Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

I&#x27;m not quite sure on the reliability of this site, but assuming it&#x27;s reliable...<p>&quot;And, as icing on the cake, seven of the top 10 most affordable states in the nation are in the Midwest.&quot;<p>Name any big city you&#x27;ve heard of in the Midwest, and it&#x27;s on the list. Chicago, Detroit, and so on. The list is, for the most part, &quot;rust belt&quot; cities that are all doing pretty well these days.<p>I&#x27;d say the one thing they all have working against them is weather. I&#x27;m in Buffalo, and I can see why folks flock to SoCal and places with better weather. Winter can be a real drag sometimes. Working from home makes it much more bearable, commuting in a snow storm can be really rough, dangerous and even deadly.

I&#x27;m surprised not to see Madison, WI on this list. Our tech sector has been strong and growing for several decades - locally we have Epic Systems, Exact Sciences, Promega Corporation, Thermo Fisher Scientific, several large insurance companies like American Family Insurance, Sentry Insurance. It might be easy to miss the agglomeration of these companies in one area because some of them are technically in different municipalities than the City of Madison. But it&#x27;s a great area, and most of the big players here have been spared or even strengthened by the unique circumstances of the pandemic.

Their data only covers 2010 to 2018. It&#x27;s not related to the pandemic.

Yup, just did this. Got an extra master suite, and 1.75 more bathrooms with much bigger yard and garage for $1100 less. And neighbors that actually talk to you. Not to mention half the price for gas and food. Oh, and the swings aren&#x27;t chained up. Good-bye LA, I will not miss you one bit.

I work for a sizable consulting firm with multiple offices including one in Chicago. We saw a lull during the early months (april-june) of Covid&#x2F;quarantine, we froze hiring, and a few projects were cancelled (one was a major airline). We had a heavier bench for a short time, and utilization fell 10-20%.<p>That lull is over, at least in Chicago, and not just our office. We have almost no bench, utilization is reaching 100% for at least tech centric practices, and we&#x27;re hiring again. Front end, back end, devops, salesforce implementation and integration, you name it, demand is exceeding supply for resources available.<p>On one hand it&#x27;s comforting to have job security. But it&#x27;s also surreal to hear reports about 13% unemployment. These are strange times. It does feel like anyone in the tech profession that we are insulated from the worst effects of this catastrophe. Most of us can easily do our jobs remotely. My brother and his girlfriend are both chefs living together in Chicago. Enhanced unemployment benefits expired in July and their lease ended in August so they both moved back in with their parents. I know what is happening out there but at times I feel like we live in a bubble.

Edit: The below applies to people who don&#x27;t want kids. I get why you wouldn&#x27;t want to raise kids in somewhere like NYC (though I can also see the inverse).<p>I don&#x27;t comment often on HN but I feel like I had to chime in here with a bunch of questions. These may sound inflammatory but I mean them sincerely, I just don&#x27;t see where people are coming from. I understand that a lot of the things I&#x27;m listing are negatives for some people, I&#x27;m just shocked that it seems like they&#x27;re negatives for 99.99% of people. Like, I&#x27;d expect at least a little more of a balance<p>I don&#x27;t understand all of the hate for big cities recently. I mean do THAT many people truly hate living in a big vibrant city? Do that many people really want to have to get into their car and drive 25 minutes to the only (probably subpar) ramen shop in town. Does everyone just want a big 6 bedroom house that they can sit in and read&#x2F;watch TV all day? Are you gonna go out on all that land more often then you would go out to eat world class, multicultural food? No one likes&#x2F;wants public transit anymore? Having tons of theaters, shops, bars, etc around? You don&#x27;t want access to the [some of the] most interesting jobs in the world? Surrounded by people who are world class at what they do? Being able to go to a bar and find someone who&#x27;s a musician, someone who&#x27;s an actor, someone from wall street, someone who sells hotdogs, etc all in the same place? How could you go from NYC to Madison, WI and not be so bored that you want to blow your brains out? It&#x27;s a completely different world.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just the midwestern cities that I&#x27;ve been in, but they&#x27;re all so dead. Everyone just seems to be ok with the status quo. Everyone just goes home and watches TV until work the next day. Maybe once a year they take a beach vacation, and then the other week they have off they see family for the holidays.<p>I mean yes, I get that it&#x27;s expensive. I&#x27;m just surprised that SO may people have been seemingly staying in this place that they hate, driving up rent prices for everyone who wants to be in the city, just so they could keep whatever job they have. I mean if you really hated the city wouldn&#x27;t you have looked elsewhere by now? It&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s competitive to get a job in one of these midwestern cities, so surely that great job you had in NYC that tied you there would guarantee you a way out of the city.

