Some of the mega corps do have some really cool work going on. It's not all rank-and-file development, I'm not even talking about R&D. The cities are fairly small compared to other larger midwest cities and if you have a decent reputation as someone who can deliver code or pick up good work there is plenty of opportunity to shine very brightly at a large org and have your pick of projects to tackle.

Fortune 500 aside, there are a lot of smaller startups in the cities. They mostly focus on creating products aimed at the health insurance industry though, which in my experience is fairly dull work.

I agree and disagree. On the one hand, General Mills, Wells Fargo, and Target are never going to be as cutting-edge as Google. On the other hand, most jobs at Google aren't cutting-edge, either. The two guys I know at Google are doing stuff that's not that much different than your average line-of-business programmer.

I'd say availability of tech jobs in the "sort of interesting" category is great in MSP, but the truly amazing jobs are still rare.