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IN THE MIDDLE
If the East Coast and West Coast are cultural yin and yang, the Midwest is its own philosophy.
Management styles are even more autocratic than they are in the East, discovered Silicon Graphics after it acquired Cray Research. Managers at Cray struggled to learn new rules of when to disseminate information to employees and when not to, says Beau Vrolyk, senior vice president of the computer systems business unit for SGI in Mountain View, Calif.
"The Midwest is more autocratic. If you're from a hierarchical background, your reaction to the dissemination of information is viewed at being done 'to' you, to undermine you. If you are from the West Coast and you don't disseminate information, you're viewed as not being a team player," Vrolyk says.
Midwesterners are also more conservative when it comes anything new - which conflicts with the latest-is-greatest attitude of the IT industry, say IT managers who live in the area. The slower pace does have its advantages. For one, the Midwest has a much lower cost of living than either coast, recruiters say.
"We get guys who are making $65,000 in the Midwest then interview in Silicon Valley or Boston and think, 'They offered me $90,000. They love me.' The truth is, you can't live as well on $90,000 there as they can on $65,000 in the Midwest," says Bob Crotinger, partner of National Engineering Search, a software engineering headhunter firm in Rochester, N.Y.
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