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Ask Slashdot: Why So Hard Landing Interviews In Seattle Versus SoCal?
An anonymous reader writes "I have been trying to make the move to the Seattle, WA area. I liked the weather, the nature, the scenery and the tech environment. However, for whatever reason it seems like interviews are hard to come by. As a MS Stack software developer in LA, I barely had to do anything and recruiters always come knocking, either via LinkedIn or from past connections. Not to mention in general I got phone interviews for easily .8 of the positions I applied for. I wanted to finally make the move and fulfill a live long dream to live in Seattle. So I have been applying for positions in the greater Seattle, WA (King County) area. So far the ratio of positions applied to phone interviews is a dismal .1. Which is terrible considering the economy was much worse when I was actively looking for job in LA. Something isn't right because I am still getting offers for interviews here in SoCal, but not much from where I really wanted to be. What could I be doing wrong? Why such a contrast? Is the IT market in Seattle in poor shape? Or may be I just lack the proper connections in a new area? Am I just being screened out immediately for not being local? Or is it the prevalence of bigger corporations vs. smaller startups? And frankly as nice as the city is I can't move unless there's a healthy IT market to thrive by. I hope someone can point me in the right direction."
You seriously like the weather up here? Have you been here anytime other than July - September?
I know a LOT of people that moved here after visiting in the summer... they don't realize what the weather is like most of the time.
#DeleteChrome
MS Stack software developer
I am just taking a stab in the dark here as I don't really know, but maybe there are a lot of "MS Stack software" developers in the home of MS. If they got a ton of them already in town why import more?
I wanted to finally make the move and fulfill a live long dream to live in Seattle
Get a Seattle address - not living local (if living local is a requirement) can be a disincentive. This is my experience as someone who recruits from time to time.
I'm hip-shooting, but it could be that as an LA resident, you're experiencing some prejudice. They go months in Seattle with nothing but gray skies and/or rain, and you have to remain productive. The lack of interest could be due to the perceived risk that you might not be able to hack the gloomy weather.
I'm in the same boat, btw. I live in Santa Monica, and I love the weather here. I would prefer to live amoungst Washingtonians if for no other reason than higher quality conversation, but I know I couldn't handle the Seattle weather for long.
I'm guessing using decimal notation is throwing them. Check your resume and make sure it doesn't say that you give an effort ratio of 1.2
I'm not a bit surprised to hear the job market is tough in Seattle; it's a nice place to live and there are a LOT of smart people working in IT out there.
The Pacific NW, in general, is a place that people move to. No one has a life long dream of moving to LA unless they want to be in show business.
You're from California. That's the problem.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They just don't seem to like the Californians.
Majorly different mindset up there.
For obvious reasons, change your name and you will be guaranteed lots of interviews.
I suggest look at the job postings of Amazon, MS and others and see what areas they most desire. I am a CS/ECE grad and in Raleigh and almost once a month I have someone from MS or Amazon ping me about a position. I know for a fact both Amazon and MS love CS programmers, algorithms, distributed computing etc. If those or other similar buzzwords are present in your resume on linkedin or elsewhere, you will get an email soon.
You do know Marijuana is legal there correct? Not that it makes anyone a flake or something; just saying...
See exhibits (a), (b).
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It's kind of different out here. Back in Detroit for interviews, I was normally put in front of a computer and asked to write code. Pretty practical, and I did well. For whatever reason, out here everyone loves the whiteboard, run though a binary tree on a whiteboard, wtf does that have to do what what you are actually going to be doing? Nothing, but Google, Amazon and MS all have you do it, so everyone else copies it. Hard to put you on the spot like that over the phone. Also your timing isn't the best, right before X-mas holidays. PS Why doesn't slashdot like paragraphs?
Where is the so called shortage of tech workers?
There isn't any, not in Seattle, not in SoCal and not in the Bay Area. Nobody told you?
Seattle is surrounded and consumed by tech and IT. The reason you are likely getting more calls and head hunter response in the LA area than in Seattle is, bluntly, because the talent pool simply isn't as deep. A senior-level MS dude in LA (or San Antonio. Or St. Louis. Or Baltimore. Or Miami. you get where I'm going...) may not even register on the radars in Seattle for anything much more than one-step above entry level, assuming no real networking contacts in the area. Remember - Microsoft itself is headquartered across Lake Washington (and east of Kirkland) from Seattle. Your resume has to be extremely impressive - with 'desirable' employers and skills on it - for employers to look at non-local candidates for MS skilled candidates. They've got 40k to choose from, in the area, just from Microsoft itself!
The second issue is that you also have to deal with the idea of relocation costs - unless the company can't find a local candidate (which, again, in Seattle isn't as hard as in other areas) that meets their criteria, they're not generally going to go after sucking up 10k in relocation costs for someone.
Basically - you're trying to get into the one of the hardest to get into IT markets in the country from a MUCH less difficult one. It makes sense that you're hit ratio is going to be worse.
Recruiters are waste of time. They have nothing to offer and only collecting resumes.
Apply directly!
I liked the weather
Ok, first off i know your lying.
As a MS Stack software developer in LA, I barely had to do anything
Thats better
Something isn't right because I am still getting offers for interviews here in SoCal
Uh, when you make professional contacts and they begin to know and trust you, word gets around and when positions come up so does your name. Its called networking? Maybe you dont need to know anything about networks as a MS Stack software developer..
but not much from where I really wanted to be
Again, networking. Your just some well tanned bum who lives on the beach and thinks its nice that this new place doesnt have sun 95% of the time. Why the heck WOULD they call you?
Oh yeah, and your like 30 miles from the corporate headquarters of MS, so there are probably a few more MS Stack software developers hanging around.
We're all full-up on Californians. Stop applying here, stop moving here, and for the love of god, stop building Mexican-villa style buildings everywhere you go. It looks terrible next to an evergreen tree.
Seattle-area tech support worker here, pretending to speak on behalf of other sectors: Once upon a time ten to fifteen years ago, Seattle / Redmond / Bellevue was a tech worker haven. Then companies discovered outsourcing in the early 2000's. And then companies discovered economic crisis in the late 2000's. A lot of smart people, hundreds and thousands, lost their jobs in the last decade and would do whatever they could.
So as a result, if there seems to be difficulty for someone from outside the area to get a job... those of we inside the area have been dealing with this long before you showed up, and some of my bretheren will cut you [not literally] to get at those jobs.
Sorry, but we have lots of highly-educated people here already.
Stay where you are.
