Be warned that only finance-related jobs tend to be downtown; most "Chicago" cost center IT jobs are in low-rise office parks around Chicagoland sprawl and are an hour or more away from the city under normal traffic conditions.

Chicago culture is nothing like New York, however, so the comparison is a bit moot. Chicago is very much a Midwestern city with a Midwestern culture. And in my years living in Chicago, I didn't know a single person who didn't own a car, and most of them spent lots of time driving.

As an anecdotal retort, I live in Chicago, not the suburbs, and known of 1 person who owns a car that I work with.

Unless you need to get out of the city, public transportation is very very good.

I think part of the issue is that Chicago's downtown and inner city are small enough that you typically do want to get out of town. Compared to cities like New York where people can easily go months, even years or decades, without ever thinking about leaving the city proper. That tends to be why so many people (vast majority) in Chicago own cars. And I've heard no end to the rants about trying to park in that town.

> didn't know a single person who didn't own a car, and most of them spent lots of time driving.

Really? I know lots of people who don't own a car & many, many people who have never had a drivers license. Its clearly not as car free as NYC, but is anyplace in the USA?

I think one thing about Chicago is that there is a lot of variance in peoples experience. Living in Morgan Park is different than Lincoln Park which is different than Orland Park.

Maybe it's an age thing. In my age group, everyone has a car, but also many have children.

More than half the Matasano office in Chicago didn't own a car, or, if they did, not one that actually worked. IIRC, one person owned a car and lost it for weeks after parking it on a street and not driving it for a couple months.

Lots of people in Chicago --- in the city proper --- don't have cars.

If you live in the suburbs of Chicago, you'll have a car.

I always wanted to know why you chose that name for your company. I'm sure you know about it's origins :) is there somewhere where you wrote about it?

Do any of the large tech companies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple) have offices in Chicago?

Google has a significant presence, though my understanding is it's mostly sales.

Chicago has a well-diversified economy, so it's not dominated by any one industry or company. There are a ton of bigcorp jobs, but they're more likely to be for companies like Hyatt, Walgreens, McDonalds, United, Allstate, etc. Legal and finance (particularly quantitative & algorithmic trading) are big as well.

The Chicagoland area used to be a telecom powerhouse with plenty of software jobs in the area. This was 15 years ago.

We had: Motorola (before all the splits), Lucent, Westel, Telabs, USR, 3Com and more I'm probably forgetting.

No, the high compensation (and high head count) companies are HFT/prop trading firms