I've been in the bay area for about a year now and this hits on what has been by far the hardest part of the transition for me, and what will eventually drive me away.

Things are so congested and crowded that it feels like some sort of dystopian novel. And there's also this weird subliminal cultural value that people actually like it. I get judged when I suggest to people that continually waiting in line for basic necessities is maybe a shitty way to live, and that it'd be kind of nice to open my window and not look directly into my neighbor's window. Having come from a very rural upbringing, it's hard to not feel like an outsider.

The rest of your analysis is spot on in my experience too. Some of the most talented people I know live in Nebraska because they want to be close to family. And while the cost of housing is drastically lower, companies also tend to not pay very well at all - and the successful ones instantly try to emulate SV culture instead of having the confidence to be themselves and embrace their own local culture.

> ...weird subliminal cultural value that people actually like it. I get judged when I suggest...

Yeah there's a bit of a cult to the place, for sure. I guess it requires believing in the Unicorns that the author of the OP alluded to.

> Some of the most talented people I know live in Nebraska because they want to be close to family.

Yes, and in my experience I find the much of the best talent I know in my clients' businesses in Southfield Michigan and in Japan (auto tech. industry), and for similar reasons -- strong family ties.

You're right, there are tons of talented people in the midwest. The problem I saw over & over was there's no incentive to learn something new when the majority of openings are Java and Drupal shops. I saw so much quiet desperation at the meetups I attended. These people would jump on any chance to break out of their bubbles and learn something new. But if startup founders want someone who can hack on their Scala codebase from day one like they'd find in the Valley, that's not going to happen. Everyone already optimized for the available work.

(And your other comments are spot-on too)

As a scientific Python and Haskell developer myself, it has been exasperating trying to find anything in the Midwest. I have heard good things about some of the stuff popping up in Pittsburgh, but thus far nothing over than has panned out either.

It's a tough one: there are a lot of great cities out here to live in, like Madison, St. Louis, Evanston/Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Pittsburgh just to name a few. But when I go looking for job opportunities that have any slight relevance on my skill set, there's just nothing here. ... Illiquid market problems.

If you ever get out to Boston, drop me a line. I'd love to talk Chicago-style pizza & functional programming.

I'm still actively looking in Boston, and would enjoy living at least in New England (my dream job would be something about functional programming but located in Burlington VT (I know... dream on...)).

But I will say I was very disappointed with the Boston job market. It superficially seems like there's a lot there, but so much of it is open-plan office marketing fluff crammed into Agile-heavy incubator spaces, which I don't consider to be real jobs. Sigh.

People just do it to cargo cult the woo-magic ideology of open office spaces without realizing that the marketing hoopla around that just exists to avoid saying "we do open office spaces to cram more people into less space and save money on furniture."

I think even in large cities, open-plan madness is still cargo cult and more about fashion and subtle ageism than it is about the economic costs of real estate. There's also some weird patriarchal aspects of it too, especially in financial companies where the offices and workflow are almost engineered to be like a Panopticon. I always enjoyed reading Joel Spolsky on his choice to commit to having private offices even in Manhattan, both for Fog Creek and later for Stack Exchange.

I'm sure there are cases where a company is strapped for cash, or where they need to be located in an extremely expensive part of SF/Manhattan/London/etc. If someone really used hard numbers to justify it, I'd have no problem with it. But the problem is nobody's using numbers. It's about fashion, signalling, and control.

I worked for an established education technology company that had offices all over. They bought a fancy new loft space in the Boston area and decked it out just like a SV stereotype: glass whiteboards everywhere, bean bag chairs, video games, gourmet coffee. The open seating was awful -- you had about 4 lateral feet of personal space, and your computer monitor practically bumped into the monitor of your neighbor on either side. There was effectively zero privacy. It was even hard just put a notepad of paper on my desk-slice and try to draw some ideas or take notes.

The company actually spent money, like > $10MM, to renovate their Columbus, OH, office to look the same. They didn't even have an engineering presence in Columbus. The people there were all veteran employees mostly within the HR, business, and regional sales departments. They all had private offices for years and were extremely productive with them, and also felt they had earned the right to work in offices given that many of them had long tenures with the company.