Oh, and stop overdressing - you just look awkward.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There is, in the city of Seattle, a certain company with a legendary history in the world of computing. It has been known as... The Microsoft.
Considering the turnover rate for Microsoft employment, Windows stack developers are probably as common there as waitresses with SAG cards are in LA.
Your problem is that your skills are a rare commodity in LA but common as dirt in Seattle
...Your PC isn't clean. I wonder if there's a product that can clean it. /Seriously. WTH?
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
Redmond is about 10 miles away, so a "MS Stack software developer" isn't exactly hard to find in Seattle.
I don't understand why the question, it's like an actor asking why it is easier to get a job in LA vs Detroit.
It's as simple as that the Demand vs Supply is higher in SoCal.
It's hard to imagine that a tech company would screen candidates based on area codes these days. I've been living in Seattle for over five years and still have a 415 (San Francisco) area code. I think people tend not to change their phone numbers when moving anymore.
That being said, I'm graduating soon with a PhD in bioinformatics, have an MS in computer science, and I'm not getting any interviews with large tech companies in the area. Maybe I do need a local phone number...
I've found that same problem before: recruiters look at the place where you currently live, not where you've said you're interested in working. So if I say I live in Los Angeles and am interested in jobs in Seattle, I'd expect to get lots of calls for... Los Angeles. When I switch and use the address of a friend in the area I want jobs in as where I live, suddenly I get calls for the right area. I don't see any way around this as long as the recruiters are ignoring the information in the profile this way.
Supply and demand: people refuse to move to California because the taxes and cost of living are sky-high, so there are more openings that go unfilled.
There is, outside the city of Seattle, a certain company with a legendary history in the world of tech support. It has been known as... ACS, now a Xerox company.
Considering the turnover rate for ACS employment, there's always space answering phones for Verizon Wireless through them.
And half of the people I've worked with in the Internet industry ten years ago passed through their doors in the last five.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
See exhibits (a), (b).
That would be a stronger point if not for the fact that they continue the habit of piss-poor grammar throughout the entire summary.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Most companies prefer local candidates. When they see that you are not local they may be crossing you out. They probably don't even want to pay to bring you up for an interview. You may want to note that you are looking to move at your own expense and like the Seattle area.
Sure, no problem. Try Linux.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Spammers won this thread.
Is this another name for .Net? I've never heard of "MS Stack". Maybe it's too arcane to have much demand for it. Keep in mind that LA is the 2nd biggest metro area in the USA so finding work there using some little in demand technology is a lot different than going to a smaller area and trying to find a job using it. If it's .Net, well, that does have its users, but if anything it seems to me that .Net is dying not thriving.
I've been to the Pacific Northwest in the lengthy rainy season, several times in fact, and all I can say is it's not for everybody. If you've never really experienced it for a week or more at a time, you can't just assume that you'll be OK with it. Having said that, if you can actually put up with it, I do understand why this part of the country appeals to some people.
It's hard to imagine that a tech company would screen candidates based on area codes these days. I've been living in Seattle for over five years and still have a 415 (San Francisco) area code. I think people tend not to change their phone numbers when moving anymore.
That being said, I'm graduating soon with a PhD in bioinformatics, have an MS in computer science, and I'm not getting any interviews with large tech companies in the area. Maybe I do need a local phone number...
I would bet anything but the real big companies always does. Local hires (and candidates when it comes time to interview) are a lot cheaper. If your cell phone doesn't match where you live, you should indicate where you live on your resume.
The GPs suggestion of pretending to live in Seattle is a bad idea. I've hired LOTS of people over the years, and if anyone ever pulled that, their resume would be round filed no matter how good they might be.
IMO, if he wants to live in Seattle, and wants to find a job there, his best bet is to just move.
I live in Seattle, well really not. I live in a city on the other side of lake Washington. But when people say Seattle, they mean Seattle, Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Renton etc 90% of the time.
Seattle proper kind of sucks for tech jobs. They're there - but not as abundant as the east side. Bellevue and Redmond are quite a bit better in my opinion.
That said, I've never seen a prejudice for hiring based on where people come from - at least 50% of my coworkers are not native to the Seattle area (or even the United States). However, I have seen an unwillingness to pay for relocation or consider people who aren't already here.
Now here's your problem: in this area, probably like others, there are two classes of techies: Microsoft Centric and Unix Centric.
Microsoft Centric folks are a dime a dozen and if you look overqualified they're not going to waste their time - cause they're not willing to pay all the much.
Unix Centric folks are not rare, but are less abundant. They command a higher dollar figure.
It may seem counterintuitive that in the land of Microsoft, MS platform skills aren't highly sought after - but in my experience that has been exactly the case.
Los Angeles is L.A.
LOL. good comedy there! But do I really need a virus to beat my wife? Can't I do it just because it is fun?
Stop telling people you like the weather in Seattle. It's a clear red flag: you're either lying, crazy, or a Twilight fan.
There's an old joke about outsiders versus locals in Seattle. "When you move to Seattle, bring your own friends, because you're not going to make any while you're there." While locals don't control Seattle as much as they used to years ago, Seattle employment is a very insular environment dominated by employment agencies.
It's pretty simple. It's because you aren't there.
Move first. Then look for jobs. If you can't do that - forget it.
Unless you have some very specific and needed skills, you need to already be local. And you won't fool anybody with a PO Box. Companies do not want to make the kind of commitment (if only moral commitment) that would be required, even if they don't pay relocation. It raises the bar for insuring it is a good match, and makes it more difficult for them to let you go if it doesn't work out.
What it boils down to is your location is a complication to prospective employers. Why introduce a complication when (as others have pointed out) there are likely plenty of people with your skills who already live there? Nobody wants to screw around interviewing somebody who might or might not move to Seattle.
I've heard from many friends that most developers want to work for the more glorious companies of San Francisco, and many of those companies want to move people out of that area, so LA Companies hire anyone interested, if nothing else, just to fill a position. I had an offer like that to work in an area I have 0 experience in just because I'm a competent developer and they had no doubt I could learn the tools/language. Compared to the candidates they were receiving who couldn't explain even the basics of concurrent programming, I am a rockstar. In the end I decided I'd rather stay where I am and work in an area I actually like working (low level C/Assembly) rather than Java/J2EE, but a little digging and networking led me to realize I could probably find a job doing what I want in LA if I wanted to move to LA, paying a decent salary because the reqs go unfilled for so long. Since I don't want to go there, and you're looking to leave though, sounds like the problem isn't getting any better!
