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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."
"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".
I must be way out of touch, because I just can't think of many specific achievements that all that world-class talent has brought about.
Processor chips - well, I think it's clear that a lot of useful progress has not been made there. GPUs, perhaps some advances. What's new in software, though? When was there last a really important new operating system? It all seems to be apps for extracting money from consumers.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I know a few people out in California silicon valley who say these companies and liberal California is pricing itself out of the business market. I think the escape to a more affordable market is in play and California may eventually be abandon by many tech companies or never considered as a place to do business.
In my neck of the woods, most of the IT companies focus on manufacturing. Their main innovations are in controls, resource planning, quality control, logistics, etc... These innovations, from the outside, are totally opaque and probably pretty boring to most end-users. However, they mean that stores can easily get the products they need to sell, stuff is easier to make, cheaper to build, and of higher quality.
The company I work for, for instance, makes software to automate regulatory filings with the FDA, which is an incredibly cumbersome process. The only electronic filing method, for instance, is formatting data using a custom XML DTD into separate files, zipping them together in a specific directory format, then uploading it, manually, via a Java 2 *swing* based desktop application.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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.
The economic engine of Silicon Valley seems to have driven right by the midwest
No it hasn't. It only seems so to clueless people on the coasts because the people who live in Silicon Valley live in a bubble. If you are looking for tech jobs, Southeast Michigan routinely outperforms Silicon Valley in R&D spending, revenue, and hiring. Why? The automotive industry uses a HUGE amount of tech. People tend to forget how much technology goes into designing and making cars. Oakland County just outside of Detroit City is one of the richest counties in the entire US. Michigan has a ridiculous amount of engineering talent - but it isn't centered around PCs and phones. It's in robots, automation, chemicals, controls, metalworking, etc.
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."
Venture capital firms have always been here in the midwest. So have startups. The culture is different and the economy doesn't look the same but none of that is anything new. It's kind of amazing how condescending folks from the coasts are about parts of the country they never bother to visit and know little about. They hear that the City of Detroit is having a hard time so they assume that the entire midwest is a desolate hell hole with no jobs and no technology.
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.
Detroit metro alone has a population of over 4 million. 100,000 people is kind of a rounding error. Plus those jobs have always been there. If you didn't know that you weren't paying attention. You don't need a four year degree to learn how to program a robot or a CNC mill but those definitely are technical jobs.
They might start moving here. Keep your nuttiness over on the coast where it belongs. ;)
Seriously though, the Midwest has always been a hub of technological innovation, it's just not the sexy kind that makes news. SE Michigan (where I am) has a large amount of talented engineers because of all the automotive companies and suppliers. We also have a lot of biotech and high tech manufacturing communities. It just seems that unless it's related to one of the major west coast tech companies no one cares. Personally I love it out here, the people are friendly and way more welcoming (my wife is from CA and seemed surprised by this when she moved here), the cost of living is low, and while we're not as trendy as the coasts, we do have a lot of trendy areas (check out Ann Arbor sometime). The only thing that sucks here is the weather, but it's not as bad as it's made out to be. There really is more to the US than the coasts.