.

ETA: And, on further thought, if we're going to be stridently anti-generalization, you're generalizing about Atlanta. Forsyth County, for instance, is definitely exurban and just as definitely part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Just because you want to present a rosy picture doesn't mean you can generalize and say that every place in Atlanta is a beautiful utopia for LGBT residents.

> I'm always direct when pointing out that I left the South partially because of discrimination

Any reasonable person who reads will infer that "the South" is that thing that is discriminatory in general. If you instead meant something else you worded it very poorly.

I honestly have a hard time believing that you don't understand how the sentence "I left X because of Y." implies that X is Y.

"I left my marriage because of domestic violence." It's entirely possible to construct a meaning where your spouse wasn't the one beating you, but that's the logical inference.

If you didn't intend to generalize that the South is discriminatory overall then why didn't you just say: I left my hometown because of discrimination? What additional meaning does "the South" add to that if you really just mean:

"I left my home town because of discrimination. My hometown happens to be in the South, but I don't think the South at large is any more or less discriminatory than any other region."

>All that said, I do think there are accurate generalizations you can make about the South, or any large region.

Sure. I don't think you can based on the experience of having lived in one tiny area of that region.

>Forsyth County, for instance, is definitely exurban and just as definitely part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Exurban is one step away from farmland. The differences between Cumming and say the area around Little Five Points is much greater than the difference between that same area of Atlanta and San Francisco.

It's important to clarify that you are mixing up two geographic regions here. You seem to mostly be referring to the deep south (especially since you refer to Atlanta in a later comment), which according to generally popular definitions is physically distinct from the midwest.

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

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

What's more reasonable:

1) That I'm confusing the Deep South and the Midwest

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.

There's at least one person who shifted the discussion from the former to the latter (you). If you did so intentionally, knowing fully well the regions are completely distinct, perhaps you should consider your own role in generating noise before you accuse others of that. I do not believe it was unreasonable or obfuscating or noisy for me to point out that the discussion abruptly shifted to a totally different area of the country and that it was unclear whether this shift was intentional or an innocent mistake.

It's very funny to imagine the mental gymnastics you performed to confidently conclude that a person who has lived in the South must be confusing it with the Midwest

Just downvote and move on if you feel that strongly about it.

I’m not LGBT (but I’m an ethnic minority who grew up in suburban Atlanta). I wanted to add that personally it’s not enough to just be ‘tolerated’. I’d rather be in a place where I’m “mainstream” or at least normalized. In that sense (for me as a South Asian) the Bay Area and NYC are no comparison so the South or the Midwest. I feel like I’m an active member of mainstream society there, not someone in the sides.

That is very cultural as well. I'm of Eastern European origin (white) and feel quite at home in large cities with varied population and racial variety and would feel quite uncomfortable to live permanently in the rural south just because of cultural differences.

How do I know that they aren't giving me misinformation about everything else? Being non-white feels like I have to constantly avoid getting gaslighted in the US about my "race".

I think I would be generally suspicious of people who are soliciting your support or affection by telling you most people are out to get you. (You're right that happens a lot here these days.)

I would be generally suspicious of people who are telling you that no one is out to get you and that your own observations are wrong.

How is stating your observations, as the OP did, "virtue signaling"? The act of denying that racism exists is a popular tactic of white supremacists.

I keep hearing that the Midwest has a racism from kids who have lived in two cities their entire lives... It's very quotable, but when then you realize that black people are very underrepresented in west coast cities and people treat you accordingly there. And don't get me started about the claims of how color blind people have gone in southern cities like Nashville...

OP should have said "What you will find is that SOMETIMES people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white), WHICH IS THE SAME THING AS IN BIG CITIES."

I can't believe the backlash here - surely generalizing ALL OF MIDWEST to be racist is the wrong thing to do?

There is a distinct lived difference that is based on, you guessed it! generalities. Instead of nitpicking OP, its worth the attempt of empathy.

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.

Or, you know, it could be based on personal experience with the many racists that dwell in the Midwest.

Years ago I moved back to CA from the Midwest, leaving a very-well paid job to be unemployed, because of it.

Nobody is saying every single person in the midwest is only friendly to white people. This is so obstinate it doesn't even seem genuine to me.

At the risk of feeding the trolls -- I grew up in the midwest. I can tell you that I both experienced racism myself and saw a lot of it in my high school both in students and from my classmate's parents. Of course everyone isn't racist, and most folks are friendly and accepting. But comments like this downplay the experience that many people in these places do have. In my experience, it takes a relatively small number of racist people and a whole bunch of folks who don't call that shit out to make it less comfortable for someone who isn't white in their day to day lives.

OP: "What you will find is that people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white)."

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%

They sorta are, if you actually read the context of each.

