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The Twin Cities is an interesting environment for that. It's so enterprise-heavy here (imho we're as much a tech city as Silicon Valley, just in a different exp
by beat 11y ago
The Twin Cities is an interesting environment for that. It's so enterprise-heavy here (imho we're as much a tech city as Silicon Valley, just in a different expression), there are lots of people who stick to the same company for 10, 20 years or more.
As someone who has job-hopped a lot in this environment, the worst thing about it is tech environments where the leadership doesn't keep up with trends even on an awareness level. They just stick with the legacy stack they've been supporting for years, which can be incredibly wasteful and limiting. Their software is bad, but it's all they've known for so long that they have no clue how much better things can be. And then the contractors and other floaters they bring through are appalled, frustrated, and often flip quickly to the next job in hopes of less "maturity". Sigh.
- PopeOfNope 11y agoMind if I ask which expression? I liked the twin cities the one time I visited, but I've never heard of it described as a tech city.
- beat 11y agoEnterprise. There are more Fortune 500 headquarters in the Twin Cities per capita than anywhere else in the world - more than New York, more than the Bay area, more than London or Tokyo. Working in IT in the Twin Cities generally means working for the likes of Target, United Healthcare, Best Buy, 3M, Carlson Wagonlit, Monsanto, and other tremendously huge companies. Last fall, I was in Silicon Valley at an enterprise meetup, and was talking to people there about a sense of scale. I observed that if you saw a startup generating $50M in revenue, you'd think they were very successful. I've worked on three different projects larger than that (some private, some government), and they were just side businesses to bigger enterprises.