4 ms·

This seems really dependent on finding a good company with openings, which is not always the case. I tried to stay in the Midwest as a recent cs grad with an in

This seems really dependent on finding a good company with openings, which is not always the case. I tried to stay in the Midwest as a recent cs grad with an internship under my belt, but after spending 4 months doing job search I just gave up and went coastal. 1. The offers I got were abysmally small and out of touch with the market even when adjusting for my experience and local cost of living. 2. Most places were either extremely poorly reviewed on glassdoor, or were not hiring junior/midlevel developers. 3. Places I interviewed at were using ancient software stacks from 2000-era that would have hampered my professional growth. Until all these things are fixed and accounted for there is no way brain drain is going to stop. I literally spent 4 months interviewing, fully willing to relocate in the general Midwest to stay in a smaller more affordable town within reasonable driving distance of my family. If people want to keep smart people around, give them reasonable offers in line with the global market, and take risks on junior developers.

Grzegrzolka 7y ago
It's very easy to explain. Even very weak companies that are located in "hot" cities have chance to catch really experienced and knowledgable talent. One good guy employed for 6 months can be an amazing catalyst of great changes, you can very quickly modernize process and technologies if you have passionate people on board. It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. The "less popular" places are the polar opposite of this mindset. If talent is not easily available, you will find companies with no proper culture, stupidly old technologies and "old guard" not wanting to change much if anything.
- arkh 7y ago
  > It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. How about no. I think there is a big divide between people who do project maintenance and those tornadoes. Most new hotness people want to put on their resume will bite you in the ass 2 or 3 years down the line. But the super hero tornado will already be 4 companies out of sight so they'll never see what the things they started ended being. And when they stumble upon an old project started by another different team of tornadoes they'll complain.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    There is resume driven introduction of new technologies and then there is introducing modern source control, a CI pipeline, a modern compiler toolchain with activated warnings, a usable bugtracker... all of which is often missing in small companies that only do software on the side, or live in a slow moving market.
    - jswizzy 7y ago
      I work in defense contracting and version control is either non existent or dated at most companies. I've gotten very good at selling git to management.
    - arkh 7y ago
      2 months to introduce those kind of changes usually mean it will still be in the "people don't want to change their way of doing things" phase. With most of the infrastructure half deployed, the process ready to be cargo-culted and a lot of things directly copied from stack-overflow into critical parts of this process. The know-how never got shared and won't appear to fill the void.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        That our hypothetical tornado managed to start introducing change during just 6 months is imho a strong sign that at least some people want to change. In my experience introducing changes takes years.
beering 7y ago
In my experience, a lot of the companies in the Midwest wouldn't survive if they were paying salaries aligned with big coastal tech. I.e., they exist in the Midwest because they can't exist elsewhere. And the rest are taking advantage of people who don't have the motivation or freedom to move out. (I knew a lot of CS grads in the Midwest who didn't bother applying to coastal companies.)
cvhashim 7y ago
Tell me more about your interview process? I'm trying to get out of the midwest as well. All my friends from school are out in the coastal cities.
derek1800 7y ago
I moved back to the Midwest from the West Coast once having kids to be close to family and be able to afford a house. I do think it is hard to find the pockets of exciting jobs in the Midwest that pay reasonably well. I personally got lucky with Amazon in Detroit which is an engineering office with exciting projects. One good thing is the pay for Amazon doesn’t change from Seattle to Detroit which is awesome.
esotericn 7y ago
This is a fairly global phenomenon I think. I've been living up in Northern Sweden for a bit, which is obviously a smallish market. I was getting offers for less than a third of what I made in London, and mostly for old enterprise tech stuff. At that point there's no reason to even bother negotiating. I went back to remote. Living costs aren't realistically that much cheaper aside from housing. The only people you're going to hire for the long term are locals that are staying in the town for reasons unrelated to work. Which is fine and describes many people - but it's definitely a huge limiter on access to top talent.
- systemtest 7y ago
  Is this a Northern Sweden problem or a Sweden problem in general? I've looked at a couple of hiring boards and hourly contractor rates are only €50-€70, even in Stockholm. Compared to the €70-€90 in London and Amsterdam that sounds a bit low, but please correct me if I am wrong.
  - zprunger 7y ago
    If you're contracting in Sweden you are 90% looking at Stockholm (the remaining 10% being Gothenburg or Malmö/Copenhagen). My experience is that Stockholm hourly rates are around 750-1200 SEK which would be ap. 70-110 EUR. I have not worked in London but a quick search says the rates are pretty similar.
    - systemtest 7y ago
      In that case I was looking at the wrong rates, thank you for the correction.
paulddraper 7y ago
Not the midwest per se, but Salk Lake City has more software jobs than you shake a stick at. One of the bigger software companies, Qualtrics (acquired this year by SAP for $8B) eventually gave up fining enough local engineers and opened a Seattle office.
thew1ndyman 7y ago
Grew up and graduated from a small University in the Midwest. All of those are a big problem especially with remote work which I prefer. Before we moved for school I interviewed a couple places in the city and they would offer 60% of offers for remote positions and I would have to commute ~30 mins each way? No thanks. The other problem with my city in particular was everyone seemed to be locked into the same tech stack (C#\.net) that I was not interested in

