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Google spinoff Chronicle boosts Chicago’s tech cred by hiring engineers here – Crain’s Chicago Business


When Google’s parent, Alphabet, decided to spin off a cybersecurity company from its skunkworks in Silicon Valley and needed to start building out its tech team, it looked to Chicago.

The startup, named Chronicle, has begun quietly staffing up software engineers and data scientists, high-paying jobs that draw top-shelf talent to one of the hottest parts of tech.

“The plan is for Chicago to be the largest engineering organization outside of our headquarters in Silicon Valley,” says James Megquier, who oversees Chronicle’s engineering team in Chicago and spent nearly a dozen years as a software engineer at Google, which already employs several hundred engineers among a workforce here that now tops 1,000. “They’re confident in the talent here.”

Other tech giants also are gaining confidence in the local pool of engineering talent, boosting the city’s credibilty as a technology center. As they hire more technologists here, Chicago is starting to overcome its image as a sales outpost for Silicon Valley. Engineers are the backbone of tech companies, the people who design and build new products. The more engineers Chicago gets, the more its stature rises as a tech hub that can attract and retain digital talent.

“For us (Chicago) is a no-brainer,” Megquier says, citing access to talent. “And we want to be near big, important customers. When you’re in Silicon Valley, it’s saturated in its talent pool. Chicago is growing.”

He won’t specify how many workers Chronicle plans to hire, other than to say it’s planning to grow fast. It’s likely the company will hire a couple of dozen engineers.

As one of the nation’s largest cities, Chicago has the sixth-largest pool of tech workers, with about 140,000, just behind Seattle. But it doesn’t have the cachet of Seattle, Boston or Austin, Texas—which have fewer tech workers overall but are popular choices among big West Coast tech companies for engineering offices.

As home to nearly three dozen Fortune 500 companies, Chicago has been more of a sales hub for tech firms, such as Facebook, Salesforce and Amazon. Even Google’s Chicago operation, which anchors the Fulton Market area that’s become a hotbed for tech, started out as primarily a sales office.

EXPANSION

Salesforce, which plans to move into a new office tower on the Chicago River and add 1,000 jobs by 2023, has more than 1,500 employees in Chicago, where it has acquired several tech companies. It has some tech staff here, but most of the headcount is non-tech. Facebook, which signed a lease for more than 250,000 square feet of space downtown a year ago, has a few hundred workers here, mostly in sales and recruiting, but it has not opened an engineering office.

Other tech companies, however, are adding tech staffers to their Chicago offices. Google declines to disclose specific numbers, but people familiar with its local operation estimate the tech staff totals about 300, or nearly one-fourth of the workforce. Four years ago, it had about 100 engineers out of a Chicago workforce of 600. Glassdoor, an online platform for crowdsourced information on employers and job postings, opened a Chicago office three years ago focused on sales. The company, based in a San Francisco suburb, recently announced it would add software engineering jobs in Chicago.

Last year, ServiceNow, a software company based in Santa Clara, Calif., opened an engineering office in Chicago with plans to hire 150 by the end of 2020.

“Folks on the coasts are starting to notice Chicago. Over the past five or 10 years, there’s been a huge change,” says Megquier, a Chicago native who worked for Google in Boston before returning home about eight years ago. “There’s a sense of a tech community on the upswing that’s hungry for more.”

Chronicle, which grew out of Google’s own work in combating hackers and security threats around the globe, is likely to be a magnet for top-shelf talent. The more options available to engineers, the more likely they’ll stay in Chicago or be willing to take a job here. “It’s another company doing really important work and another sign there are a lot of great engineers here,” says Brian Fitzpatrick, who left Google four years ago to become chief technology officer of Tock, a restaurant-software startup. “What engineers want is to work on interesting problems, with a good team at a place that respects what they do.”

Economics are driving West Coast companies to look more closely at Chicago. The big tech companies have enjoyed explosive growth in the past decade, and they’ve bid up the price of talent and the cost of living in Northern California to unsustainable levels. Seattle and Austin are on the same path.

BlueCrew, which created a software app to match temp workers and employers, recently moved from California to Chicago. “We realized we were not going to be able to grow as fast as we wanted in the Bay Area,” says CEO Adam Roston, a 37-year-old Wilmette native who spent the past five years on the West Coast. “Retention is harder. We wanted a larger city for both access to talent and customers. There are tons of customers here.”

Even though he and BlueCrew founder Gino Rooney are from Chicago, they weren’t homesick. “It’s about lifestyle and cost of living. Chicago strikes a real balance.”



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