I live and work in the Chicago metropolitan area. It comprises the northern counties of Illinois and, like much of the Midwest, has challenging weather. Often, you can experience all four seasons in March. The climate creates a flintyness toward nature and forces us to be kind to one another because if nature is not pleasant, then at least we can be good to our fellow humans. It explains why Los Angeles and New York people call the Midwest friendly. The stereotype of the Midwest conceals a strong work ethic and a judgemental streak, which many of us, including myself, exhibit. Today, I want to discuss what that means in the Midwest technology business.
I joined the technology business in the mid-1990s. The main intellectual centers of technology are Silicon Valley in Northern California and New York City. New York's concentration of media company headquarters gives it a powerful grip on media-related technology. Silicon Valley became a land of myth and legend where coders got to make billion-dollar corporations. That myth has some truth because Hewlett Packard, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook found a home in the valley and became household words.
The Midwest and Chicago represent what pundits dismissively call "fly-over" country. We are land you bypass to go from east to west. To many, the Midwest is about corn, hogs, and transportation to move those goods to the remainder of the country. Truthfully, the Chicago metropolitan area fulfills a vital role in the technology ecosystem, and it is the integration and interoperability of systems. Since its founding as a city, Chicago has been a hub of communications and a link between the eastern seaboard and the western frontier. As technology begins to eat the world, the city and metropolitan areas have specialized in the less glamorous aspects of technology, which keeps the global economy chugging.
Computer systems in banking, insurance, and business span fifty years, and they must communicate, or all forms of commerce will come to a grinding halt. Computer languages span functional programming languages, object-oriented development, and large learning models. Often, these disparate systems cannot speak to each other directly, so something called middleware is written to facilitate communication. Finally, businesses, cloud companies, and purveyors of Artificial intelligence need warehouse-sized facilities to house their servers and infrastructure. The Midwest and the Chicago metropolitan area excel at these activities.
People give more thought to those things once they break, which becomes a crisis. Midwestern technology professionals take pride in running these systems at peak efficiency with no downtime. Instead of splashy conference demonstrations, we prefer working software that others can test and experience for themselves. Reliable working systems are proof of skill instead of social media credibility.
This pragmatic streak defines most technology professionals in the Chicago area. In general, we do not want to change the world but instead want to make it better, faster, more reliable, and work with other systems. It takes an engineer's mind with an illustrator's creative sensibilities. It is long nights working on knotty problems and early mornings with off-shore teams on conference calls. Hard work and innovation combine to make technology work invisible, and Chicago plays a critical part.
During the days of the first Dot-Com bubble, The Chicago Tribune published a special technical classified page called "The Digital Prairie." Sadly, the Tribune became a victim of the digital economy, but I liked their portrayal of technology as a service and infrastructure that needs maintenance. So, the story of Midwest technology is getting desperate systems to work correctly and with little fuss. To Midwesterners, everything should be plug-and-play, behaving like magic. The reality is more complex, but the goal is what makes the digital prairie so fertile.
Until next time.
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