Houston, TX:

Where are you, and what do you do?

I'm engineering hire number one at a startup--I do primarily technical development, but I also train up the new people on the team and drive process improvements (pushing the use of things like short sprints, issue tracking and code merging with Github, etc.)

I also do sysadmin and super light DBA work (one of my guys is strictly better at that than I am, but I can make progress when I need to), and I also freely give feedback about what the company is doing and whether or not I think that's a good idea. It's my third (arguably fourth) startup I've been a part of, and the second I haven't founded myself, so I feel no hesitation in speaking my mind.

What's the economic/cultural difference between Google/Facebook and a startup with VC funding?

So, we're raising our series A having brought in some institutional investors, and so money is tight. I'm working on an old workstation with some new monitors, whereas a lot of companies later in their funding cycle will seemingly just give developers whatever they want--which is a good policy, because developers are expensive compared to hardware.

My previous startup here operated out of the attic of a machine shop, which we'd drywalled and run cable for, so I've been through worse--we're just in that weird spot between "must look professional for clients" and 'can't afford to give each developer nice hardware".

Economically, we're still finding product/market fit, and so the business team is constantly looking at new opportunities--some of them outside our core product and technical expertise--and that means that there is always the temptation to go chase "easy money" doing services work or consulting.

By contrast, my friends at Google and Facebook and Amazon seem to have no problem getting funding for basic development tools, and their product is pretty well defined. So well defined, in fact, that they get to sometimes play with really nifty technologies.

At the same time, the bureaucracy of those places is kind of insane compared to a shop with less than 10 people, and it shows in the way they talk. One was visiting during a hackathon this weekend, and while I was trying to finish some code they just kind of prattled on about their software review process and some other things, and I couldn't help but imagine that that sort of informal sit-down-and-waste-time talking about stuff instead of working could be pretty common over there for anyone above line-coder status.

What is it like for those who make salaries but don't get big payouts from stock and IPOs?

Cost of living in Houston is low, but let's not kid ourselves--the ongoing erosion of the middle class and the concentration of wealth means that, if you aren't making an exit, you might as well not even be playing. In a city as awash with money as this one is, you need only take a trip to the Galleria or certain bars to be reminded what fuck-you money looks like.

So, it's constantly on my mind what my payout is going to be, because it's easy to get a salaried middle-class white-collar engineering job here. In a startup, that translates to wanting to take risks and fail fast. If it doesn't work out, I can try again. Conversely, if the startup is being conservative and being run more like an SMB, I question why I'm still there.

How many programmers strike it rich? Are they making enough to buy houses and send kids to school?

Houses here are cheap, though schools vary widely, so even a modest salary can let you be a homeowner in five or ten years. That said, this city doesn't pay its talent as well as it could, and that means a lot of people who can't find a forward-thinking company will bail and go West or to Austin (which is a joke in and of itself).

Will their high salaries last? And if they don't, what will programmers do?

We don't really have high salaries, so if the bubble pops, it probably won't effect us much. What does effect Houston, though, is whatever the oil & gas industry is doing--the low gas prices have forced a lot of engineers out of work. That said, they'll all probably be hired back when that is fixed.

What do most programmers do in your city?

There are a lot of shops doing enterprise stuff--AlertLogic is a big Erlang shop that exited recently, Schlumberger and other energy folks have large software teams, BMC is still crumbling along doing database and services stuff. There are a few different devops/sysadmin shops here, like CPanel and HostGator (more admins than coders).

There are a lot of little consultancies, ranging from WordPress site creation to weird high-performance big-data analytics for energy. There're a decent number of startups, varying from consumer to tech to medical to energy, and all have found a place here--which is good, because it means developers can circulate if they have to and can have people to talk shop with.