I worked with two developers in Boston who were DINK (Double Income No Kids) and they sold their Boston condo, moved to the Midwest (Minneapolis) and bought a six bedroom house on a lake and two jet-skis for the same price as their condo. Their cost of living went down tremendously. By their own standards they lost nothing compared to Boston (food&#x2F;services&#x2F;entertainment actually got better) except that they had to deal with people on the Coast saying how boring it must be - scratch that - they weren&#x27;t listening because they were having to much fun on their jet-skis...

Stats are from 2018, any idea what the trend has been in the last six months? Are a significant amount of workers truly leaving places like SF and NYC for a cheaper place in the Midwest?

Minneapolis has a bunch of tech and startups. Microsoft, Cray, Amazon, AWS, Target, Best Buy, then a bunch of medical tech and insurance companies as well as associated startups. I imagine the med tech AI space will develop here as well. Google is working with the Mayo in Rochester for example.

For people that work in any of these cities, how have you been enjoying it? What sort of tech companies are around? What do the job interviews and salaries out there look like?

1. Chicago: 8th overall US, 344,146 positions, 17.9% growth 2010--2018.<p>2. Detroit: 11th , 241,135, 37.2%<p>3. Minneapolis, 14th, 196,151, 17%<p>4. Kansas City, 24th, 100,782, 17.3%<p>5. Cincinnati, 28th, 82,088, 23.9%<p>6. Cleveland, 29th, 76,698, 16.3%<p>7. Indianapolis, 31st, 74,615, 24.2%<p>8. Milwaukee, 32nd, 71,755, 9.2%<p>9. Omaha, 40th, 37,508, 10.7%<p>10. Des Moines, 42nd, 28,693, 26.9%<p>TFW article is basically a textualised spreadsheet.<p>Not listed: wage levels, cost-of-living, industries, skillsets.

Here I was just recently eyeballing Minneapolis tech jobs and as salaries vs. 5 bedroom non-mcmansion houses with front porch and some woods nearby. Man it&#x27;s getting to be an interesting sell. Chicago too if NYC is more your vibe.

These jobs are tech roles in non-tech companies. Boeing, United, McDonalds, Koch Industries... all are big in the midwest, all need lots of tech folks, none are particularly techy companies.<p>All the really good tech people I&#x27;ve met either (1) leave for SV&#x2F;NY or (2) work for quant trading shops.<p>For context, FAANG job postings in the midwest are all satellite-office positions: they&#x27;ll hire good engineers here, but you&#x27;re kinda working remote in the downtown office at a certain point.

Off-topic - for any other non-Americans wondering why this eastern area is considered western: &quot;The term West was applied to the region in the early years of the country. In the early 19th century, anything west of Appalachia was considered the West&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Midwestern_United_States#Background" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Midwestern_United_States#Backg...</a>

What states other than California have reasonable protections for employees&#x27; side projects and protections against non-compete agreements?

How does this increase compare with other regions?

It&#x27;s remarkable to see Detroit on this list, and I&#x27;d love to learn how they gathered these numbers. Years ago, I heard the quip that &quot;the janitor at Apple is counted as a tech worker, but the supercomputer engineer at Ford is counted as an auto worker&quot;.<p>Clearly this analysis has solved that. Why have so others missed it?

It is hard to tell if this is general trend or workforce relocation, when only looking at data in these picked cities and for past few years. Job posting data from this year due to pandemic may tell a better story.

Just wait till all the companies start to figure out that they can hire highly talented people in places like the Philippines or India for one tenth of the price of the Midwest.

Well yeah, you can pay people pennies on the dollar here while they&#x27;re convinced it&#x27;s &quot;cool&quot; to live in bum-f*ck middle america. If you&#x27;re lucky they might even buy a house, adding another barrier to leaving and moving to a real tech-hub once covid is no longer an issue.

&quot;Take him to Detroit&quot;!!

No thanks