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Comment by yesimahuman | Hacker News Reader

The headline is clickbaity. The point isn't that Silicon Valley isn't a major force in tech or that other parts of the US will "beat" it. Rather, it's that you can build valuable tech companies outside of it, and that the Midwest in particular is ripe for more tech companies. I know first hand, I'm building my VC-backed (including coastal $) startup in Madison, and we've stayed put. I realized the pressures we felt to move early on were our own insecurities and the bias of tech/investor media (which I've noticed has changed recently, we're not seen as so crazy!)

I'm glad we stayed put, especially as we've started to focus on real revenue and scaling, and less on trying to be hot for the purposes of raising a big early round. I feel like the market for engineers around here is becoming an advantage for us, and we're not having to fight the same talent wars as those on the coasts. That matters.

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Having just moved to SF from Madison, I have to say that the engineering competence of teams there is disappointing in comparison to the Bay Area. Not only that, but Madison companies really do not pay well at all. You can't expect to keep talent if you aren't paying for it.

So far it’s working out and we’re excited about growing here. Our data says we’re competitive on compensation and I’m proud of our retention. I’m very happy about the level of our engineering talent and this team is building a successful product used around the world right here in Madison.

I’m sorry you didn’t have a great experience with your last team.

I'm glad your happy with your company's engineering output.

As an engineer, I would head for Chicago or Minneapolis. Madison doesn't have "the next job". When that time comes, I wouldn't want to uproot my family.

I'm glad your rention is stellar. I would expect increased retention due to lack of alternatives.

Most companies believe their compensation is competitive. A lot of them are wrong.

The Midwest might be a place where companies can skirt those two things fairly easy.

You certainly would be entitled to make that decision, and many do! The point of my original comment was that we have sufficient talent to build and scale tech companies here. It's certainly not going to attract every talented worker (like yourself), but not even the bay area has that going for it anymore.

For entrepreneurs thinking of building in the Midwest, you absolutely can. Let's not let that point get lost in a discussion about personal values.

> not even the bay area has that going for it anymore.

Are there definitive stats on this because I would disagree especially compared to the Midwest?

My point was there are enough talented people who don't want to work in the bay area that other cities have enough to grow tech companies. This is kind of obvious.

That’s always been the case. The issue is quality. Outside of the valley, top caliber developers tend to congregate in big hubs like NYC or LA; or interesting places like Portland / Seattle, Austin, or Denver. The Midwest tends to be for locals only due to a combination of less agressive investors (not to mention a lack of), bad climate, and lack of stuff to do compared to everywhere else

Chicago would be an exception but crime would keep people away

Can any of this change? Of course, but it’s really hard to change culture and climate takes time (ex even after all these years CA still had a gold rush mindset)

Chicago didn't seem to have that great a real crime problem (as opposed to perception) when I lived there.

There probably would not be much to do in Nebraska, but then I can't see Bay Area as being exactly an epicenter of culture either.

Chicago is typically in the top 10 in the country in terms of crime according to the numbers / population

> Bay Area as being exactly an epicenter of culture either

It depends on what you want. The SF Bay Area is not NYC in terms of fashion or theater. If you want that, you go to NYC. If you want a good clubbing scene, it's either LA or NYC. However it has a bit of everything. If you like the city, there's SF and Oakland. There's also a lot of suburbs and quaint downtowns like Palo Alto if you like that. There's always something going on regardless of whether you're in the city or out. The food scene is good. Wine country is next door. Tahoe isn't too far, and there's a lot of places to hike nearby. There's also fishing and sailing on the Pacific, or canoing in the rivers. Yosemite is doable. Also the weather is almost always temperate year round, hovering around the 60s-70's. These are a few reasons as to why housing is so expensive here. I didn't even go over the professional reasons.

Comparing the Bay Area to Nebraska is disingenuous. There's no equal in the MidWest, though Chicago would be the closest.

The US MidWest is just a really hard sell to almost everyone except to the people who grew up there. There's just too many other alternatives in the US. (I used to be a consultant going here and there)

Crime in Chicago is very much concentrated. In areas where your average HN reader would live, I very much doubt that your chance of being a crime victim would be any higher than in SFBA. And in most suburbs (from which you can get to Chicago much easier than to SF from SV) it would be significantly less; reading NextDoor here is downright scary.

Certainly, California has more diverse nature than most of the Midwest does. But culturally... as far as theaters, museums, music etc. goes, SF is behind not only New York, but Chicago as well. Food scene, once you pass French Laundry and couple more places in Napa isn't Chicago either, just more expensive. I've left far less money at Alinea than at Atelier Crenn, and while of course this is highly subjective, there really was no comparison between the two.