If you are currently employed, you find a job before you move. Anything else just shows idiocy.
Sounds like you should be in the I-270 corridor of Maryland. They can't get enough of your type in the area.
Amazing this, being that they are doing their best to hire people from outside of the country who will work for half or less of what American programmers require for pay. Thanks a lot, Democrats in congress! We here in America don't really need jobs.
I have the inverse problem. Recruiters call me for positions all over the country -- Virginia, North Dakota, Texas, Colorado -- and say they have looked at my resume and think I'd be perfect for the job. Well, if they looked at my resume they would see 25 years of continuous employment, all of it in the San Francisco Bay Area. So I ask them, "What about my resume indicates I have the slightest interest in relocating?"
I also get calls from out of state recuriters trying to place me in Bay Area jobs. When I ask them about their familiarity with the Bay Area, it's typically little to none. Great, so someone with no clue what it's like to live and work here is going to represent my best interests? I politely tell them that we have recruiters in the Bay Area and not to waste my time.
OK, so not always politely. If their English is poor, I ask them, "Why the fuck would I want you to represent me?"
It's WHO you know... That I'm finding out more and more in the tech industry.
The Pacific Northwest has reached it's max quota of Californians. Sorry, but we really don't want any more. Please consider reapplying after you've mounted a roof rack on your vehicle, own a kayak, mountain bike and a pair of tele skis (road bikes and snowboards are for pussies and white rappers.) Also, you'll need to complete 6 months working as a barista in order to fully appreciate the nuances of coffee. Finally, if you decide to whine about anything and/or compare it to SoCal, you'll be deported.
----- obSig
Slightly off-topic, but I wonder if others have seen this. I'm pretty senior (15yrs+) and applied for a new job.After submitting a resume, I was invited to take part in a video interview. But here's the catch. The firm is local and no one is at the other end. Best I can describe it, you talk into your webcam while answering questions. I've never felt more de-humanized in a process. And these people expect me to work for them? Maybe for an entry level position but for someone over 10 years?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Before Global Warming/Climate Change...
Vancouver/Seattle = ~3 months of summer and the rest rain
Rest of North America = the regular expected seasonal weather, snow in winter, hot in summer, leaves changing colour in fall, etc.
Now/After Global Warming
Rest of North America = OMG Apocalypse BBQ
Vancouver / Seattle = oh look seasons
Remember that the need for Microsoft developers will soon decline, if it has not already done so.
Most devices run Linux.
Mobile phones are dominated by Linux, as are most other mobile devices such as eBooks, and Linux is gaining ground in tables with Android & Chrome O/S. Linux dominates servers: note that essentially all Valve, Dig, and Google servers (I expect that they probably do run the odd Microsoft server, although I have no evidence of this) run Linux - not Microsoft. At least 95% of the top 500 supercomputers run Linux.
More and more companies and organisations are adopting Linux as their primary O/S on the desktop like the French Gendarmerie (http://www.zdnet.com/french-police-move-from-windows-to-ubuntu-linux-7000021479) and the local Government of a region in Spain (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/spains-extremadura-starts-switch-40000-government-pcs-open-source).
At home we have 2 Linux workstations (3, if you count my old development box I normally keep powered down), 2 Linux laptops, 2 Android phones, an Apple desktop, and an iPhone - for 2 adults and a teenager. Note no Microsoft boxen.
So for professional reasons, you should at least be investigating moving your skill base to Linux!
The last thing they need is more Californians. Try Portland or Tacoma.
Given your alternative, that Taco Bell hacienda style isn't *that* bad.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think companies don't want to bother interviewing and recruiting for someone who's not local. If offered the job, chances are that you'll not actually follow-through with the relocation. I know when we go looking, and we get someone from out of town, they almost always drop out of the running, or can't move in the time-frame required.
It's a chicken and egg thing. Potential employees don't want to move till they get a job. Employers don't want to hire anyone not local.
There is, as of this writing, FOURTY-FUCKING-FOUR posts with the "About six months ago, I was overexerting myself trying to get rid of a terrible virus on a client's PC..." spam. The worst thing is, it's only a few users who posted those and all posted within the same minute of each copy. Isn't there supposed to be a timer to prevent more than X posts per minute? How are these jerks bypassing them?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I've lived in Seattle since 1996 (and 5 years in the '80s) and getting interviews as a techie here has ALWAYS sucked. At times I've had over 200 resumes out and gotten two or three interviews out of it. The OP's experience is not atypical.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I have moved several times in my career.
It is stressful and expensive. I live in apartments and moving costs a minimum of $5,000. Deposits, fees, and other nickle and diming that one gets. You end up in debt or your savings is clipped severely. That's why kills me about the economists who say people need to move to where the work is. Aside from homeowners in this shit market, it's expensive and even as a well paid software developer, it took me over a year to get even.
I moved because of money and I wanted a clean slate. I thought that moving would change my life and in my new place, I''d finally find the happiness that I have always wanted. The 100% increase in pay helped too - I was underpaid and it was the mid-90s.
Doesn't work as far as having a clean slate.
If you are lonely in your current place of residence, you'll be lonely in your new place, The only exception to that rule is if you are moving to get close to family. But that's a whole other bag of shit....MOTHER!
The OP is set up in SoCal and he should stay there.
No. I think it's more than weather.
Huh? Do you know how many recruiters I told "I need information on a the proposed relocation package prior to reviewing the job offer" from in the past 10 years? Repeat offenders are requested "Please go purchase a Globe and review where you are hiring for versus where I live." I have further reported some companies as spammers because they simply fish by regular expression and ignore location.
Most companies _do_ screen based on area codes these days, and I'm happy for it. The foreign run agencies not so much, but I ignore them even if they get lucky with a local job offer.
Now this is of course different than me going on line to fill out an application, but I can't see a recruiter treating it any differently. Unless there is a way to make them know ahead of reading the resume "I want to move next door and I won't ask for money from you to do it.".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
If you want a job here, you will have to live here. Sad but true most people in Washington hate when Californians move here. If your resume says you live in California right now, it will be put at the bottom of a list most of the time.
Up here, the only people that should dress up for weddings are the ones getting married. I still haven't recovered from the rented tux I had to wear at my daughter's wedding, and I warned her that she better not get married again 'cause I am definitely not dressing up for another.
I agree with not lying about where you live, but finding a job ahead of time should not be that difficult. Vacation and visit, send lots of emails and most importantly be HONEST about what your plans are. Moving without a job, as the AC points out is a bad idea.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
why it's called the Emerald City.
