An open letter to the Minneapolis–St. Paul IT community By Matt Sharples, Founder & CEO, TriCom Technical Services — May 2026
What thirty years of placing engineers in this metro is telling me about the next ten.
The Twin Cities does not trade in swagger. It trades in throughput — buyers who know what problem they want solved, technologists who have shipped at scale for two decades inside the same Fortune 500, and a quiet conviction that anything worth building takes longer than a press release. That posture is exactly why our market gets misread right now by people who only watch the coasts.
The macro headlines are loud — over 1.1 million U.S. layoffs through November 2025, tech cuts near 96,000 in Q1 2026, and AI/ML pay up 9.2% year-over-year at the same time. The Twin Cities story underneath is almost nothing like what's playing out in San Francisco, Austin, or Chicago, and it deserves to be told on its own terms. What follows is what's distinctive to this metro, where the risk actually sits, and where the next decade of value gets created.
1. The world's #1 health technology cluster, about to matter more than ever
Minnesota is officially Medical Alley — the #1 Health Tech Cluster in the world: more than 800 health and life sciences organizations and over 500,000 employees. UnitedHealth, Medtronic (10,000+ MN employees), Boston Scientific, Abbott, 3M Health Care/Solventum, Coloplast, and Mayo Clinic anchor a supplier network running hundreds deep. Medical device manufacturing alone is a $4.4B market — and that's just the manufacturing layer.
What's new is what's running on top of that base.
Medtech-AI convergence is now a hiring profile, not a research program. Mayo Clinic's 10-year partnership with Google brought a Google office to Rochester where Google engineers sit alongside Mayo physicians. UnitedHealth is committing $1.5–1.6B to AI in 2026 alone, with 22,000 software engineers and 80%+ using AI to write code or build agents. Optum Tech is recruiting Director-level Applied AI leaders in Minnetonka to run 20–50+ engineer organizations under HIPAA-grade governance. Medtronic is embedding AI into its monitoring platforms at scale. The skill stack this creates — engineers and data scientists who can ship AI inside FDA-regulated, HIPAA-bound environments without breaking the rails — exists in Minnesota in a density that exists almost nowhere else.
The cyber stress on this cluster is also rare. Twin Cities Business puts roughly 6,500 cybersecurity roles open in Minnesota at any given time, with a 78% supply-to-demand ratio (Nucamp). ISC2 puts the U.S. shortfall at 522,000. In a metro where the largest industry is healthcare data, that isn't an IT problem — it's a patient-safety problem and a board-level problem.
What this looks like in a 2026 intake meeting: the req still reads "Senior Software Engineer" or "Security Engineer III," but the underlying ask has shifted. Hiring managers want people who can sit in a Class II device review or a HIPAA risk assessment and reason out loud about which parts of a workflow an LLM can safely accelerate, which parts it can't, and how to document the difference for FDA, OCR, or an internal QMS audit. They want analysts who can prompt an AI well enough to draft a claims rule and catch when the model fabricated a CPT code. They want security leads who understand both the MITRE ATT&CK chain and the clinical consequences of a downed PACS. Those candidates aren't coming from bootcamps — they're coming from fifteen years inside Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Optum, Mayo, and the Twin Cities medtech supplier network.
2. The headquarters economy is the most underrated edge in American tech
Minneapolis–St. Paul has more Fortune 500 headquarters per capita than any major metro in the country — a position that traces back to a contested 1987 special session that kept companies rooted here when corporate raiders were unwinding the rest of the Midwest. UnitedHealth, Target, U.S. Bancorp, Best Buy, 3M, General Mills, Ameriprise, C.H. Robinson, Land O'Lakes, Ecolab, Thrivent, Securian, Polaris, Hormel, Xcel, Solventum, plus privately-held giants like Cargill, Andersen, and Mortenson (Greater MSP). It is the most under-priced strategic asset in American tech right now.
Why it matters for talent and tenure. This density produces technologists who have shipped enterprise-scale software inside regulated, multi-billion-dollar P&Ls. Median Twin Cities tech wages run $104,820, with senior engineers at $200K+ and ML engineers at $260K+ (Nucamp) — in a metro where housing runs 20% below the national average. Local tech unemployment is 1.7%; tech contributes ~$37.5B to state GDP (MnTech). And Minnesota workers stay: DEED data shows the state's "Firm Headquarters" sector has an 82% wage growth from short- to long-tenure workers, the highest of any sector. Compare that to the ~2-year median tenure inside large coastal tech companies. In an AI transition where every enterprise is retrofitting decades of business logic into agentic systems, the institutional memory inside our Fortune 500 stack is the moat.