Weather is nice, but the second year it became incredibly boring; I like my seasons. But then, I've moved here for personal, not professional reasons. And professionally, while I was making quite a bit less money in Chicago, I could live in a hot area, 1 minute from subway, 15 minutes walk to work, 10 minutes walk to NEXT or Moto (yes, I like my food) and somehow had far more money left to squirrel away than I do living in some cheesy apartment complex in a middle of San Jose nowhere.

Certainly, if you get into a startup that actually makes it, gets acquired, or something like that, you have a better chance of striking it rich than in Chicago. But as far as I know, most people don't. And it's not that work here was that much more interesting -- doing yet another JS framework du jour, or yet another noSQL database (because rewriting MUMPS, just not quite as good, is always fun) isn't that exciting once you get old enough and stop jumping at every new and shiny thing. I'd much rather do something interesting at Wolfram (well, if Chambana weren't just as boring as SFBA) than doing yet another chat app in SV...

> once you pass French Laundry and couple more places in Napa isn't Chicago either, just more expensive

We can just agree to disagree on this one. The SF food scene alone is pretty vibrant and constantly evolving. However this isn't just a Chicago vs SF or Napa. It's hard for Chicago to compete against the entire SF Bay Area in terms of food. Also, you may be confusing the cost of Bay Area food with NYC.

> Weather is nice, but the second year it became incredibly boring

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but most people don't like dealing with nasty slush and ice for months on end in their daily lives. Moreover, if one climate in the Bay Area gets 'boring', there are plenty of micro-climates. Also, as I've mentioned before, it's pretty easy to get to Tahoe or go to the desert if you want something really different every weekend.

> Certainly, if you get into a startup that actually makes it, gets acquired, or something like that, you have a better chance of striking it rich than in Chicago.

Ignoring the SV lottery, the Bay Area is just a better place professionally for techies than the Chi Metro.

> But then, I've moved here for personal, not professional reasons.

I don't feel that you're disproving my point that mostly locals like the MidWest better than elsewhere. Besides my main point isn't just that the SF Bay Area is more appealing than the MidWest. If I wasn't very clear, my main point was that there are many other metros in the US that are more appealing overall than the MidWest at large. Of course, different people like different things so not everyone will agree with me.

EDIT: > Crime in Chicago is very much concentrated.

Unless the data is wrong or I'm misinterpreting it, crime in Chicago doesn't look concentrated like it is in most places or in the Bay Area . It looks pretty well distributed.

I am not sure if the Bay Area is that (or any) better, food-wise, than Chicago, and I've tried most of the well-rated places in both... Matter of taste, of course.

For the difference in cost of living, I probably could fly myself from Chicago to Tahoe every week and still come out ahead. And to each his own, but I like looking in the window and knowing what season it is.

I'm not really a midwestern local, but of all the places I lived or visited in the US, I would certainly pick Chicago well ahead of Bay Area. It might be more "interesting" professionally (although I'd rather work on something actually useful, not the next Juicero or Theranos), but having some money left is pretty sweet, too.

> although I'd rather work on something actually useful, not the next Juicero or Theranos

Bay Area companies have made a lot of what we know of modern life in the 21st century possible. It's not just limited to IT either. This is the birthplace of biotech. It's a lot harder to take your comments seriously when this is what you're writing; it also shows that you're not familar with the professional side of the Bay Area. There are just a lot of companies as well as a big variety of them that give your professional life a lot more flexibilty. The concentration of companies also allow for more serendity i.e. it's not uncommon for people at Googles or FB to just meet by chance and end up working on something together. People are less risk averse and more open to new ideas. I can go on. Does this lead to ridiculous things? Of course. Mistakes are inevitable. At the same time, it's also how major breakthroughs are made.

There's a reason why a lot of things start here and not elsewhere. That said it's not totally exclusive to the valley; it's just no longer in the Midwest. Of course I could be missing something, and I've been totally wrong before and I could be wrong now or in a few years.

> For the difference in cost of living, I probably could fly myself from Chicago to Tahoe every week and still come out ahead

For SF, maybe; but the Bay Area is more than just SF. Outside of SF, Chicago is only about 20% - 30% cheaper than many other parts of the Bay Area metro.

SV does tend to exaggerate its importance. Part of the brand marketing, I guess. I also fail to see how Google and FB meeting to come up with new ways of stealing your private data is a good thing.

Seriously, sure, there are breakthroughs made in SV, too. But if you adjust for the signal/noise ratio with all the absolutely useless things that SV comes up with (and that's the majority of them -- exactly because it is only in SV that you can get financing and sometimes even sell for billions stuff like the aforementioned Juicero) you could find that cornfields of Illinois are just as innovative. They just have to come up with something that, you know, is useful.

As for prices... for anecdotal reference, I am paying about $1000 more a month for a two-bedroom on the outskirts of San Jose, in a crappy apartment cardboard apartment complex with no walking accessibility to anything, no public transport, and nothing to do than I did for a place in a Chicago midrise, with stuff like elevators and garages, 2 minutes from subway, 10 minutes walk from some of the best restaurants in the country, walking distance to downtown, real soundproofing etc. etc.

