“Brain Drain” may sound like the title of a C-grade horror flick, but it’s a real issue many cities with blossoming tech scenes face: smart, driven, talented women and men fleeing for the promise and allure of an ecosystem with top billing.
In Atlanta, that might mean engineers packing their bags for the Valley. In St. Louis, it could be a data scientist headed south for Austin. In Minneapolis, Portland, Chattanooga and Raleigh, developers buy tickets for the Big Apple.
But how big of a problem is it in Chicago tech? We talked with Capital One, which is headquartered in Virginia but is itself building up a sizable digital tech arm in the Second City. They shed some light on their own retention strategies and weighed in on whether or not Chicago faces a drainage of the, er, brainage.