Why it matters beyond healthcare. The Twin Cities is also the Midwest's retail-tech center. Target is recruiting Lead GenAI Engineers and Cybersecurity AI Engineers at $132K–$286K. Best Buy rebuilt its customer experience around generative AI with Google, OpenAI, and Accenture, and is pursuing agentic commerce. Cargill, General Mills, and Land O'Lakes are running production AI in food and ag — Land O'Lakes co-developing "Oz" with Microsoft as a five-year partner. No other Midwest metro has this combination of retail-tech, food-and-ag-tech, and medtech under one talent pool.
What density does to the rhythm of the work is the piece outsiders miss. Inside MSP's Fortune 500 cluster, people ship through real change-control, real audit trails, real cross-functional reviews — and they spend years inside the same systems, watching second- and third-order effects play out. That tempo produces engineers, architects, and PMs who can be trusted with consequential systems on day one. It also produces a quieter labor market, where the best moves happen through introductions between people who have known each other since their first co-op at Medtronic, Cargill, or U.S. Bank. Thirty-plus years in this metro has taught me the firms that treat hiring as a continuous, in-person discipline — meeting candidates before there's a req, calling references by phone, walking the floor at MnTech and Medical Alley events — consistently land the people the algorithms miss.
3. The quiet migration — and what we should actually do about it
What's happening at UnitedHealth is the talent story shaping this metro right now, and it deserves concrete terms. UnitedHealth, the largest company in Minnesota by revenue, has quietly moved ~2,000 positions — technology development, data analytics, and corporate strategy in particular — from Minnetonka to Dallas and Nashville over 18 months. The drivers are familiar to any multi-state employer: cost of operations, talent depth in target markets, post-pandemic real-estate decisions, and the broader tax and regulatory frame underneath. Optum is also closing 16 clinics and laying off hundreds. CEO Stephen Hemsley has reaffirmed Minnetonka as headquarters, and the long-term Minnesota commitment is real — but the near-term shift in where roles sit is also real.
These aren't statistics. They're the engineers who shipped UnitedHealth's first cloud migration, the data scientists who built early claims-AI prototypes inside Optum, the analysts behind the medical-economics models the rest of the industry now copies — most with fifteen or twenty years inside one of the most influential health-IT operations ever built. A Dallas relocation or a local buyout isn't a slide-deck decision. It's a spouse's job at Allianz or Securian, a kid halfway through Edina or Wayzata schools, an aging parent in Brooklyn Park, a hockey season, a lake cabin, and twenty years of compounded equity in this community. Those are the actual stakes behind "workforce reduction" and "site rationalization."
The local context layers in fast. Best Buy took a $114M restructuring charge in late 2025 with more WARN filings in early 2026 and is offshoring Geek Squad phone support. GAF filed a WARN for 120 Minneapolis layoffs, and Nilfisk, EDS, Vollrath, and Nordstrom-MN all filed significant 2025–2026 WARN actions. Tax conversations are live heading into the 2026 session. Minnesota's real edge has always been the package — talent, quality of life, schools, healthcare, civic infrastructure — and the policy frame works best when it's tuned to keep that package competitive for the long haul.
The college bench underneath all of this is one of the strongest in the country, and it's the single biggest reason the Twin Cities can absorb a shock like this and rebuild quickly. The University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering graduates one of the largest CS classes in the Big Ten and feeds Medtronic, 3M, Target, Cargill, and U.S. Bank year after year. Carlson supplies the analytics and product talent. The University of St. Thomas anchors a deep applied-engineering and software bench across Medical Alley and the financial cluster. Macalester, Carleton, and St. Olaf punch far above their size on quantitative talent. Augsburg, Hamline, Bethel, and St. Catherine widen access — St. Catherine in particular has put more women into Twin Cities tech roles than any institution in the state. Minnesota State Mankato's project-based CS program ships graduates straight into Fortune 500 teams via four semester-long industry projects. Dunwoody and the MnSCU two-year stack — Normandale, Century, Hennepin Tech, Saint Paul College — are the practical, hands-on backbone that produces the systems engineers, network admins, and applied-AI technicians most employers actually need. Every one of these schools sits inside a 90-minute drive of downtown Minneapolis. That's not a coincidence. That's a moat.