No one in the "nice weather" parts of Cali is from there. No one...
They are from China, India, Mexico, Russia, the UK, and of course the rest of the U.S.
If you want to find Californians that were born and raised there go inland... Modesto, Bakersfield, Redding.
I always get a kick out of people who live in Oregon, Washington, et al who bitch about people from Cali. More likely than not, they only lived for for ten or less years and are originally from Poughkeepsie, Hyderabad, Tulsa or Shenzen.
I'm a Cali native who doesn't live there anymore, but visits often. The only place/attitude I've experienced with a higher snark/sneer factor than the Bay Area is, yep, you guessed, Seattle.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
It is impossible to get sh!t done in the pacific northwest, which is fine if you are in to that sort of thing. In addition, people in the Pacific Northwest have this idea that unless they band together and only "buy local", that the transformative power of poorly understood economic fallacy will magically create a closed loop utopia.
I saw upthread people were suggesting Portland and Tacoma, which have the same problem turned up to ELEVEN.
I've been running into a similar problem trying to land a job in CA (my wife is a native and wants to move back). I'm in MI doing systems admin/project manager work for one of the 'Big Three', and while I get tons of recruiters calling me, they're all for local positions (although not all in the automotive sector which I guess is at least one positive). I've had very little luck landing interviews with any company in CA and I'm fairly sure it's because I'm not already in CA even though I'm not expecting a company to pay for relocation. While my skill set is good (if I do say so myself), it's not unique, so I'm guessing companies would rather look for someone closer by simply because they can.
Unfortunately I'm a bit risk adverse, so moving to CA without a firm job offer is out of the question (I'm not putting my wife through something like that). The longer the cycle goes on the more depressed I get, but I keep on trying because there's not much else I can do.
Free your mind. The thing here is probably that it's tougher for tech companies in LA to recruit. I live in Seattle and you'd probably have to pay me 50% more to live in LA. Lots of people'd like to live in Seattle, for the reasons you describe, so there's plenty of job candidates.
There's already too many fucking californians in Seattle. Get out and stay out.
You don't understand? Really?! Could it be that MS programmers are a dime a dozen around Seattle? Could it be that you are expecting an LA salary? Maybe you should focus on developing skills that are a little more in demand. Non-MS specific skills are a little harder to come by around here. How is your Java? GNU-Linux? etc... Many companies are looking for people who can think outside of the MS-Certified-Box. Those that drank the MS.NET Kool-Aid can pick up cheap talent from the local community colleges and high schools.
I gave up being a life-long Seattle resident to relocate to the LA area about 3 years ago partly for the reason you cite: tons of jobs here. Southern California is beyond huge compared to Seattle. The number of technology workers here dwarfs that of Seattle including even MS and Amazon. How many large tech companies are between LA and the Mexico border? Medium size? Small? A huge number. Seattle has Microsoft and Amazon, and then a bunch of other smaller companies basically hoping to get bought by one of them.
To be sure, LA is no Silicon Valley, but bear in mind that every entertainment company also is to some degree a technology company (e.g. Disney, DIRECTV, all the movie studios). Then, you've got Broadcomm, Qualcomm, Toshiba... etc etc. The market here is huge. The same is true in the legal world (my field). There are relatively few jobs in Seattle even for folks with technology backgrounds. You can write your ticket in California.
I will also echo what some others have said... localism is a factor in Seattle. It really is an insular, strange little place. Outsiders, especially from California, are generally looked at with suspicion if not outright hostility. That has cooled somewhat now that the housing market has cooled. But during the runnup to the bubble, everyone, myself included, was tired of seeing folks sell their 2 bedroom condo in LA or SF, move to Seattle, and positively not give a crap about what a house cost because it was so pitifully cheaper, and often pay with cash to boot. It really stoked the bubble up there... In general, money has not done good things for Seattle. It has lost it's character to a large degree.
Lastly, the weather does absolutely suck. I lived there for 25 years, and even with the 10% pay cut due to income tax here, it will be hard to get me to go back. If you don't care for June Gloom, you will HATE Seattle. It is June Gloom on steroids there for 9 months a year... in a good year.
If you are currently employed, you find a job before you move. Anything else just shows idiocy.
If you want to live somewhere bad enough you just move, plain and simple.
What shows idiocy is complaining about something and never doing it.
You'll never get anywhere in life without taking chances.
As someone who oversees several branch software development offices in SF, LA, and Seattle (along with a few east coast ones) and is hiring developers (I've got 100+ and looking for more) - I can point to three things that are killing you:
First, as others have said, MS tech skills don't mean much in Seattle, unless you've already worked at Microsoft for a stint. Why should I, as an employer, hire some third-party guy to do MS development, when I can hire a real ex-MS engineer who had a good chance of being the framework developer in the first place. You've got a certification? Great. I can hire the guy who wrote and developed the curriculum instead. They churn enough people through that you're frankly, just not qualified to work on a Microsoft stack, at least in comparison to what I can get up there in the marketplace. You want to work on MS stacks, go work at MS. The little MS maintenance work I need in my environment, I only hire ex-employees to do for me, because I can.
Second - all the cool kids in town are running Linux. I don't know any major startups or other big players using the MS stack... they're all running cloud based stuff, and a lot of it in AWS. The MS stuff is confined to the drone and drudgery of a corporate IT department. Not that it's bad for that - it's not...stupid simple... but there aren't a lot of major game-changing, startup-like-exciting jobs out there in Seattle for MS developers. Speak Java, Javascript, or have some cool science project in Erlang/Haskell/god-knows-what, and we can talk.
Third - talent. I can say there's a marked difference between my Seattle and SF crew, and the level of talent that my LA team brings to the table. It's not even close, and when I do find them in LA, it's like a needle in a haystack. Nice guys, good to work with, but I spend 10x the effort in LA to hire one guy with even close to the developer talent and quality I find in the Bay area or Seattle. Of course, I get to pay him a lot less, too, so I keep doing it :)
You want to play up there, move up there first. And learn Java or Javascript+node.js if you want to be marketable in that environment.
The last time a recruiter tried to call me about a contract position - at MS, orange badge no lessl - I told him I would need at least 97K/year (I picked a prime and added some zeros) and would consider nothing less than permanent employment (blue badge). The guy left me alone after that.
