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Changing Careers at 31

mattdeboard.net

6 pointsmattdeboard6 comments

Matt might be a little out of touch with the local IT community. Working for a small consulting group in Indianapolis, I've been pushed into Python and Django work more than once, and I was certainly not looking for it. I blundered into it, unavoidably.

Contrary to the stereotype you see on TV, Indiana is a predominately urban state. Parks and Recreation's "Pawnee" couldn't be further from typical.

The central metro area, the Carmel-Indianapolis MSA, is two million people. The part of the Chicago MSA that lies in Indiana is another half million. The Fort Wayne, Evansville, and Muncie-Anderson MSAs are good-sized cities in their own right. Needless to say, in those millions of people, there are many, many python/django users.

You might say this hit a nerve for me. I feel the need to shill for my home state:

  - Indiana's major industries are manufacturing and logistics, not agriculture. 

  - Technology work is readily available, in a number of industries.

  - Indianapolis routinely attracts technology startups.

  - Indiana is home to two major research universities and many large corporations.

In short, it looks a lot more like the east coast than the plains. It's a small state, but it's relatively densely populated. There's no shortage of tech jobs, only a shortage of tech workers. You may take a 25-40% pay cut versus the coasts, but the money goes a heck of a lot further in a place where a detached home costs <$100k.

hapless, I think you drew conclusions about my remarks far beyond what I intended.

There are a couple of Python foundries in Indy that I know of, SixFeetUp and my current employer. SixFeetUp uses Plone for their work (and are extremely active in the Plone community), and of the guys I've met they're pretty damn smart. They're actually looking for a Python dev as well.

All that said, my impression of Indy is that it's overwhelmingly .NET-oriented, with a side of Ruby. I'm not sure what prompted you to launch into a general multi-pronged defense of Indiana based off a couple lines of my blog post. If you took anything I wrote as "all the programmers in Indiana suck", you're wrong. The devs at my shop are clearly talented and smart, and I love picking their brains. Same for many of the programmers I've met at meetups.

We both know Indy isn't a tech mecca. That doesn't mean there aren't smart & talented people here, or that there aren't companies doing exciting, interesting things. But, from my observations and conversations, the companies doing exciting and interesting things are almost certainly not doing them with Python.

Is that observation wildly different than reality? If so, please let me know because I'd love to get more plugged in.

Sorry that you got offended; I certainly didn't intend that.

I consciously over-reacted, Matt. By its nature, I expect HN to be a predominately coastal audience. I came away from your blog post with a bad impression of Indiana, and I wanted to get in front of that problem in the HN thread. If it had been inside baseball, a piece written for an audience of midwesterners, I would not have needed a proactive defense.

I agree with your impression of Indy as "overwhelmingly .NET-oriented." Microsoft has a huge market presence at every level. Nevertheless, in my experience, python is at least as common as any other non-Microsoft stack.

Come now. Ruby is extremely dominant here.

Also, Indiana is boring, has poor infrastructure, and any special events that would lure young people are concentrated almost exclusively in Broad Ripple/Mass Ave/etc. Mass transit is a joke. I mean, really, bus stops in a ditch?

I was born and raised in Indiana; Greenwood no less. After high school I left and lived all over the world. Indiana is bland and very boring. It has very little in common with the East coast unless you're talking about places like Wilmington NC or Jacksonville, FL. Oh, and the utterly shit weather.

I still don't get your defensiveness. I moved back for cheap schoolin' since I'm still an in-state resident. It's fine if you're ready to settle down and play some golf, mow the lawn, etc. But in the context of my blog post, where businesses are doing exciting things with Python, Indiana is dead in those terms.

Ruby seems to be dominant everywhere - but that might just be because they have better marketing. Or, maybe, they just have louder supporters.

Keep in mind that prior to this, Matt lived in San Francisco. So while Indy isn't, say, North Dakota (hope I didn't hit anyone's nerve), it's not exactly in the top ten when people think of bustling tech corridors.

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