If you're hiring at a medtech firm, financial-services anchor, or mid-market integrator, the engineers coming out of UnitedHealth, Optum, and Best Buy this year are exactly the seasoned operators your AI and modernization roadmaps need. This depth of regulated-industry experience won't be available locally again for a long time. Compress your loops, give honest feedback inside a week, and underwrite offers that reflect twenty years of compounded judgment.
If you're a UnitedHealth, Optum, or Best Buy alum, demand for your experience is broader than the trackers suggest — Medical Alley, the medtech-supplier bench, Cargill and the food-and-ag stack, the Securian / Thrivent / U.S. Bank cluster, and the enterprise-software roster up and down the 394 and 494 corridors. Use the network this metro built around you. Minnesotans tend to wait too long to ask for help — don't. If a conversation with us is useful, my team is reachable, no expectation we're the right fit on any specific role. Our W2 contractor program has carried full medical, dental, and immediately-vested 401(k) since long before that was standard.
If you're a civic, business, or policy leader, be precise about what makes this region stick. Name the tradeoffs headquartered companies are weighing and address them plainly. Invest visibly where our advantages compound — K–12 outcomes, the U of M and the broader college bench, the Mayo network, the cooperative and ESOP legacy that keeps companies rooted here. Most technologists watching this conversation are choosing to stay. The work is to keep that choice obvious.
4. The thing the Twin Cities does not do well — and why it matters now
I won't write a love letter to this market without naming the gap. The same Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center / Heartland Forward report that confirms our Fortune 500 density also flags a real weakness: the Twin Cities ranks near the bottom of peer metros on new-firm formation, tech-job growth velocity, and small-business lending under $1M. Nearly 5 patents per 1,000 workers and $22B in exports tell you we have R&D depth and late-stage capital. The earliest stage is the pinch point. We are excellent at scaling, mediocre at starting.
That matters more than it used to, for three reasons.
The supply side isn't coming to rescue us. Minnesota produces strong engineers, but the state ranks last in the nation for K–12 computer science access, and the 2026 college-enrollment cliff will tighten the funnel further. MnTech projects only 39,000 tech openings statewide through 2029 at 0.8% annual growth. The shortage is structural. Genesys Works Twin Cities (300+ partners, 3,700+ paid internships), MnTech's High-Tech Alliance and MSP TechHire, PRIME Digital Academy, IT Ready, Minnesota's Dual-Training Pipeline, Step Up, and Metropolitan State's MN Cyber Range aren't auxiliary efforts. They're the supply side. Every employer who hires from them tightens the loop for the next class.
A third of our tech employment now reports to a company headquartered somewhere else. Our 2025 Twin Cities Tech Talent Trends survey puts the figure at 34%. That fraction sits outside our employer-led civic infrastructure: not at MnTech events, not in Greater MSP working groups, not on the boards that shape the next generation of technologists. For employers, the 2026 Global Workforce Trends Report reports 56% hit identity-related candidate issues in the past year and 82% encountered falsified employment statements — highest of any industry. AI-driven sourcing and AI-driven impersonation are now arms-racing each other at the front door of every distributed hiring funnel.
The counterweight is real, though. Minnesota nets roughly +7,800 25-to-34-year-olds a year (Greater MSP Regional Indicators) — the prime tech-hire band — and Greater MSP has historically reported ~30,000 professionals moving into the metro from out of state annually against ~28,000 leaving, with tech consistently the most-demanded occupation inside that flow. Make It MSP, MSP Tech, and the campus-recruiting partnerships behind them exist because the inbound pipeline is meaningful and worth contesting for. The Minnesota answer to both the distributed-hiring risk and the attraction opportunity is the one this state has always defaulted to: do the unglamorous diligence — in-person conversations, references called not just emailed, technical screens that actually probe depth, and the kind of welcome that gets a relocated engineer to stay through their second winter. TriCom's four-week placement guarantee, twice the industry norm, exists because that diligence is the job. In 2026 it's also a competitive moat.
