Reading it back, my comment was harsher than I intended, especially with the reference to Amazon, but most of my aversion to working at a place like Google is just the shear size as well as where most of the offices are located.
I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts.
Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have friends at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other large names in the tech industry, but more often than not, when I hear them talk about their jobs, even when they are talking about them positively, I am glad I stayed in the midwest because that is what fits me the best.
> I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts.
Have you left the tiny midwest town and know that for a fact? Or do you base that on just word of mouth, articles, or..?
I have lived in a lot of different places: (New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Southern California, Northern California (don't laugh re: me splitting those!) and briefly in Illinoism Connecticut and the Dominican Replublic. ) and find value in their differentness.
I live in the Midwest, and have traveled frequently to Silicon Valley for work. It's a nice enough area in most ways, but I get a really nice view of it through travel-expensed meals and hotel accomodations where the commute to the office is 10 minutes of pleasent traffic. The experience the locals have involves more traffic and rather fewer trips to modestly nice restaurants. I don't hate the area by any means, but it certainly isn't so much better than where I live that I would want the commute or to buy 5 or 6 fairly nice houses just to live there... which is a rough approximation of the housing costs vs. where I live now.
To be clear, I'll say again it's not like I hate the Valley, but the reality is that day-to-day life between my Valley coworkers and mine just isn't that different, but sure is more expensive. If you find a Silicon Valley job from a SV company in a remote office... and there are rather a lot of them, just not all in one place... there's not that much advantage left, unless you really love something about SV specifically, which is of course a totally reasonable and sensible thing.
It's a mecca for programmers. I can go to talks on various technical topics every day of the week if I wanted to. I have spoken to the creator of Scala, the Symfony PHP framework and Optimizely. It's just really exciting (to me) to have that level of access.
Whereas my friends in Houston get to go to one conference a year (if that). But I totally agree if you want a house with land to raise kids personally I think it sucks to live here.
Chicago is midwest in geography and climate only. Someone who grew up in a typical small midwest town would feel as out of place in Chicago as in San Francisco, New York, or Paris.
Probably the closest to the vibe the person is looking for would be the Google Waterloo office where I work, or the Pittsburgh office the other poster mentioned.
It's true the sales people do out number us here in Chicago, but we do have O(100) engineers in the office. We are working on lots of cool stuff: Ads, Search, and Privacy to name a couple.
I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts.
Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have friends at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other large names in the tech industry, but more often than not, when I hear them talk about their jobs, even when they are talking about them positively, I am glad I stayed in the midwest because that is what fits me the best.