They're generalizing from different ends: one is saying that there are _some_ people who are not friendly if you're not white; the other is saying that _most_ people are friendly. The implication is that there is a subset of the populace that is unfriendly, and a subset that is friendly. Both comments say basically the same thing.

"What you will find is that people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white)."

should be

"What you will find is that most people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white)."

So you are correct in noting the statements are not equivalent.

By leaving out the word ‘most’ for whatever reason (typo, bias, etc.), the communication efficiency of the comment was reduced. Good catch.

You're right, the above declaration should probably be refined a bit. You should be both white and straight.

I would say it's hard to take what you've said seriously having personally known people who have left the midwest specifically due to the discrimination they faced.

Except I do have to have to take it seriously because it's a toxic attitude that belittles the struggles that people face due to discrimination by attempting to minimize their experiences.

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 my ethnicity from whoever was feeling tipsy enough to ask them.

Here's one story of folks being un-friendly: I was at a public event, basically a version of a county fair with my wife's family somewhere in the rural midwest. There's a stage with small-name bands performing, food vendors, and a small carnival-ride section. As the sun sets we lose track of her parents, and as we're looking for them I also got separated from my wife. I felt like the crowd was also slowly changing and like I was starting to attract attention in the form of unfriendly looks. I find my wife and try to express this, but her face clearly says it's all in my head and why am I talking about anything other than how we can find her parents. Just then a physically imposed man walks up, plants himself firmly in front of me, and asks in the least friendly way possible, "how's it going brother?" I answer him in unaccented neutral native-born american english (don't remember what i said, but likely something like "good how you doin"), and my wife is like, "ok you're right, we have to find my parents and leave."

So just to be clear - I can't know what might have been, but I strongly suspect that having grown up here and being a native speaker made that evening simpler. And again, I'm someone who many people look at and just process as "white" so I can easily take my experiences as a shallow sample from the tip of the iceberg.

And that kind of "unfriendly" experience is something that happens more often if i leave coastal metropolitan areas.

Just curious... What ethnicity are you? On the west coast, outside of a couple cities, my experience has been the opposite - though I'm of a darker complexion.

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.

"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 my ethnicity from whoever was feeling tipsy enough to ask them."

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'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).

This has been exactly my experience. 'Where are you from, where were you raised?' are the first questions after 'where do you work, what do you do for a living?'

As you well know, it's more the how than the what.

There's the small talk version of that, but then there's the following question of "where are you really from?" if you give them a less exotic answer than they were expecting.

Edit: wording

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 native born person.

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.

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.

If you are white, then take how many times you get asked "where are you from" and multiply it by 10. Then decide if you don't think it would get annoying.

It's rarely out of malice. But that doesn't really matter. If you get asked it enough, you will start to feel like you don't belong.

There aren't enough people here to do that (that I actually speak to at least).

As an aside, I have a last name with an unusual spelling. Literally everyone who sees it asks how it is pronounced, followed by where it is from. It is just a fact of life.

By asking the question, people clearly want to know more. Sure, they might be asking the wrong question, but the reality is, they are trying to include you.

If people didn't want you to belong, they would just make the assumption on their own and not ask (and probably avoid talking to you altogether).

If you're native american in the midwest, you will experience discrimination and your life will be harder than it needs to be. Similar to the difficulties that other POC experience. It's just the way it is, better than it used to be but it's still there and it's naive to think this is a problem that has gone away.

Source: my family.

People might not be objectively racist, but if you grew up in a school district where the high school of 14,000 kids only had 10 black people attending, you will hear some disgusting stereotypical comments and some very off color jokes eventually whether you are a minority or not. People uttering these things might not even see how damaging these comments are to the groups they target, because they've never met very many of these groups or ever been around someone who would check their behavior. It's just a fact of life when you grow up lacking any perspective of another culture, and the national culture encourages you to adopt biases that aren't rooted in reality, and you have no personal experiences to disagree with them.

People also so kindly forget that the midwest experienced white flight like nowhere else. That sentiment is still in living memory among the older generation.

This is spot on.

Yes, white flight was real. One kid I went to school with moved immediately after he had a knife pulled on him, but I don't know any of the details so can't say if it was race related. Our own family moved about a year later. If I had stayed in that house I probably would have went to high school with Prince, but if I checked the yearbook of the suburban school I graduated from I doubt I could find a single black face. I never heard those stereotypical comments you speak of because there was nobody to speak them about.

"White guys have names like Lenny, whereas black guys have names like Carl."

It's true, you just have to go thirty minutes outside the city.

> What you will find is that people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white).

Grew up (Indian-American) in the midwest and can confirm this is true with a large majority of people there.

If you don't look like them, they will be cordial to your face but then subtly make it very clear how they actually think about you.

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.

There's a huge pay difference for the top x%, including cost of living. And y% of people like to believe they are or will be part of the top x%, where y >>>> x.