Other's have said it too, I know... but it bears repeating. Yes, your current location is a factor. So, fake your location... Use the mailing address of a friend or relative, and get a Google Voice number. It's free, and will forward to your actual phone. You can even set up caller ID so that your Google Voice number appears on your phone, and you then know it is someone calling your GV number instead of your cell phone.
In job interviews, it is difficult for them to ask too many questions about your personal life since it could open them up to claims of discrimination. If they start asking you where you live, tell them the address of your friend or relative or whatever, and say you just moved back recently. It's not hard to eliminate this factor from the job seeking process.
... you don't have an H1B visa, are not willing to work for minimum slave wage and cannot be shipped off without notice at the discretion of the employer.
Have you not got the memo?
The tech job market out here is not great at the moment. There were a lot of layoffs that were publicized in 2008, and companies like Microsoft took some flak for it. They've smartened up and have been slowly downgrading their workforce (basically laying off or firing people, then hiring replacements on contract at lower prices). From personal experience, this has been Microsoft and another company that I worked at.
This has a left a LOT of people unemployed. I've been unemployed for about two months now, and I've gotten a couple of bites, but nothing that's panned out. It's extremely competitive and even with a top-notch resume you may not get a second look
Don't just take my word for it, though. Look at this article from The Stranger (http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/12/03/new-study-pegs-washington-state-living-wage-at-1604-to-3046-an-hour?fb_action_ids=10201031928110151&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582):
"in Washington State, there are 22 job seekers for every job opening that would pay a living wage to a one-worker, four-person household, according to the report."
It doesn't help that the real estate market is insane. Apparently everyone who lives here is expected to be a Microsoft VP if you don't want non-ghetto housing.
I wish you luck.
Your problem seems to be the same as the Bay Area vs the Monterey Peninsula - I'm constantly being hounded about jobs in San Jose, Frisco (YES I CALL IT FRISCO!), Cupertino, Mountain View, etc. etc. but I live on the Monterey Peninsula and am not willing to commute that far. There *are* some jobs here, but for whatever reason[s] they seem closed to me.
At any rate, I am almost 100% sure I'm going to get out of the programming game after 20 years, anyway, so for me it's kind of a moot point. Just telling you LA vs Seattle is not the only "problem" pair.
not to be rude but stop winning. try getting an entry level IT job in Washington, D.C. metro area. No one calls me. I just graduated. Maybe recruiters don't call me because I have 0 years of work experience. Or maybe half the postings require a Masters degree and 5 years of experience. other jobs that I found are student internships that I don't qualify for. Be grateful that people are calling you at all. sorry to sound mean but there are places worst than Seattle.
good luck in your job search.
Years ago I was in Seattle and had a greater Washington mailing address and Area code. I was getting no responses. After that I changed to a 206 cell and gave a friends mailing address off Cap Hill. It made a huge difference. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal
oh yeah, and 75% of the jobs in the D.C. Metro Area require a current/active security clearance, even the entry level jobs. WTF? Northrup Grumman, Department of Defense, L3 communications, IBM, Accenture Federal Services,
Lockheed Martin, The Boeing Company, AT&T?? really?
Agree completely. You must appear as though you are a local candidate. I did this a number of years ago when I was job hunting in the Atlanta area. Picked up a Google voice number in the 404 NPA.
Most of Seattle has short commutes if you bike, skateboard, or walk.
It's only car drivers that take forever.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Microsoft has been kicking the finest programmers they can recruit from around the world off their local Redmond/Bellevue porch at a rate of 10% of their employee population per year, every year for over a decade. Naturally that leads to a local surplus of people with those skills because they tend to not move far if they can avoid it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Relocation ain't cheap - cost a Houston company over 30K to move me from Miami, plus whatever the recruiter took.
The opportunities that come to my email are often from Seattle / Portland. I lived there 6 years while with Microsoft. FWIW I am an embedded / driver guy mostly. It wouldn't kill me to move back (I actually stopped getting depressed and started to like the weather after 3 years), but I really prefer Orange County (CA). IMHO there is not that much difference in the housing costs. I will say most of the opportunities are crap, 3 month contract with of course no benefits (and I suspect a lot of the offers are just gaming the H1 system). I decided to go back into medical, where we are forced to work more slowly and carefully. And most importantly, I just happened to land in a situation where many of the management are good people that want us to work reasonably, but do not abuse us. That is increasingly rare.
Not to mention the inability to understand difficult concepts like "ratio".
At the top of the resume, type these words exactly:
"Objective: CEO position where I can eliminate Windows RT and Windows Phone from our product offerings."
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The tech market is fine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And once you get an in-person interview, they tend to be much more difficult than what I've seen in California. Anecdotal but I've done more than my fair share in both places.
There is a downside to this approach, at least if actually taken "all the way": Tech companies will often pay for full moving expenses. Every company I've been involved with did, and all but one were quite generous about it. If he ends up having to completely hide that fact he's not in Seattle, he won't get that benefit.
And live in one of the worse educated, most polluted, and more sick people than almost any states in the nation.
I don't know where you get your info from but I went to school in Houston, and drove all over Texas - none of what you say is true. Texas is a much cleaner state overall than California (which I have also spent a lot of time in and driven though many areas of).
But hey, it's all about money, fuck everything else, emirate?
No, it's about quality of life. Thus, Texas > California > Washington
As a personal addendum, one other thing Texas has going over California and Washington is that it's not as crowded. WAY too many people in California.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
yea thats a good idea-trick the recruitor.
That's unfortunate, because most bay area companies will pay moving expenses. I actually won't work for a company that doesn't, even if I don't need to move to work for it - it's an indication, to me, of other things that could be wrong.
Your proud of living in a shithole?
I think you misread. He was from Minnesota, not California.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, Seattle has a lot of local tech people that are employeed by MS and Amazon. Not so many highly qualified . (The company I work for opened up to remote working specifically because it was so hard to find top-tier talent due to MS and Amazon brain-drain, and it's worked out very well for us. )
The rainy, drizzly weather here is bad enough, but what most visitors don't realize is that the days from Halloween through the equinox in March are just long DARK days... in addition to grey. We're above the 47th parallel, and we go to work in the dark, and come home in the dark all winter long. If you are out in the "daytime", the clouds minimize the sunlight. Months of this wear on the soul and drive the depression rates in people not habituated or born into this environment. There's a reason the Aurora Bridge was the 2nd most jumped-off bridge in the country (until they constructed the anti-suicide fence two years ago). Sunny SoCal? Good luck, friend. As to getting an interview: I work at a mid-sized, well-funded non-profit here and we find that it's hard to even *find* good tech people, because they get snapped up by even higher-paying large corpos. We're no slouch outfit, but the good candidates usually have a few other interviews lined up already with Aerospace, MS, Amazon, Isilon, any of the biomed facilities, or biomed startups. Also, Amazon chews through it's tech force rapidly, so ex-Amazonians are constantly re-flooding the market. Lasting 3 years there makes you an 'old timer'. I'm not kidding. It's a tough market here on both sides of the fence. Lower your standards, or raise your skillset. Try getting picked up by Robert Half International, the recruiting/staffing-services group. If they like your resume, skills, ethics and story, they will take you on and "present" you to their list of qualified clients. No cost to you; their corporate clients fund them. If you can't get in with Robert Half, ask them for advice. You may need to do more work to flesh out your experience.
