Slashdot Mirror
The American Midwest Is Quickly Becoming a Blue-Collar Version of Silicon Valley (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: The economic engine of Silicon Valley seems to have driven right by the midwest. America's urban coastal cities have enjoyed an explosion in their technology sectors. New York's Silicon Alley and Boston's biotech corridor are world-class incubators of talent and startups. Austin (Texas), Seattle (Washington), Washington, D.C, and even Miami Beach claim a piece of the digital economy (and Silicon-something monikers). But what about Columbus and Indianapolis and Kansas City? After years in the doldrums, their fortunes are rising. Venture capital firms are setting up shop. Startups are clustering in old industrial strongholds. But the region's tech sectors look different than their coastal cousins. The midwest is seeing the rise of "mid-tech."
Alongside the traditional high-flying software jobs that are plentiful in Silicon Valley, mid-tech jobs, loosely defined as tech jobs requiring less than a college degree, are growing fast in the Midwest. While not an official designation, mid-tech jobs can be defined as skilled tech work that doesn't require a college degree: just intense, focused training on the job or in vocational programs like those of blue-collar trades of the industrial past. [...] Mid-tech jobs composed more than a quarter of all tech employment in major midwestern metropolitan areas, including Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota-Wisconsin. More than 100,000 people were employed in such jobs in these cities alone. That proportion never cracked 20% in Bay Area metropolises, the heart of Silicon Valley. While the analyses did not include all cities, it reveals the tech sector's evolution in the Midwest along different lines than Silicon Valley. The findings come from the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit public policy research group, which crunched data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. High and mid-tech jobs in midwestern cities also grew at an annual compounded rate of about 5%. What do these jobs look like? "In Kentucky, the technical skills once applied to things like calculating blast trajectories in mines are going into Javascript," reports Quartz. "The software firm Interapt has set up a training program in Eastern Kentucky to turn former coal miners and others with technical aptitude into software developers."
Alongside the traditional high-flying software jobs that are plentiful in Silicon Valley, mid-tech jobs, loosely defined as tech jobs requiring less than a college degree, are growing fast in the Midwest. While not an official designation, mid-tech jobs can be defined as skilled tech work that doesn't require a college degree: just intense, focused training on the job or in vocational programs like those of blue-collar trades of the industrial past. [...] Mid-tech jobs composed more than a quarter of all tech employment in major midwestern metropolitan areas, including Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota-Wisconsin. More than 100,000 people were employed in such jobs in these cities alone. That proportion never cracked 20% in Bay Area metropolises, the heart of Silicon Valley. While the analyses did not include all cities, it reveals the tech sector's evolution in the Midwest along different lines than Silicon Valley. The findings come from the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit public policy research group, which crunched data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. High and mid-tech jobs in midwestern cities also grew at an annual compounded rate of about 5%. What do these jobs look like? "In Kentucky, the technical skills once applied to things like calculating blast trajectories in mines are going into Javascript," reports Quartz. "The software firm Interapt has set up a training program in Eastern Kentucky to turn former coal miners and others with technical aptitude into software developers."
speaking as a former CAD/machinist/electrician for a manufacturing company in Indiana, this work has always seemed to exist and the money has always been pretty good (~75k a year) but you'll owe the devil his dues. Manufacturing companies take 1-2 downtimes a year, during which you'll likely work 60-70 hour weeks doing this "intensive" type of work TFA describes. You'll be issued a sprint direct-connect phone because managers love the idea of a walkie talkie that works even when you're asleep at home, yet they'll pretend its not something they rely on when you start expensing 1 am PTT conference calls with the furnace operators. You'll spend most of the day writing excel reports in the cramped heat-treat or shipping office on a desktop with a missing '3' key that hasnt seen an upgrade since the bush administration, only to turn around and realize your boss also expects you to reprogram a new set of Cincinnati CNC's the mover/millwrights are slowly snaking through the plant.
and dont expect to delegate any of this because your title never changed, just the money. Sure, I was still "big john" on the floor but ill be damned if anyone was helping run new hydraulics for me, or retrofit my reprogrammed fork truck scanners at the dock. Then theres your boss. Are you actually keeping up with the work? you can expect to have every other time card "flagged for further review" because your managers and leadership dont understand what you do anymore, but have come to rely so implicitly on it that your face is practically on the company card.