Your second sentence may be true, but your first sentence is most definitely not. The biggest thing that accounts for the cost of living difference is housing. If you can live relatively cheaply, which most people in their 20s can, you will always come out ahead (and usually WAY ahead) if you take a high paying job in an expensive area vs taking a lower paying job in a cheap area.

I can rent a $4,500 apartment and still save, post-tax, at least $100,000 more than I could save post-tax anywhere in the midwest except maybe Chicago. Even including the value of paying off a mortgage vs. rent.

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.

" simply don't exist in large quantities outside major job markets."

Job's that pay that much don't exist in large quantities period. If you think otherwise, you live in a walled garden.

That may be true but they still appear an order of magnitude less in the Midwest than coastal hubs so the point is the same.

So your chances of getting such a job go from 0.001% to 0.01%? I'll take my chances in the Midwest.

Given a candidate is already in the software industry, the odds of getting a high paying job in the Bay Area are much higher than 0.01%. Top paying companies have the same interview standards everywhere but the number of positions are significantly higher in tech hubs. Not sure why you think your chances are better in the Midwest. Self-defeatist attitude will pull those chances down to zero everywhere though.

I think their point was that there are very few jobs even in the bay area paying $300k or more.

There are more jobs paying $300K+ than there are qualified candidates for them otherwise there wouldn't be thousands of job openings for them at any given time.

I rarely see listing that advertise $300k salaries. Where are these thousands of listings? Additionally, many companies leave up listings permanently so they can build up databases of resumes in case they might need you later.

Where are these thousands of listings advertising $300k/year salary jobs?

> Tech jobs that pay more than $300,000 -- maybe $350,000 -- simply don't exist in large quantities outside major job markets

They don't exist in major quantities in major job markets either.

I strongly disagree with the first point. The high salaries in the Bay Area and NYC filter out jobs where the marginal value of the labor is low. This also filters out low margin, low productivity businesses. This in aggregate also filters for higher skill employees on average. As a result, the chances of you working at a highly profitable (or fast growing) company is higher. The chances of you working with (and being mentored by) high skill colleagues is higher. Working at a growth potential or high margin company where you are a profit center, working with/collaborating with/being mentored by other (on average) high skill workers means you have a much higher earnings cap, even factoring for COL.

I completely agree. I made the mistake of taking a lower paying job in a lower cost area at the start of my career. When I did move to a higher paid area, I found that new grads were almost being paid my rate.

Same. The comment was a reflection of my observation from Plano -> SF -> NYC. I started my career in Plano. I personally was able to grow a lot more in my career after moving to SF (and later NYC).

Engineering managers at large companies in the Bay Area can make $600k. (And I don't mean directors or VPs, which are over $1 million.) Engineering managers in the Midwest are generally lucky to reach $200k. That's a basic new grad offer in the Bay Area.

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

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

Fwiw I did the math on that for goals of saving ~$300k for a mortgage and similar stuff.

It usually pays to sit in the big city for a few years with that salary, and then decamp to the smaller tech orbits, if your goal is to end up in one of the smaller cities.

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.

When you say "high paying" do you mean Silly Valley 10x Coder positions that are as likely as landing a job as frontman for Aerosmith? Or are you talking about $125-200k code monkey positions?

Atlanta has plenty of the later.

I do mean those higher paying ones than I see at levels.fyi than the Atlanta companies I listed, but I can guarantee that it's far easier to get into G, FB, Snap, Stripe, Netflix, etc than to be a frontman at Aerosmith if that's what you're considering the former - they are literally some of the biggest employers of software engineers after all.

Additionally, they hire in many more places than Silicon Valley - there are a lot living on those high salaries in the Midwest and South, for example.

The "Midwest" is approximately 20% of the US population.

Therefore, all generalizations about the Midwest are false stereotypes. The Midwest is large and varied.

"What you will find is that people are friendly, as long as you look like them (white)."

I grew up in snow-white South Dakota. In my hometown of 15,000 I knew of only one African-American family. The father was the town mayor.

I guess we had different experiences.

Even between Austin and NYC I've noticed these differences. I'd still take the latent bible thumping in Austin over the insane political cliques of NYC though.

This is a good summary

What are the big schools? I always thought that what was holding the Midwest up, not enough high quality schools.

Most midwestern states have a world-class research university. Northwestern, U of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Purdue...

Minnesota, Iowa State, and the University of Ohio State are very good schools too for tech prospects.

The "Big Ten Academic Alliance" does more funded research than the Ivy League and the UC system combined [1].

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

There are plenty FAANG engineers minted from the top Midwestern schools - think CMU and other state schools - even if they rank behind the top schools on the coasts.

Top paying tech jobs tend to be found on the coasts though as well.

> There are plenty FAANG engineers minted from the top Midwestern schools - think CMU and other state schools - even if they rank behind the top schools on the coasts.

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.

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.

