How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Startup Communities

Re:How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Start... by csixty4 on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @02:49PM (#10583504)

> The problem isn't that there are no talented people.

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)

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Re:How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Start... by p4wnc6 on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @02:59PM (#10583565)

This is definitely true ... and there are a lot of little hubs (like the defense work opportunities near Wright-Patterson in Dayton) that perpetuate this problem by doubling down on "enterprise" solutions.

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.

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Re:How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Start... by vonmoltke on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @03:07PM (#10583596)

I have recently started thinking about Yinzerville myself. I'm particularly interested in trying to parlay my defense radar experience into that Radar Engineer role at Uber...

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Re:How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Start... by csixty4 on Wednesday November 18, 2015 @11:18AM (#10588588)

> As a scientific Python and Haskell developer myself, it has been exasperating trying to find anything in the Midwest.

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

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Re:How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Start... by p4wnc6 on Wednesday November 18, 2015 @10:09PM (#10592499)

I lived in Boston for a long time, > 8 years. I actually just left there over the summer b/c the job market was so poor. I interviewed top to bottom. I worked in a finance company there after I finished grad school there, and I left and worked remotely (from Cambridge) for a Python-focused start-up, then left that to do functional programming for an ed tech company. I couldn't deal with how little professional engineering actually happened in these jobs, and I searched and searched for jobs in the area, but found nothing reasonable.

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.

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