If you have evidence that says otherwise, go for it.
MS Stack software developer
says it all. I almost stopped reading at that. MS stack is going bye-bye. And if there's one thing that is *not* lacking in *Seatle* it's MS 'talent'.
Try this: Advertise yourself as a Linux stack guy of same skill level, and look how many interviews you get with that. I'd bet measurably more.
Good luck.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's exactly what I did. Moved to Portland, Me from southern US. Been up here roughly a month and am still searching for a job. Have the tech skills, but since I took quite a long vacation, over a year, I'm considered less marketable despite 12 years of IT doing everything short of cluster computing. Oh. And I'm not a programmer or MS Cert. drone. I digress...
Am going to start looking at Tech. meetups, if they exist, and start working the scene. Apparently the digital front up here isn't worth the salt poured out for ice.
I've lived in Seattle since 1994, and getting interviews and jobs here has always been easy. Today, it's really easy. Just show up at any sort of networking event and announce that you can write code, and you'll be swarmed by people who are hiring. Really. It's not quite the Bay Area (or at least it's not what I think the Bay Area is like now), but it's still booming. I haven't sent out a resume for a long time and I'm constantly getting email from recruiters.
And the counterpoint to this is that, since it's _so_ hard to hire in the Bay Area, many companies from down there have opened engineering offices up here in Seattle.
The digital front in Portland, ME is about 110 miles south of you in Boston. Might be able to find something in Concord or Manchester (NH), but those are also pretty hefty commutes from Portland.
Honestly - if you can bootstrap it, start something up. Write apps, do SOMETHING in addition to pounding pavement. A year 'vacation' can be overlooked if you took the effort to keep your skills up to date, and can prove it.
act like you don't give a shit.
As a .net developer in seattle/bellevue I haven't found any problems finding work, especially contract work.
I think it's more down to your individual skillset instead of locality. .net also use a lot of javascript, which is more of a lateral move, not an either/or like java/ruby vs. .net.
No one uses silverlight, local desktop apps are mostly dead outside of internal tools, and even then...
most modern houses that use
Amazon is largely a Java/Other Stuff shop.
"No matter how good they might be..."? Wow, that makes you an ass..........
Or desperation. I've met plenty of people that moved without any idea if they would even find a job but they did it because they were out of options and were going to be homeless either way.
Agreed.
I made the short list with a large company, but I was not local. When the hiring manager went on holiday, they hired someone else who was local. I also ran into that a few years later. Several hiring managers said someone moving is a pita so they wouldn't consider anyone even 100 miles away.
I don't know how difficult it would be to walk the walk if I said I had a Seattle local address. It WOULD mean flying up their on a manager's whim .. which I would not normally want to afford.
And Timmy strikes again by not posting an Ask Slashdot story to the Ask Slashdot section. Hey Timmy! They put those sections there and allow readers to filter by section for a reason. Quit being a fucking tool and post the stories properly. In other words, do your job.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
How do you know that they didn't live in the area? I ended up in Boston because I did something similar.
They only wanted local candidates, my friend lived here so I used her address.
Southern California? South Carolina? South Calamazoo?
Because you call it "SoCal"
That's only ok if you're from Southern California. Say that anywhere else and you sound like a douche.
Moved from Sacramento CA 15 years ago to Seattle. That is when they really didn't
like Californians. Contracted at Aldus, Adobe, Microsoft and other tech companies.
Love the weather, alway mild, compared to the most of the US. (Yes I have lived in many different parts of the US)
Its green, year around, evergreens don't turn in the fall or winter. For the most part, people
a pleasant and helpful. The dating scene in Seattle is not that great, strange dynamic.
They even use to joke about it on Almost live, now called the "206".
Because that has been a dominant area code prefix in Seattle for many years.
There are all sort of problems locally like all cities and the cost of living in not
as low as you might think, its not cheap living up here.
But i would never move back to CA after being up here. This has been the only
place i have moved away from and moved back to out of the 22 different placed
i have lived in my live time.
Good luck keep trying, make a friend or two up here and when you have a chance
set up times to come up for an extended period to get the feel of the place and squeeze
in some job hunting while your at it.
Keep your political tourettes to yourself.
I'm always amazed at how stupid people can be. I warned you in college that going down that road would only end in misery. Microsoft would do something I said to make your life hard, like discontinuing the tool, you learned, and would end up dependent on to get a job. Now that time is here and my advise to learn concepts over tools is showing its ugly head.
I find it offensive that you claim only someone living on six figures would like Texas more. When I lived there I was a student, paying my own way through college on part time jobs at $10/hour. I had a cheap apartment that was BETTER than the crappy apartments my friends who moved later to California had to endure, even when they had "real" jobs.
How can you sit there with a straight face and claim you are only better off in Texas being poor, when EVERYTHING is so much cheaper in Texas?? You are a monster who is going to lead someone to their doom through your ignorance.
I am done listening to your totally uninformed bullshit not based on any way in reality. You can respond how you like but I can't contaminate my brain reading your scrawlings any longer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would bet anything but the real big companies always does. Local hires (and candidates when it comes time to interview) are a lot cheaper. If your cell phone doesn't match where you live, you should indicate where you live on your resume.
I don't know about that. I've interviewed at Microsoft multiple times, and they've always flown me out.
So-Cal blows compared to San Francisco Bay Area,
The tech talent floats northwards.
As a result, So-Cal can't attract enough Software Engineering / IT Talent,
And you'll find that its easy to get a job.
Quoting the GP:
And I'm not a programmer
That's probably going to make writing apps somewhat more difficult.
Write failed: Broken pipe
has all the Microsoft, ex-Microsoft, friends and colleagues of Microsoft, children of Microsoft, students of Microsoft, and pets of Microsoft -job applicants they can handle. Maybe if you were a Mac tech...