I'm from Pittsburgh, my partner is from New Jersey. We argue about this (in a playful way) all the time; Pittsburgh is east coast, to me. Ohio is midwest. She counters with "a seven hour drive to the water is not on the coast."

I used to follow your Rust work and had no idea you are yinzer! Mineo’s or Aiello’s? :)

Fun fact: Carol, my co-author on the Rust book, is too, and still lives there!

I worked for Pizza Outlet/Vocelli's for seven years, so, I have some bias, haha! One of the locations I was at competed with Mineo's, so... not saying that Vocelli's is the best, but it has a special place in my heart anyway.

It's Pittsburgh, not Pittsburg.

The "is Pittsburgh midwestern?" debate is irrelevant since the article does not mention Pennsylvania. Also, increasing tech hiring by 100% in Pennsylvania would be really hard since the state also has Philadelphia and because Pittsburgh's tech scene has been strong for years.

Granting that there is a lot of fuzziness in all of these definitions, Buffalo and even Rochester can be included in "Rust Belt" but are not Midwestern.

Yeah, I meant to say CMU is a private school unlike the other leading Midwestern schools which are generally public. Pittsburgh is pretty far from the east coast, so it being in Pennsylvania doesn't really make it a 'coastal school' in my eyes, so I'll continue to lump it in with its geographic neighbors, though perhaps 'Rust belt' region is more accurate than Midwest for what I'm trying to b describe.

What ranking puts CMU at 1 in CS? Just curious because I usually see it behind a couple coastal schools.

It’s currently tied for 1 with their other usual suspects in US News [1]. Of course these rankings are all a bit arbitrary, game-able, and should be taken skeptically :)

[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...

Thank you for the link! Ah yes graduate education makes a lot of sense, CMU's computational linguistics department publishes incredible stuff and of course their ML stuff is the cutting edge, too.

It's in Pittsburg which is a Midwestern city. Even if the state has some coast.

University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, University of Michigan, university of Wisconsin Madison, and Purdue are all top 20 in CS.

Most of the Big Ten Schools are decent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Ten_Conference They aren't Ivy League, but they do compete internationally. My alma mater, Purdue, boasts the most amount of astronaut alumni of any nonmilitary school.

In my view, what holds the Midwest up, is that not everybody gets to live in the high-wage cities, yet we don't just give up on inventing and making things. Wherever smart, creative people live, there will be stuff happening, albeit perhaps at its own pace.

I tend to look at the high-wage regions like silicon valley, like they are a different country. Some folks will emigrate to that country, and I'm happy for them. Those of us who are left behind, for whatever reason, get on with our lives and find what there is to enjoy in our humble surroundings.

Washington University in St. Louis?

I have a friend who graduated from WUSTL’s CS program, who suspected the lack of accreditation stopped him from numerous job prospects. While WUSTL was a cornerstone of the early internet, it’s never been known since (IMHO) for particularly strong CS.

The midwest has the following top 20 CS schools: Illinois (tied for #1), Michigan, Wisconsin, Purdue, maybe Carnegie Mellon (also tied for #1).

In addition, the midwest also has the following universities which are top institutions in some fields: Northwestern, University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, Ohio State, Minnesota. I'm probably leaving out at least one Chicagoland school. Indiana is also quite good for CS, but is just not big enough to show up at the top of the rankings.

The problem is not a lack of top-tier universities. The problem, especially in Computer Science, is that everyone leaves after university. E.g., here's a map from CMU (page 4): https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2017_one_pagers/scs/BS_...

From CMU, only 2% go to the midwest while 67% go to the west coast and 17% go to the northeast. Similarly, from UW-Madison, only about half stay in the midwest: https://dataviz.wisc.edu/views/FirstDestinationSurvey_0/Empl...

-------

US News 20 CS schools by state/region (note that UIUC is now in the tie for top):

1. Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh, regionally ambiguous)

1. MIT (New England/Northeast)

1. Stanford (California/West Coast)

1. Berkeley (California/West Coast)

1. UIUC (Great Plains or maybe Upper Midwest/Midwest)

5. Cornell (New England/Northeast)

6. UW (PNW/West Coast)

6. Georgia Institute of Technology (South)

8. Princeton (New England/Northeast)

8. UT-Austin (Texas/South)

10. California Institute of Technology (California/West Cost)

11. University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Upper Midwest/Midwest)

13. UCLA (California/West Coast)

13. Wisconsin (Upper Midwest/Midwest)

13. Harvard (Northeast)

16. UCSD (California/West Coast)

16. University of Maryland--College Park (Mid-Atlantic/Northeast)

16. University of Pennsylvania (Mid-Atlantic/Northeast)

19. Purdue (Midwest)

20. Rice University (Texas/South)

20. USC (California/West)

20. Yale (New England/Northeast)

20. Amherst (New England/Northeast)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com