AIM Institute Technology Blog

Archive for July, 2010

Techies reject coasts for ‘Silicon Prairie’

By Josh Rubin, CNN
July 16, 2010

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* High tech workers on U.S. coasts moving to heartland for better lifestyle
* Recent openings include developers, backend coders, traditional IT positions
* Salaries can be 25 percent lower in some regions, but so is cost of living
* Consultant Clint Brauer left California for Kansas: “I’m at peace out here”

Wichita, Kansas (CNN) — At a table in Caffe Moderne, a coffee bar in downtown Wichita, sat a couple of young Kansans sipping coffee and working away on Macbook Pros. Terms like “content management systems” and “web integration” floated in the air as Clint Brauer taught a local about his business.

Thirteen years ago, Brauer couldn’t wait to get out of the Sunflower State. “I just didn’t see the opportunities in Kansas,” he said. “I grew up in a small town outside of Wichita, went to Kansas State … and so I moved to the West Coast to get into high tech.”

Brauer traveled from the prairie to the Hollywood Hills and spent his 20s living the kind of life he’d fantasized about while growing up in the small town of Haven.

“It was a really exciting time. Life was about work.” Brauer worked, made a career in consulting, and became the managing editor of Cyberread, an e-book company.

The coasts have always held a great deal of appeal for techies. Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, and New York and Washington are hubs for the young and cyber-savvy.

A generation of young workers flocked there at the turn of the millennium, drawn by job opportunities and the fast-paced lifestyle that the big cities provide. But the priorities of a 30-year-old can be dramatically different from those of a 20-something.

“I started realizing that while I loved what I did, I wanted more balance. My goal wasn’t to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company anymore but to have a better quality of life.” A change was coming for Brauer, and fortunately the Web would provide.

“I’m OK that I don’t have three different Cuban restaurants to choose from,” he jokes. “Some folks couldn’t deal with it, but I like going out to the country, going out to the lake, and enjoying the open skies.”

Not surprisingly, salaries in the heartland’s Silicon Prairie are generally lower than California’s Silicon Valley or New York’s Silicon Alley.

The average salary for software engineers in New York City is $97,370; in California, it’s $109,000. In Kansas, the average salary for the job is $85,000, according to federal stats. But if you factor in the Midwest’s dramatically lower cost of living, the possible benefits become clear.

“As high technology has become more interwoven with everything in our lives, there are bits and pieces of these industries in virtually every city,” said Mark Vitner, an economist with Wachovia. “We’re getting to the point now that the jobs are spreading out across the country from Silicon Valley and New York.”
It’s a little bit more difficult to grow your business but your costs are so low [in Kansas], your personal burn rate is much lower.
–Clint Brauer

Midwestern tech is coming into its own. Jeff Slobotski produces an event called Big Omaha that includes more than 500 of the region’s workers from Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa. The annual event just took place in May.

“We’ve got a real healthy and growing community,” said Slobotski, innovation director at the AIM Institute — a nonprofit membership organization for IT leadership.

Recent jobs for developers, coders for backend structures, as well as traditional corporate IT jobs have been filled recently by workers from the coasts, he said.

Slobotski, who runs a blog called “Silicon Prairie News” said high-tech talent and ideas are thriving in the region many coastal residents snidely refer to as “flyover country.” Some of the newer companies in Nebraska include Agile Sports/ Hudl in Lincoln, and Hayneedle.com and Rockdex in Omaha.

Biotech and green-tech industries are “still in the discovery stage,” he said. “People are talking about how to grow that.”

In Silicon Valley, longtime human resources executive Aryae Coopersmith of HR Forums has noticed a change in the past year.

“Now that the economy is waking up a little bit and there’s more hiring, our members have shifted from few concerns about retaining employees to new concerns about retaining employees,” said Coopersmith. The work-life balance in middle America could be more appealing, and there are benefits to being a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

A lot of the growth is spurred on by people like Brauer, who returned to Kansas with a decade of experience and a phone full of business contacts.

“I’d been sourcing people from all over the world for the last decade, so working for them didn’t necessitate being in L.A.”

The nature of the new economy and the technological advances of the past ten years meant that he could be based anywhere and work for clients worldwide.

“I remember one day sitting on a tractor at my parents’ and needing to be on a conference call — with clients in India. I turned down the motor, and since I had good cell service, I did it right there.”

“Business is going fine, it can be done. It’s a little bit more difficult to grow your business but your costs are so low [in Kansas], your personal burn rate is much lower,” said Brauer. “I’m at peace out here.”

I’ve spent a few years in the IT field, and one of the recurring themes I’ve seen has to do with business systems integration. A business of any size will have several operations groups that are critical to success. Common examples include accounting, inventory, personnel, order processing, and IT. It is also common to find that these centers use separate IT products to conduct business. Each center has its own internal rules and data, and if they send data to each other it’s usually a laborious affair involving batch updates and data conversions. This is not usually timely, and is fraught with problems.
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As the new HTML5 and CSS3 Web standards come online, surfers can expect to see some exciting new functionality and more elegant page layouts.  Of course, there is a catch for developers:  complete Web browser support for these standards won’t exist for awhile.  Compound that with the fact that many Web users are slow to upgrade their browsers, and it is no surprise that implementing HTML5 or CSS3 functionality is problematic.
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We use SugarCRM Pro for our contact management needs here at AIM. I like SugarCRM for it’s customizability and rich feature set. The Pro version gives us more advanced campaigns and a very strong reporting tools. However, there are just some things that you need to go directly to the database for. We needed to have a page that displayed a user’s activity over a certain period of time. Specifically, we wanted to track the following items:

• Calls to Accounts
• Calls to Contacts
• Calls to Leads
• Notes to Accounts
• Notes to Contacts
• Notes to Leads
• Meetings with Accounts
• Meetings with Contacts
• Meetings with Leads

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Ok so I’m back. This time with a post on using HTML5. Wow there is alot of new stuff in HTML5 but I’m going to focus on the some of the new FORM element goodies available since we use alot of fill-in forms on Careerlink.

First lets talk about the ‘placeholder’ attribute for the input element. Adding the ‘placeholder’ attribute and a corresponding value to a form input (type text) will display text inside of said text box matching the placeholders value. The placeholder text will disappear as soon focus is applied to that field. This is a very nifty feature and the placeholder attribute deprecates very nicely with browsers that don’t support it. Cheap and easy

Our next friend is the ‘autofocus’ attribute. This tag should have been around since the start of the Internet but now has just arrived on the scene. This attribute moves the input focus to a particular text input field upon the. The support for this attribute is limited so you will need to code a fallback javascript solution just in case.

Finally one of the things I’m really excited about is the automatic input validation that’s only present in just a few of the latest browsers at the moment, this should make basic client side input validation using javascript a thing of the past. Peace out people.

Every professional web developer knows that now is the time to start picking up HTML5. We all need to dip our toes in the water, pretend that it’s warm, and jump in. As you MAY have guessed by now, I tried HTML5 for the first time this week, and I’d like to share my experience. Bring some Doritos and a pair of flip-flops — the water’s amazing!
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