Sure, I guess Gilroy might compare with Chicago prices slightly better (but then, houses there are at least 2-3 times as expensive as a comparable Chicago suburb; and Chicago wouldn't stink of garlic, either). And a place 3 hours away from anything... why would I want to live there in the first place?

> I also fail to see how Google and FB meeting to come up with new ways of stealing your private data is a good thing.

It doesn't literally have to be just Google & FB. There are plenty of other companies here such as MS, Amazon, NVidia, Intel, AMD and so on. Having a large number of programmers, engineers, and scientists in one location tends to produce a lot of breakthroughs and innovation, similar to what happened with the glass makers in renaissance venice.

> SV does tend to exaggerate its importance. Part of the brand marketing,

Yes, I guess the place where the first commercially viable microprocessor and smart phone were created isn't very important. Most of the work of the foundation of what later became the internet was done here as well. There's a really long list of acheivements that overshadow the bread and circus that's inevitably forgotten.

> As for prices... for anecdotal reference, I am paying about $1000 more a month for a two-bedroom on the outskirts of San Jose

Again, I feel that you're missing (or continuing to ignore) my main point. Despite its problems, Chicago is probably still a great city. The problem is that it has a lot more competition (not including the SF Bay Area) in the 21st century.

Is there any company out there who actually says “our compensation is NOT competitive?” That’s pretty much the lowest bar. When I hear “competitive salary” it means the company can’t think of a more positive word to describe it that is also truthful.

Maybe not but there are plenty of companies who don’t say their company is competitive.

I'm really not sure what your point is. If you're losing candidates based on compensation being too low, then you're not competitive.

Everyone at least says their compensation is competitive—-it’s not a way for an employer to differentiate. As a candidate, when I see the word “competitive” that tells me it’s lower than “generous,” “excellent,” “top of market,” basically lower than any other description of compensation out there.

Yes, "Next job opportunity" is the biggest stumbling block in the midwest. It's workable, but more difficult when you become more specialized.

I've always assumed this is the same everywhere, but I've never received a competitive raise outside of my first year with a company. If you come in and make some big adjustments that save money, you might (maybe) get a bump, but after that they take it for granted. I've only ever kept up with inflation (especially health care inflation), by changing employers, so "next job" is a huge consideration.

These seem like related complaints: low pay doesn't attract top talent. Most of the people looking for higher pay would likely go to Minneapolis or Chicago.

when you factor in the cost of housing in the bay area, I'd be willing to bet anywhere outside the bay area will compensate you much better.

This might not matter if you're a 20 year old deciding between renting a 8' room for 1500$ or 200$. But it most certainly will matter once your in your thirties with a family comparing buying the 3 million dollar crap whole in palo alto vs a nice decent house at 300K (in madison).

I think the best way to go is spend 5 years working in the bay area, save as much as you can. And then get OUT while you still can before you set down roots and meet someone.

Madison has a lower cost of living, but my experience there (working and looking for work), admittedly dated by half a decade, is that the variety and quality of engineering work pales in comparison to that available in bigger hubs. It's mostly very mundane work for one of the many insurers there, maybe Epic, etc. It's also generally very poorly compensated relatively.

That’s a slightly ancillary point to mine. Regardless, a lot has changed in the last two years even (and we’ve had to raise salaries to compensate). It has a ways to go but I’d like to think we’re proof of the potential that is there today. (We didn’t even exist 5 years ago anyways!)

Also I’d like to think what we’re working on isn’t mundane!

That just means more opportunity to hire people for an interesting, funded startup.

Not necessarily: the greater portion of talent there are still there because they lack the desire or ability to work at interesting startups, funded or not. Compensation and opportunity abundance both will have to significantly change that.

My experience hiring here right now is that we have more interesting, qualified candidates than we can possibly hire. If we were struggling to fill open positions with great talent I wouldn't be here. Compensation has gone up across the board to remain competitive, which is a good thing. This has changed dramatically in the last few years, especially as remote work has changed the hiring landscape.

It's a great time to be an engineer anywhere, including Madison.

>I'm glad we stayed put, especially as we've started to focus on real revenue and scaling, and less on trying to be hot for the purposes of raising a big early round. I feel like the market for engineers around here is becoming an advantage for us, and we're not having to fight the same talent wars as those on the coasts. That matters.

Would you say there's any other advantage to your location besides being able to pay people less and having cheaper rent?

Your question sounds pretty sarcastic, but yes, I do think we’re able to focus on building a big company and not getting caught up in the high burn, rocket ship or bust game that is dooming a lot of valley companies and resulting in many premature acquisitions (or worse). People think midwesterners think small, but I don’t relate to that.

We changed the baity title to the less baity subtitle.

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