And the company paid money to remodel the whole office. They actively destroyed privacy features that directly created productive and happy workers, and spent money to do so.

When I did my exit interview at the company, I spoke with one of those HR reps in Columbus and talked a lot about my frustration with the Boston office's open layout. She shared my sentiment and lamented how, at her age and her rank in the firm, it was extremely frustrating to be placed back into a fully open-plan office and have no privacy to conduct calls or spread out her work materials and get things done.

I asked her why the company chose to do it, and all she could say was that they had recently hired a new CTO for a major sub-division in the firm, and that CTO brought in sweeping changes that were meant to "modernize" the company, and specifically he decreed that all of the offices needed to be remodeled to have open-plan layouts because "that's what engineers want."

And this was in a huge company, where presumably these kind of remodeling choices would have to be debated by committees, face political opposition from other parts of the company, etc. It was just insane.

The typical retort to that around here is that group productivity matters more than individual productivity. I agree that the productivity of the group can be greater than the sum of the individual productivities of its members. No one has yet explained to me how lowering the sum of individual productivities leads to an increase in group productivity, though.

But you'll never win that argument with a manager in a company that has decided to double down on open-plan layouts. If someone higher up is dogmatic about open-plan, then managers can't talk bad about open-plan or else they face career roadblocks. This gets funneled to HR, so then they create bullshit codewords like "team player" or "good cultural fit" that really just mean "someone who agrees to sublimate their natural need for privacy for no other reason than that we told them to."

The only thing you can do is rejection-sample employers until you find one of the rare ones where the upper management just happen to already share your views about offices and productivity.

If the company's office plan looks like Google's, then surely they're going to generate earnings like Google one day. I don't think the analysis necessarily goes that much deeper than that.

We've gone from managerial pseudoscience of the early 20th century that attempted to measure and optimize productivity into full on mysticism that rests on vague notions of 'increasing opportunities for collaboration.' At least scientific management attempted to use quantitative analysis and empiricism to make employees more productive. In the new age, we just need vague slogans, beanbags, and chi consultants.

What bigger slap in the face can they give to a developer? They are basically saying, up-front in one of the earliest conversations they have with you, that your value to them is more determined by your ability to look like a good piece of office furniture than by the product of your software development labor.

Open-plan offices optimize for luck (as in, chance encounters that spark new ideas) at the expense of pessimizing known, guaranteed, solid productivity. Most people won't be as effective in heads-down, concentration-required, focused, knowledge-based work in an open-plan office. But this is irrelevant: in today's economy, if you're doing something that anyone else knows how to do or that anyone else thinks is a good idea, you're a rounding error. The only work that generates any financial return is when you do something that everybody else considers too crazy to try and it works.

Open-plan offices in startups are usually because the founders hope that enough smart people in close proximity, dedicated to working on a problem, will manage to fill in the holes in the business plan that the founder didn't get to before they raised money. Open-plan offices in big companies are usually because management hopes that employees will generate the next big idea that keeps them from becoming obsolete.

There's a lot of cargo-culting going on too, and particularly in other parts of the country, people adopt the open-plan offices without the incentive structures, openness to new ideas, and ability to bring a product to market that allows companies to capitalize on it. But that's why Silicon Valley companies do it, at least.

This is true in public policy, too. I live in St. Louis, where we're constantly chasing the tails of bigger cities and their neat, new bike-share-startup-trolley-incubator-green-space whatevers. And it'll never work. For St. Louis to ever have any hope of being cool, it needs to focus on the things that make St. Louis cool and give up on trying to be Chicago.

That said, absolutely this. However, I'll add one more thing: The projects that we see getting built seem like they're more tourist-oriented than geared toward improving the standard of living for the city's denizens.

