<story><title>$1.6B in funding and $7B in exits: Chicago tech just had its best year ever</title><url>http://www.builtinchicago.org/2015/01/22/16b-funding-and-7b-exits-chicago-tech-just-had-its-best-year-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spamizbad</author><text>Eh, three things really grind me gears about the tech scene in Chicago.&lt;p&gt;1) Lots of mediocre entrepreneurs that seem to have the same story:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  - Little to no hard skills.
  - Probably got an MBA from a good B-school
  - Did a stint at a consulting firm and is going to outsmart
    the competition with all the wisdom they gained at 
    Accenture, McKinsey, BCG, Bain, or some big IL firm.
  - Does NOT have a technical co-founder but is being advised
    by some guy with a similar pedigree that attended a coding 
    bootcamp&amp;#x2F;wrote a crappy iOS app&amp;#x2F;got a CS degree... 
    but has written &amp;lt;10,000 lines of code in their life.
      - This person will interview you by giving you a fizz     
        buzz test followed by &amp;quot;lateral thinking&amp;quot; brain-teaser 
        questions). Very 90s.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I know these people exist everywhere today but there&amp;#x27;s an unusually large number concentrated in Chicago. Must be something in the water?&lt;p&gt;2) Developer compensation is roughly 10% lower (when adjusted for CoL) than it should be. And in terms of equity compensation Chicago isn&amp;#x27;t even in the same league as SV today. Getting &amp;gt;0.25% as the initial engineering hire is extremely rare here - even at companies that lack a technical co-founder.&lt;p&gt;This causes younger talent to get sucked to the coasts.&lt;p&gt;3) Many of the startups do not actively cultivate a technology or engineering culture.  I think this largely stems from Point #1 - you really do need a tech co-founder to drive that side of the company.</text></comment>
<story><title>$1.6B in funding and $7B in exits: Chicago tech just had its best year ever</title><url>http://www.builtinchicago.org/2015/01/22/16b-funding-and-7b-exits-chicago-tech-just-had-its-best-year-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>encoderer</author><text>My impression is that in Chicago -- and really everywhere outside the SF BA and NYC -- has much weaker comp for engineers.&lt;p&gt;It makes sense, really. By far the majority of SE jobs in these places are in IT departments writing line of business software. These are Java and .Net shops usually and anecdotally it seems they pay from $60-90k.&lt;p&gt;The companies where engineers are profit centers -- web startups and software companies, etc -- are desirable and attractive. Importantly, these are usually high margin businesses. In competitive markets, these companies meet engineer scarcity with attractive pay and equity packages. In places like Chicago, for every opening at 37 Signals you have 5 applicants from places like Crate &amp;amp; Barrel.&lt;p&gt;This is unfortunate especially because even here in SF I think engineers are not yet paid what they are worth. I reach this conclusion by looking at the margins of software companies and profitable internet companies. You can clearly see the value software engineers are creating.&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I&amp;#x27;m sure there are thousands of highly paid software engineers in the greater Chicago area. it&amp;#x27;s a very big city and there is a lot of money there. Hell there may be thousands of highly paid engineers in finance alone. Chicago is certainly the heart of trading in this country. I&amp;#x27;m generalizing.</text></comment>