Grzegrzolka 7y ago

It's very easy to explain. Even very weak companies that are located in "hot" cities have chance to catch really experienced and knowledgable talent. One good guy employed for 6 months can be an amazing catalyst of great changes, you can very quickly modernize process and technologies if you have passionate people on board. It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. The "less popular" places are the polar opposite of this mindset. If talent is not easily available, you will find companies with no proper culture, stupidly old technologies and "old guard" not wanting to change much if anything.

arkh 7y ago
> It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. How about no. I think there is a big divide between people who do project maintenance and those tornadoes. Most new hotness people want to put on their resume will bite you in the ass 2 or 3 years down the line. But the super hero tornado will already be 4 companies out of sight so they'll never see what the things they started ended being. And when they stumble upon an old project started by another different team of tornadoes they'll complain.
- adrianN 7y ago
  There is resume driven introduction of new technologies and then there is introducing modern source control, a CI pipeline, a modern compiler toolchain with activated warnings, a usable bugtracker... all of which is often missing in small companies that only do software on the side, or live in a slow moving market.
  - jswizzy 7y ago
    I work in defense contracting and version control is either non existent or dated at most companies. I've gotten very good at selling git to management.
  - arkh 7y ago
    2 months to introduce those kind of changes usually mean it will still be in the "people don't want to change their way of doing things" phase. With most of the infrastructure half deployed, the process ready to be cargo-culted and a lot of things directly copied from stack-overflow into critical parts of this process. The know-how never got shared and won't appear to fill the void.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      That our hypothetical tornado managed to start introducing change during just 6 months is imho a strong sign that at least some people want to change. In my experience introducing changes takes years.

beering 7y ago

In my experience, a lot of the companies in the Midwest wouldn't survive if they were paying salaries aligned with big coastal tech. I.e., they exist in the Midwest because they can't exist elsewhere. And the rest are taking advantage of people who don't have the motivation or freedom to move out. (I knew a lot of CS grads in the Midwest who didn't bother applying to coastal companies.)

cvhashim 7y ago

Tell me more about your interview process? I'm trying to get out of the midwest as well. All my friends from school are out in the coastal cities.

derek1800 7y ago

I moved back to the Midwest from the West Coast once having kids to be close to family and be able to afford a house. I do think it is hard to find the pockets of exciting jobs in the Midwest that pay reasonably well. I personally got lucky with Amazon in Detroit which is an engineering office with exciting projects. One good thing is the pay for Amazon doesn’t change from Seattle to Detroit which is awesome.

esotericn 7y ago

This is a fairly global phenomenon I think. I've been living up in Northern Sweden for a bit, which is obviously a smallish market. I was getting offers for less than a third of what I made in London, and mostly for old enterprise tech stuff. At that point there's no reason to even bother negotiating. I went back to remote. Living costs aren't realistically that much cheaper aside from housing. The only people you're going to hire for the long term are locals that are staying in the town for reasons unrelated to work. Which is fine and describes many people - but it's definitely a huge limiter on access to top talent.

systemtest 7y ago
Is this a Northern Sweden problem or a Sweden problem in general? I've looked at a couple of hiring boards and hourly contractor rates are only €50-€70, even in Stockholm. Compared to the €70-€90 in London and Amsterdam that sounds a bit low, but please correct me if I am wrong.
- zprunger 7y ago
  If you're contracting in Sweden you are 90% looking at Stockholm (the remaining 10% being Gothenburg or Malmö/Copenhagen). My experience is that Stockholm hourly rates are around 750-1200 SEK which would be ap. 70-110 EUR. I have not worked in London but a quick search says the rates are pretty similar.
  - systemtest 7y ago
    In that case I was looking at the wrong rates, thank you for the correction.

paulddraper 7y ago

Not the midwest per se, but Salk Lake City has more software jobs than you shake a stick at. One of the bigger software companies, Qualtrics (acquired this year by SAP for $8B) eventually gave up fining enough local engineers and opened a Seattle office.

thew1ndyman 7y ago

Grew up and graduated from a small University in the Midwest. All of those are a big problem especially with remote work which I prefer. Before we moved for school I interviewed a couple places in the city and they would offer 60% of offers for remote positions and I would have to commute ~30 mins each way? No thanks. The other problem with my city in particular was everyone seemed to be locked into the same tech stack (C#\.net) that I was not interested in