I think you're probably right, if you're talking about random applicants. I wound up relocating for my current job position, but I was already friends with a couple of people working for the same company when I found out an opening was available. I think they realized I was going to be more serious about actually accepting the position because I already knew people there.
(I did find out later that they'd been interviewing local candidates for months, and didn't really find anyone they thought was a good fit. So that worked in my favor too, obviously.)
I will say this much: Don't pay TOO much attention to general hype about how many tech jobs exist in a certain area. If you want to relocate, do it for other reasons besides a generic idea that "it has a lot of work for people who do what I do". The area I moved to was recently voted among the top 10 (or even top 5) in tech jobs, but the truth is -- the vast majority of openings are government and military related, so often requiring active security clearances, and are just as often unstable jobs (govt. agency loses funding for reason X and all of a sudden your job gets terminated indefinitely). It's not the "techtopia" the magazines portrayed it to be, especially with the high cost of living. Many of the private sector tech jobs that remain are available/unfilled because the salary is too low to attract anyone any good at tech, vs. the price to rent or buy housing out here.
And when I lived in the midwest before this, I'd also read the occasional article promising how successful one could be there in I.T. But those figures were always heavily slanted. For example, we had one large financial firm in town who constantly ran pages of want-ads for all manner of tech positions. The catch? Those positions were almost always already filled. They just liked to collect up resumes to keep on file in H.R. Good bargaining chips if an employee started demanding a raise.... "I've got X number of people right HERE (waves stack of resumes around) who want to do your job right now!" In general, we really only had a hand-full of other firms doing much I.T. hiring, but they were all big corporate HQ's that employed a lot of people. So collectively, they could really push up the statistics and make things look promising -- but many good I.T. workers would never land a job at any of them, if their previous experience was only working in smaller to mid-size companies. "What? You have no experience dealing with Asian character sets on an Exchange server?! Well, our sister company over in China needs support from here so that's a MUST." (Yep, I actually heard that once in an interview with one of them.)
Legal Marijuana too.
I don't even have my resume online and I'm getting cold calls from Amazon asking me to move to Seattle to work for them...so it seems like they're looking. I'm not a superstar. I just have my linkedin account updated and network when I'm able.
Ironically, I was in the opposite situation, I wanted to work for Amazon, but wouldn't consider a move to Seattle.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
If you're not working now, I don't want to bother interviewing you. There's usually some reason you're not working that won't show up in the interview, and it's a waste of my time to go digging for it. It also pisses off the HR people when 'i find it and get you rejected, so it's easy to find an excuse not to bother with you at all.
Similarly, if you live far away right now, you're likely to need more vacation time to visit family and friends, spend more of your time in contact with distant people, or maybe even marry one and take off again. Not worth my time: if you're coming to the Seattle for a specific reason, such as "my wife just got a job" or "to help take care of my mom", list it so they know you're not a flight risk. People with wanderlust tend to stay people with wanderlust.
And if you've got medical problems or any chance of getting pregnant, blow the ADA out my brown-rimed orifice. I'm not spending my money, or my company's money, on a high cost medical or flight risk, and I can find a dozen "legal" reasons to cover my ass with.
Please don't do this, I live in Seattle and no one cares what your area code is.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
"'Nough said Danno."
Let's smoke the faggots!
1. Be honest about your address and intentions. If someone applies to my "local applicants only" job with an address in CA I don't even bother to read the resume. However, if you mention in your introduction email (cover letter?) that you want to move to the area and plan to be making a trip up in the next couple of weeks ("to visit some friends", "for a couple of interviews", whatever), I'll give your resume the same consideration as I would to a local candidate. I might even fast-track a phone screen if you look good, so I can schedule an interview to take advantage of that time you'd be here. Do your best to make your trip description emphasize how serious you are about looking for a job in the area -- it will bypass the concern a lot of small companies have paying to fly you into town for an interview (not worth it with so many great local candidates), and should hopefully prevent you from sounding presumptuous about expecting an interview.
2. Find some good recruiters. I don't know a single tech worker who enjoys dealing with recruiters (most put off the same vibe as the stereotypical used car salesman) but there are a lot of VC-funded startups that hire exclusively through recruiting firms. Reach out to big guys like greythorn and volt, and do some searching on linkedin and other sites for smaller firms (which often have much more interesting work). Reaching out directly to them will help you get the message across that you want to move, and in turn they will help convince the hiring manager that you're worth talking to despite currently being out of state.
3. You mentioned Seattle and MS in the same description. Be aware that there is a giant invisible line down the middle of Lake Washington. Though there is some MS stuff (at least on the web side of things, which is what I know best) in Seattle, there is a lot more of it on the East Side (Bellevue, Redmond) closer to Microsoft itself.
4. It may help to get a local phone number, but honestly if you mark your non-206 number as "cell" and direct eyes toward your email address, I can't think how it would hurt your chances. FWIW, unless asked on a job application form at a big company, I'm not sure I've ever given my phone number out to a prospective employer until asked for it in order to schedule a phone screen.
5. Yes, there really are that many good candidates in the area. You're competing with locals who are more readily available for interviews or followup interviews, so you need to stand out more than they do. And it's not just about weighing the costs of bringing a non-local candidate in for an interview -- I personally hate giving video interviews and will do everything I can to avoid them (I get so much more out of the interview if I can actually interact with a candidate; after all, personality-fit is as important as technical competence).
6. On the other hand, there really are a lot of good jobs here, too (Amazon's hiring spree high pay has made it a pretty competitive market, too). Consider broadening your skill set. I know there is often a wide cultural gap between the kinds of devs who focus on MS vs Linux, but if I'm just looking for a good developer/engineer rather than a language expert, I'll be much more interested in you if your resume has more than just the one stack (Ruby+dotNet, dotNet+Java, etc). You could also take this as a "don't complain about picky companies if you're limiting yourself to a single technology subset".
7. Be willing to work contracts. Microsoft itself is well-known for preferring to hire people through staffing agencies (corp-to-corp contract) rather than through direct hiring, and they're not alone among the larger companies. The staffing company becomes your employer while you work the contract (avoid 1099 contracts unless you fully understand the tax implications), and you don't have to feel too bad if you leave for a better gig a few months into the contract.
Anyway, I hope this helps someone.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
The job market for professionals in Portland and Seattle is poor because
so many professionals move there for the environment. It is simple supply
and demand. A company I was associated with stated as much in a presentation
they made to prospective investors.
