That’s interesting. Chicago is nowhere near the tech city that Seattle is, but I’ve found the tech meetup scene here to be pretty active and decent. Interesting

That’s interesting. Chicago is nowhere near the tech city that Seattle is, but I’ve found the tech meetup scene here to be pretty active and decent. Interestingly, some of the best meetups here (devops, tech in motion etc.) aren’t organized by tech folks but by non-tech folks working for tech companies. Also I’ve found Chicagoans to be a friendly lot in general, including the techie types. Maybe it’s the midwestern thing, but it’s relatively easy to strike up a conversation with strangers. I think it has to do with a more balanced ratio folks in engineering and non engineering roles. Many of tech companies here are oriented around finance and marketing, rather than pure engineering. Empirically I’ve found that meetups comprising solely of high IQ nerdy folks (eg C/C++ meetups) to be fairly awkward. I don’t want to fall into lazy stereotyping but I wonder if by concentrating certain types of talent in one area, one is inadvertently optimizing for specific traits at the expense of others?