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3. Only list your last ~10 years of work experience.

I'm going to reiterate this here. Sure, keep a separate text file with all your work experience, salary levels, etc., that you can print out and use to quickly fill in a job application form. But that's not what you want to put out for the world to see. One of the things an employer wants to see is that you don't have any unexplained gaps in the past 10 years or so, like you might be hiding something. (Like, say, being in prison.) Beyond 10 years, they really don't care.

In my case, I was self-sufficient living off of money from a shareware program back in the mid '90s, and got tired of explaining it all the time. I was sure glad when I had enough employment experience to drop it from my resume and job application forms. I do have some time when I was living off of savings from 2006-2010, but it started off as a "sabbatical" and then the economy tanked. Even then, I got two jobs from cold calls during that time, including my current one, and will happily explain how I was able to get jobs to come to me during a bad economy, when I wasn't actively looking for employment.

Still, I think it's the remote work requirement that's the real problem for submitter. Over the past five years or so, telecommuting has fallen out of favor with companies. Even when they are willing to allow it, the company still needs to have proper infrastructure for it (VPN support, etc.) Unless you're a top-gun hotshot with a reputation (and not just the word "kickass" on your resume), you need to either be able to live where you can commute to work daily, or be willing to take a temporary relocation job living out of an extended-stay monthly suites hotel for a few months.

You also need to know where the jobs are. Submitter has implied in another post that he only really knows about Silicon Valley, where he doesn't want to be (and I can agree) but not about other parts of the US (like Austin or RTP). He also implied that he has some kind of circumstances for wanting to be where he is, but not what they are. (Family member in bad health? Divorced and staying near the kids for visitation? Underwater mortgage?)

Seems to be Research Triangle Park

It's "Durham". Jesus, Slashdot editors can't even copy and paste now? Is that a Linux problem?

But seriously, RDU shouldn't be a surprise. We have Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State all within 30 minutes or so from each other, and we have Research Triangle Park here. Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill was a great, cheap place to enjoy the dot-com boom. We've got IBM (10,000+ employees), Cisco, a small MS office, whatever MCI is now (worldcom?), Nortel, Ericsson, Red Hat, and tons and tons of start ups.

Also, UNC-Chapel Hill is home to Sunsite, which became ibiblio. So yeah, it's dork heaven, but without the SF prices.

"...why do enterprises seem to most frequently use RHEL, or something like this SuSE LE 10?"

Because many decisions in enterprises (like mine) are relationship driven.

We have a strong relationship with Oce and Oce has a strong relationship with SuSE (both with German roots). So, our Oce print servers all run SuSE.

On the app hosting side, our IT department has always had good relationships with RTP companies, so they prefer RedHat.

RTP? It has the universities, decent weather, and good companies.

This is really great news as it's becoming more popular to add CPU clusters to improve performance. Google is probably not the originator of this type of computing, but they have definately pushed it into the mainstream. Anyone living in NC might want to check out this new cluster going into RTP NC. I wonder if this will be the biggest cluser ever

http://www.rtp.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=in_the_new s_item&id=159

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Funny that N.C. is opposing Lexmark, who's parent company IBM has it's largest site in the world in the Research Triangle Park (18,000 employees). The Research Triangle Park (RTP) is only 15 minutes from the North Carolina state capitol of Raleigh. LOL!

RTP in north carolina is situated in the triangle resulting from connecting the universities of UNC, Duke, and NC State. it was designed that way. sometimes proximity to technical work force is fairly key.

I'm sure people asked the same kinds of questions when Research Triangle Park was being put together by a multitude of companies. Now it's one of the best places to live in America for technology workers.

Checked in more closely on this map of the RTP area. There is a "Wake" county, but if you will notice the larger share of RTP is in Durham county.

Now to check out what the local police department says.