And this is exactly why the entry-level door has to stay open. The numbers nationally are alarming: junior hiring at Big Tech has collapsed from 32% of new hires in 2019 to roughly 7% today, entry-level tech postings are down ~73% year-over-year with many "entry-level" reqs quietly filled by senior engineers, and Stanford's Digital Economy Lab has documented a ~20% employment decline for software developers aged 22–25 since late 2022 — with AI cited explicitly in 25% of March 2026 tech layoffs. The math employers are running is blunt: a $20–30/month coding assistant against a junior who needs six to twelve months of ramp. The short-term P&L wins. The ten-year leadership pipeline does not. Every senior engineer in our Fortune 500 stack today started as somebody's junior hire — usually inside a Twin Cities employer that was willing to invest a year before the work paid back. That bargain has been the quiet engine of this metro for forty years, and it is the first thing AI-era cost discipline cuts. If we let it go, the same depth of regulated-industry judgment that makes Medical Alley irreplaceable today simply does not exist in 2036.
The Twin Cities is unusually well-positioned to refuse that trade. Genesys Works, IT Ready, PRIME Digital Academy, Minnesota's Dual-Training Pipeline, Step Up, and the MN Cyber Range already produce vetted, work-ready candidates — most of them screened harder than the average four-year CS graduate ever is. What they need from employers is not more programs. They need open reqs, paid apprenticeships that pair juniors with seniors on AI-augmented work (the Stripe model: juniors review AI output, write verification tests, build judgment under mentorship), and a recognition that the cheapest hire today is the most expensive one to backfill in 2032. Every Twin Cities employer who keeps a meaningful entry-level door open in 2026 is doing two things at once: training their own next decade of senior engineers, and giving the +7,800 young professionals showing up here every year a reason to build their careers in this metro instead of passing through it.
The next decade of value will be created between our Fortune 500 anchors and our underbuilt early-stage ecosystem — and that gap is starting to close. The Twin Cities hosts a real homegrown enterprise-software roster: Jamf, SPS Commerce, Calabrio (now part of Verint via Thoma Bravo's $2B 2025 acquisition), Code42, Field Nation, plus a deepening medtech-software bench across Medical Alley. The University of Minnesota's Supercomputing Institute now offers faculty access to a Quantinuum quantum computer built right here. Active development across the metro approaches $25 billion — the Blue and Green Line extensions, MSP Airport modernization, the Minneapolis Big Build ($323M in 2026), the $600M Capital City Live renovation, Target Field upgrades. Every one of these is, underneath, a tech project — venue networks, fare and identity systems, smart-building infrastructure, transit operations stacks, fan-experience apps. A decade of digital workload landing in the laps of exactly the mid-market firms and integrators that hire the people we place every day.
The work in front of us is to translate Fortune 500 throughput into founder-stage velocity, keep our largest employers anchored here, and widen the on-ramp for people entering the field. That's a different agenda than Austin, Nashville, or Columbus are running. It suits us.
A note to the people who actually run this market
TriCom has been placing technologists here for more than three decades, and we run our second office out of the Twin Cities for a reason. Our work with Cargill goes back to the early 2000s, and the lessons from that relationship — long horizons, deep technical benches, judgment built over many cycles — still shape how we hire and place people across this region. Minnesota rewards people who play long games. The 2026 market we see here is healthier and more interesting than the layoff narrative suggests, and more demanding of the people who lead it.
If you sit on a hiring desk this year, the most useful posture is conviction. The technologists circulating right now — UnitedHealth and Optum veterans, Best Buy alumni, Mayo and Medtronic engineers eyeing their next chapter, professionals coming home from Seattle and the Bay — are not bargain talent. They're the people who will run your AI program, your cloud build, and your security maturity work for the next decade. Hire accordingly.
If you're early or mid-career here, the durable skills are the ones this metro already cultivates well: data engineering paired with regulated-industry context, AI fluency layered on legacy systems knowledge, security calibrated to clinical, financial, or industrial consequences. Don't chase coastal compensation headlines. Do the math on equity, family proximity, schools, the seven-month run from the State Fair through Boundary Waters season. The career arc that builds here is rarely the loudest, but it's consistently the longest.
For the broader Twin Cities IT community, the inheritance is unusually rich: a century of cooperatives, family-controlled companies, and ESOPs that grew people instead of arbitraging them; a research university that still pulls weight in computing and quantum; a medical-technology cluster with no real peer on the planet; a culture that rewards craftsmanship and the long view. None of it is automatic, and none of it survives without people choosing to invest locally rather than chasing the next geography.