When i gave this kind of work up for a salaried ladder logic programmer job, I was hired back part time at twice my pay for downtime events and documentation. I miss being "big john" on the floor, but i sure as shit dont miss juggling chainsaws on a sunday for pay.
Good people go to bed earlier.
But we both know the process is "cumbersome" because of the FDA, not your company. I'm doing 800-171 compliance at a smallish airline (we some a bunch of DoD flights), and their XML idea is pretty cumbersome too. No FTP access to the 40+ security guides (STIGs) I need, so I had to write a PowerShell script to parse out the names, version numbers, revision numbers. Oh, and not all of them are at HTTPS, about half a dozen are HTTP so there's another sub-step. Oh, and SOME have a month in the name. It is the PINNACLE of standardization.
Not to mention the DoD keeps all their "good tools" locked behind their PKI. So it's either pay $$$ from a vendor for some tool, or roll it all myself. I can't really use much OSS, because that's a whole new boatload of STIGs, plus most of those tools have no STIG so I'd have to figure out a way to audit them myself. My current idea is to make a physical CentOS box for OpenSCAP and just turn it off most of the time so it won't trigger a "finding" for an audit.
As a counterpoint to your MAGA infused viewpoint, let me give you mine.
I'm originally from the Bay Area, but now live in a flyover state. I have actually lived in a flyover state now longer than I lived in California. However, most of my relatives still are in Cali and can't understand why/how I can live someplace besides the west coast. So I have experience with both the ultra lib Cali attitude and the ultra conservative flyover mentality. My politics and approach actually fall somewhere in the middle.
With that being said however, much of the the example you give is correct:
"small minded, lack diversity, and lack interesting and rich culture."
That is true, and it definitely takes getting used to and building up a thick skin. Unless you are a Trumper, you won't fit into the strip-mall, iHOP, lifted truck, AR-15, Budlight, Carls Jr, MAGA, monochromatic situation you will find yourself in. That is just the reality.
On the flipside, the stereotype of parts of California is also correct. Ultra pc weenies who take offense quite easily and are as inflexible in their approach and thinking as the most staunch NRA dipshits. They are actually two sides of the same coin.
Also, as my relatives love to point out(who are all "locals" to Cali going back to the 49ers):
No one in California is from there, especially in the Bay Area.
This is true, just ask people who live and work in the Bay Area and you'll discover they are from almost everywhere, India, Wisconsin, New York, England, Mexico, Canada, Russia, Zimbabwe, etc
I live in a flyover because I make decent money at a good company with good benefits, have a great home in an ok neighborhood and don't have to deal with the traffic, crime and expense of living in California. But to be honest, all it takes is being back for a day or two and I wish I have never left...
California is to the US what the US is to the rest of the world.
The best of everything, but the price is quite high.
If you are working with things like molecular dynamics there is a limit to how much speed you can trade off to make the code easier to write and maintain. For many of these problems we can't just buy more hardware to solve the problem since we are already at the limits of hardware. I work on a chromatography simulator which takes several minutes to do a single simulation and millions of simulations could be needed. In the end many of our runs takes a few days to work. Most of the simpler simulators run 1/100th the speed or less. Taking something from a few days to most of a year is just not going to work.
Languages like C++ are just inherently harder than languages like Python. If you want high performance you have to pay for it with something like C++ and your code will be harder to write and maintain. We work to make our code as clear and maintainable as possible in C++ but still not as simple as Python.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Last official census was in 2010. There were some estimates in recent years that show the state is still growing, but a bit slower than usual: http://worldpopulationreview.c... http://journal.firsttuesday.us...
But the ironic thing [1] is our conservative friends say many interesting things about California, but you can forget most of them. They were, for example very interested when the state's finances were in trouble, but dropped the story when we fixed it by electing Democrats.
[1] Actually that isn't ironic. The ironic thing is you need to look up the word ironic and think about it. But then, that wasn't actually ironic either.