How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Startup Communities
I live in the Midwest and would happily consider living here long-term in order to work at jobs like these, except that the jobs are generally terrible. They don&#x27;t pay well, even by lower-cost-of-living Midwest standards. Yet they do all of the same nonsense that companies do in larger urban areas: open-plan office layouts (even when private working space out here is much cheaper than the already cost-effective prices you&#x27;d pay for it in a city), Agile&#x2F;Scrum crap, various over emphasized alcohol-based social functions, ping pong tables, etc.<p>Why would a talented person stay around here for that? Most of us who like it out here like it because it&#x27;s <i>different</i> than Silicon Valley or New York, and it suits our preference better.<p>You&#x27;re not going to win with the talented people in the Midwest if you just try to make it feel like Silicon Valley Jr. -- you have to be different, with a whole different ethos that&#x27;s a bit more about the style of life here. Many people choose to live in the Midwest because they like having more personal space, they want to raise a family, they value frugality and consider cost-of-living carefully, they might possibly actually want to own property some day, and&#x2F;or they just may not personally derive much value from urban amenities.<p>But I&#x27;ve never seen start-ups or tech businesses here aim at providing a kind of working life that affords these values. It&#x27;s all still the same &quot;work hard play hard&quot; bullshit as if by making yet another app or something-as-a-service, we&#x27;re going to become masters of the fucking universe or something.<p>That stuff is already stupid even in the urban tech hubs. It just comes off even dumber when you&#x27;re farther away from the tech hubs.<p>At any rate, I question the article&#x27;s claim that there&#x27;s a talent problem in the Midwest. The problem isn&#x27;t that there are no talented people. The problem is that companies are not providing the opportunity for a lifestyle that matches up with the values of someone who would prefer to live in the Midwest.<p>If I have to work a million hours, put up with aggressive deadline culture, deal with Agile&#x2F;Scrum &quot;sprint cycle&quot; idiocy, and feign social interest in rock climbing while I code or joining the same people I&#x27;ve been working with for 10 straight hours at a bar for 2 more hours of trite conversation where I&#x27;ll be judged by how much overt social signalling my alcoholic beverage of choice emits, then fuck it. I&#x27;m just going to move to a big city and demand a big city wage and career opportunities.<p>On the other hand, if you can give me what the big city folks can&#x27;t, like say a private office where I can actually get work done and feel productive instead of listening to the person at the desk next to me chew potato chips, or you can provide me with a work environment where 40 hours is exactly all that&#x27;s expected, and also is exactly what is <i>rewarded</i> (i.e. you encourage workers to have a substantial life outside of work), and I don&#x27;t feel like you&#x27;re just doing a bunch of stuff like whisky night and ping pong to try to affiliate with the cool kids in SV, then we could talk.