That work — hiring with intention, mentoring deliberately, building pipelines, treating placements as relationships and not transactions — is what TriCom has been about since 1994. It's also what this region has done well for far longer. I'd like to think the next decade rewards us for sticking with it.
With respect, and looking forward to whatever comes next together,
— Matt
Matt Sharples is the Founder and CEO of TriCom Technical Services, an IT staffing firm headquartered in Leawood, KS with a second office in Minneapolis–St. Paul. TriCom places IT professionals across 30+ states in contract, contract-to-hire, and direct placement engagements.
Sources
Medical Alley / MN DEED — #1 Health Tech Cluster in the World | IBISWorld — Minnesota Medical Device Manufacturing | Mayo Clinic + Google 10-Year Strategic Partnership | Google's Rochester Office | STAT — UnitedHealth's AI Transformation & 22,000 Engineers | Yahoo Finance — UnitedHealth $1.5B+ AI Investment | Optum Tech — Director Applied AI & Data Science Listing | DeviceTalks — Medtronic AI & Monitoring Strategy | Twin Cities Business — Cybersecurity Skills Gap | Nucamp — MSP Cybersecurity Job Market | ISC2 / Cybersecurity Guide — 2026 Skills Gap Report | Technical.ly — MSP Fortune 500 Density & Startup Gap | LinkedIn / Technically News — Fortune 500 per Capita Origin Story | Greater MSP — Major Employers | TriCom Twin Cities Tech Talent Trends Report 2026 | MnTech — State of Tech Talent | MnTech — High-Tech Alliance & MSP TechHire | Auxis — IT Salary Trends 2026 | Nucamp — Cost of Living vs Tech Salaries in MSP | MN DEED — Job/Career Tenure by Industry | Centum Search / LinkedIn — Tech Tenure Benchmarks | VentureBeat — Minnesota as the Midwest's Retail-Tech Center | Target Careers — GenAI Engineer (Brooklyn Park) | Target Careers — Cybersecurity AI Engineer | Forbes — Best Buy AI Customer Experience | Yahoo / CX Dive — Best Buy Agentic Commerce | NAM — Cargill, General Mills AI in Manufacturing | Land O'Lakes + Microsoft AI Partnership ("Oz") | Capital Flight — UnitedHealth Job Migration to TX/TN | RSM — MN Worldwide Combined Reporting | Star Tribune — Optum Clinic Closures & Layoffs | UnitedHealth CEO Response to MN Officials | Star Tribune — Best Buy Restructuring | WARN Database — Best Buy Filings | Strauss Borrelli — GAF Minneapolis WARN | Patch — Minnesota's Largest 2025 WARN Layoffs | Ramsey County — Cybersecurity & K–12 CS Gap | Genesys Works Twin Cities | Achieve Twin Cities — Step Up | MN Department of Labor — Dual-Training Pipeline | StateScoop — Metropolitan State MN Cyber Range | First Advantage — 2026 Global Workforce Trends Report | Greater MSP — Regional Indicators Dashboard (Net Migration 25–34) | Star Tribune — Greater MSP CEO on Talent Attraction & Retention | ByteIota — Big Tech Junior Hiring Collapse 32% → 7% | Hakia — Entry-Level Tech Postings Down 73% | SoftwareSeni — Stanford Digital Economy Lab on AI & Junior Developer Decline | DEV Community — AI Cited in Q1 2026 Tech Layoffs | PRIME Digital Academy | Creating IT Futures — IT Ready | University of Minnesota — College of Science & Engineering / Computer Science | Carlson School of Management | University of St. Thomas | Macalester College — Mathematics, Statistics & Computer Science | Carleton College — Computer Science | St. Olaf College — Computer Science | Augsburg University — Computer Science | Hamline University | Bethel University — Computer Science | St. Catherine University — Computer Science | Minnesota State Mankato — Computer Science | Dunwoody College of Technology | Cherry Bekaert — PE 2025/2026: Calabrio + Verint Acquisition | UMN — Quantinuum Quantum Computing in the Twin Cities | FOX 9 — $600M Capital City Live | Minneapolis $323M 2026 Construction Plan | Minneapolis $25B Transformation Overview | Zone Coverage — Target Field Operating System Upgrades