Ultimately, I think the policy thing, especially surrounding the damnable tourist-oriented Loop Trolley, is going to be one of those "lots of dollars squandered while we try to re-learn how to make our city a sustainable (and safe) place to live, work, and play and not just visit" ordeals. That's really quite unfortunate, but the reasons are cultural: We Americans just don't like being told that we're wrong or that something is a bad idea.

"Oh yeah? Well, I'll show you." And then ridership doesn't meet projections, and those politicians wind up losing the Mandate of Heaven^W^W^Wnext election, and then we get the same thing all over again.

It's funny. Not too far off is Madison county, and as far as a semi-rural county goes, I think they actually got the whole infrastructure development thing (more) right (than most urban Midwestern areas). Trails to rails, gradual "nicening" of facilities (i.e., implicit bus stops at intersections to explicit signage to full-out bus shelters), lots of green space between communities, more encouragement to build tighter towns and cities that don't sprawl all over the place, etc.

I found using MCT for the six years that I lived up that way to be on par with, normalized for density, biking Berlin and riding the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe's buses and trains when I last visited there. That's pretty hard to pull off, and it was readily apparent that those were facilities meant to be used by the folks who lived there, not as a vehicle for tourism.

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/workers-play-and-play...

>The employees, most of whom started their workday at 8 a.m., were back at their workstations as the hour approached 8 p.m.

>And the catered breakfasts began last year as survival-mode nutrition for computer-coders who took to living at the office for weeks on end — one of them brought a basket of laundry and stayed 81 straight days — in a push to launch a new website.

Level descriptions: http://www.indiana.edu/~uhrs/salary/level_guides/LG-IT-systd...

Salary ranges: http://www.indiana.edu/~uhrs/salary/pa-ranges-201516.html

If you prefer not to click, I'll summarize:

  Entry level: $41-53k/yr
  Junior: $53-69k/yr
  Senior: $69-90k/yr
  Tech Manager: $90-117k/yr
  Tech Executive: $103-134k/yr

Every last person working there now must have already explicitly decided, "I am never, ever, ever moving anywhere else." I politely extricated myself from the interview process, offering the feedback that their salary ranges are not competitive.

The talent is available. But it just isn't going to sell itself to the lowest bidder.

for what it's worth there are companies in large coastal cities that do not match the SV mold. you just have to be extremely upfront and non-yielding with your requirements when seeking them out/interviewing.

as far as the smarmy office bullshit, i can't stand any of that stuff either, although i do enjoy a lot of urban amenities like restaurants and the general feeling of anonymity.

Easier said than done. Most companies that hire remote either want someone who has worked remotely before or "will make an exception for an exceptional candidate". That's a pretty high bar for someone struggling just to stay relevant.

It is far, far harder to get as far with the abundance of technically-lackluster non-amibitous 9-to-5 lifestyle companies that are abundant outside hubs on one's resume despite being very talented otherwise and to land one of these remote jobs for prestigious, highly ambitious coastal city companies making tons of headlines and making lots of people rich. Most of these non-ambitious culture companies are extremely caste-oriented and culturally tend to value tenure at a company or non-employment factors like veteran status to technical proficiency or even experience in management and individual contributor alike. These are the companies that people like to talk a lot about what "things used to be like" in political debates where people stayed employed for 10-20 years and employees almost have a family-like relationship to each other rather than drinking buddies relationship.

There's some merits to this kind of culture and approach to life but it's something I think only works for some people long-term and perhaps even then only at a certain stage of life and it's in your best interest to understand what kind of culture you really do want NOW and to be honest to yourself about what kind of sacrifices / trade-offs you are willing to accept.

You are pretty unlikely to go from rags-to-riches founding a tech company in Tulsa, OK as an extremely smart, ambitious person with a lot of capital (not rags anymore though, catch-22) around unfortunately unless you can cart around a small army of loyal, dedicated workers that want to keep working with you ahead of their own personal interests to oh... not live in Oklahoma (no offense to OK, just an example). It may work in industries with much longer timelines for success than tech such as restaurants perhaps, but even among ambitious chefs they tend to go to areas where they can compete and learn among the most well-regarded before opening their own restaurants.