Biggest IT employers (Chicago, Oak Brook: public schools, living, warehouse)

[brianjb]

Other than Groupon, what are some other companies in Chicago that hire a lot of IT people?

[chet everett]

Let's see, the Federal Government, Chicago Public Schools, the City of Chicago, Cook County... Seriously this list is a little dated but I have no doubt that is fully shows how a unlikely a private sector "tech boom" is

Chicago's largest employers

This more up-to-date version is unchanged at the top:
Business Lists - Crain's Chicago Business

Here is a list from 2007, the only "software heavyweight" on that list is SPSS with its whopping 1200 or so employees -- http://www.chicagotraveler.com/pdfs/...-2007-list.pdf

Better bet is working deep in the bowels of Chase or in some backroom operations of other financial sector...

[emathias]

Originally Posted by brianjb

Other than Groupon, what are some other companies in Chicago that hire a lot of IT people?

Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of Groupon hires aren't technical. It does hire technical people, but not on as big of a scale as most people might assume.

[chet everett]

I seem to recall that ALL the technical infrastructure of Groupon sits on top of the hsted Salesforce.com stuff (which itself is hosted by some could provider..)

Originally Posted by emathias

Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of Groupon hires aren't technical. It does hire technical people, but not on as big of a scale as most people might assume.

[tb4000]

CDW or one of the other tech resellers in the city do, but a lot of them have to start at the account manager role before getting bumped up, if you wanna do that for like a year.

[chet everett]

I'm sure there are some folks that make a real nice living working for CDW's riverfront location but I really doubt that anyone with skills in traditional IT roles (programming, systems administration, dba) would be happy sitting on phone helping folks order laptops and servers and software... CDW does have a their own integration team as well as warehouse and internally managed IT staff, but those are in the burbs....

Originally Posted by tb4000

CDW or one of the other tech resellers in the city do, but a lot of them have to start at the account manager role before getting bumped up, if you wanna do that for like a year.

[JacksonPanther]

Originally Posted by chet everett

Here is a list from 2007, the only "software heavyweight" on that list is SPSS with its whopping 1200 or so employees -- http://www.chicagotraveler.com/pdfs/...-2007-list.pdf

I don't understand - almost every company on this list has HUGE IT departments with hundreds or thousands of IT workers employed. You think McDonalds (for example) doesn't have hundreds of IT workers trooping to Oak Brook every morning? Of course they do.

You don't have to be a software company like SPSS (bought by IBM, by the way) to hire IT people.

[snoylekim]

That was true at one time , but many of the Fortune 500 leverage outsource/offshore activities for a lot of IT functions ..doesn't mean there still aren't onshore positions within IT , but the delineation often runs between Management/PM/Business Analysts onshore, development and support off ( or some mix) .. It's still an area of opportunity... but compared to the 80s 90s and 00s , I'd expect to see a decrease in the Chicago area as a whole .. Startups and smaller companies are a different story

[flamadiddle]

go to Job Search | one search. all jobs. Indeed.com and search for your specialty in Chicago. If you cannot find an IT job in Chicago, you need to change professions.

[chet everett]

McDonalds is not located in Chicago, it is headquarter in Oak Brook, at the eastern edge of DuPage Co. As others have stated it has a modest internal IT staff and relies, like most other firms in non-IT / non-computer centric industries, largely on out sourcing / project based contract IT consultants .

As more and more organizations adapt to models of smaller full time staffing the difficulty for both younger workers and those with more experience to fulfill the "skills requests" of project based staffing firms is increasingly difficult -- no one wants have a contract employee "learning on the job" and even the consultancy type firms are not "developing their people" in the rapidly changing technologies.