Liquid Generation makes funny for a living. We were born in Chicago and moved to LA after closing on some financing in 2006. There are many advantages to physical proximity between the tech department and creative. I tried every way I could to build a team there. I failed. Few in LA work for a living. They audition full time; and the day job is just that. The Chicago work ethic with which I grew up and to which I had grown accustomed was completely foreign to the populace. Every young thing seems to have a demo reel or CD or be forever rushing off to Improv class. One almost had to reverse-discriminate against pretty people. This flightiness might be fine for the creative side. They have to eat while searching for their break – so they work for cheap. But programming isn’t like that. It requires a considerable attention span and, as Brooks wrote way back in the ice age: “no other human endeavor requires absolute perfection.” Hard to achieve if your mind is elsewhere. Lose a lead developer in mid-project and you have suffered a healthy blow to your budget and/or timeline. Redundancy costs money and we’re a small company. We won’t always have a full-size spare.
Entertainment is a very disingenuous business and the treatment percolates to everything. Everyone always LOVES everything and then never returns your call. Deadlines seem to be a frequency that LA techies can’t tune into. They have eyes, ears and brains so it can’t really be a hardware problem, but somewhere, something just gets lost. By comparison, Chicago has no problem at all telling you that something sucks and 15 different ways to fix it, and maybe “here, try this solution I worked up!” Some of these are helpful, many not, but still – I’d take that any day over: I LOVE IT! And then silence. Both cities have top-notch education. That can’t be the difference. What is? Is it really our winter that leaves little to do but work and drink? I was once complaining to a friend about the weather. He said if we didn’t have that we’d have 10 million people living here and it would cost as much as NYC. Well, if we keep having winters like the last one, we will put this hypothesis to scientific scrutiny. Just so long as it ends up NY and not LA. I cannot tolerate people whose pace is as if they’re wading through motor oil. I like Chicago's pace, without New York’s bite – on my head or my wallet. I like that its business IS business run by business people with timelines and accountability and tales of truth to power. I really missed it here and you will too. Don’t ever leave.