My ex had a degree in economics. She could not get a satisfying job in Portland.
She had a choice of jobs suitable for her education in SF.
He said he was constantly approached by recruiters in SoCal. If so, there's little risk jumping into Seattle and, worse case, he has to come home with his tail between his legs a few months later to pick up something in SoCal again when he still fails to score a gig up north.
Move first. Then look for jobs.
How much money should one have in the bank before moving from, say, northeast Indiana to greater Seattle?
You lack the proper connections in a new area.
Yeah, and your resume will have no local experience on it. It'll be rather obvious you're not local even with a Seattle number, won't it?
You don't like the weather, you like the climate.
or any other reason for them not to care. Just get over yourself.
You haven't said anything about *what* kind of company you want to work for? Established? Startup? Tech? Non-Tech?
There are half a dozen fortune 500 companies that are *not* regular old tech companies that are either head quartered or have major operations within 20 miles of downtown Seattle. Many of these companies have huge IT departments running their ecommerce sites or internal systems (think Nordstrom's, Costco, Starbucks, Expeditors, PACCAR, Boeing). And that doesn't count a dozen or so other major regional companies such as the local hospital systems and insurers. Many of these companies have a multitude of openings and often times opportunities for quick advancement because Amazon and several other local companies have hired away many of their employees over the last 2 - 3 years by throwing gobs of money at them.
Also as several people have noted the unemployment rate in Seattle is low but not so low that people will pay for your relocations, unless your skills are phenomenal.
That's half the cost of what I'm paying for a house. I think you got F'd in the A, buddy.
Lol I moved to California 11 years ago from Massachusetts (that has the same kind of shitty weather but even more taxes and bullshit) . I've traveled all over the US the past years and I've been to some really bad shit So here's my short list of places where you wont ever see me relocate to All of the East Coast and the South-East Florida possibly being an exception because I've never been there. Massachusetts sucks ass, I grew up there and hate it with a passion. New York is for New World Order vegan nanny nazis sodium and soft-drink limiting pro-Obama retard zombies who would love to stick a gun in your face and pull the trigger .. just because they heard you vaguely approve of the 2nd Amendment.
Then I'm not moving wherever people drive pickups in ribbed arm-less under-shirts (I swear I've seen it, those yellow stains were either beer or piss or both) . That would be anywhere from Indiana to Nebraska. Finally anything north of San Francisco and that includes Oregon and gloomy depressing rainy Washington (and I'll be dammed if I ever went and got a job in SF itself, what a cold and miserable shithole that city is). Oh and I've been to Colorado, Wyoming and Utah on business.. R.O.F.L.
So pretty much other than the SF Bay Area that leaves SoCal, Arizona and Texas. One day I was fed up enough so I packed up my shit, quit my job and left Boston one Winter day without having a job lined up and hit the road going WEST. It took me 16 days because I stopped a lot along the way to take in the sights and did about 4 phone screens on the way, the one that eventually landed me my first job in CA I did at an Arby's in Amarillo TX. I love California. I love the food here, I love the weather, and I am mostly okay with the people and the taxes yeah they are fucking high but not any worse than the shithole I'm originally from. Massachusetts is like California in those regards except it is far shittier :-)
So right now I take it you're living somewhere around LA. I would definitely consider moving to LA. I wonder why you would go live and work in one of the shittiest places I can imagine chock full with sour environmentalists popping pills to stave off the day they'll commit suicide because of the terminally depressing gloom ever-gloom and the fact that the polar bears aren't about to go extinct.. just so you can go kayaking for a week or two in the summer?? What IT jobs are actually in Washington worth going to for a Microsoft-guy besides maybe Microsoft itself? Why get a job where you get $60,000 instead of the $85,000 you could get as a Microsoft dude here in the SF Bay Area?? And finally: Why the fuck are you agonizing over moving to shit-city when your skill-set only gets you ~85K when you could be making $130,000 and up. You should agonize over how you can join the 21st century, you'll probably want to get into Java, Python, Ruby and pick up some serious Linux skill, THEN you can pick the shithole you want to sink into.
It's hard to imagine that a tech company would screen candidates based on area codes these days.
Perhaps they believe that someone who comes from out of town is less likely to stay in town as long. Perhaps that true.
nut posting as
I don't know about SOCAL, but here in Seattle hiring happens in waves depending on the time of year/budgets etc. December is a terrible time to find work. I would expect you to get a lot of calls in the Feb/March time frame. Get yourself on Dice and Monster as well. Dice alone should get you a few calls a week, but again December is difficult.
Back in 2001 to 2002 at my dotcom company went bust, I applied about 1,000 and only got about 10/ten interviews in Southern, CA. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
As someone who oversees several branch software development offices in SF, LA, and Seattle (along with a few east coast ones) and is hiring developers (I've got 100+ and looking for more) - I can point to three things that are killing you:
Suggestion - Apply to work with this guy from LA. In 6 - 12 months, start making noise about wanting to transfer positions to the Seattle office.
Once you're in Seattle, with a job, you're not a Californian any more, and you can move to MSFT campus for the experience.
So I don't mean this in a mean way but are you sure you have the skills? MS stack developers are not as much in demand here as other places maybe you're just selling yourself wrong. I work for one of the biggies and do interviews for them here in Seattle and they don't care about remote versus local at all it's really just none of the big companies here hire for skills they hire for ability. Ie: if you know c# really well but don't ever want to do something else you're probably going to get passed on a lot.
Excuse, but is the same Seattle that I've been to where every single time that I've been there it rains at LEAST once a day and is almost continuously overcast and dreary or is it some other Seattle in some alternate universe? Or did you just happen to visit during that, from what I understand, brief 3-4w where it MIGHT actually be sunny and nice?
Cloudy and dreary here during the nearly half of the year that it's effectively winter(Nov - Mar, possibly snowing in October and through early May in particularly bad years although fortunately not tending to last long) is bad enough. About the only plus is that outside of the foothills/mountains you probably won't see snow...
We are hiring a boatload of people and it was really easy for me to land an interview here. http://www.f5.com/about/careers/us-openings/
If you just rely on HR and job engines, the odds of connecting to a job are tantamount to winning the lottery. This is simply foolish but this apparently is the preference of kids today - they just want to have it easy without work like using a web page and then have a job pop out like having Amazon deliver a new toy.
Jobs are NOT like commodities that Amazon or any other E-commerce system transacts. Jobs entail far more commitment to both parties so using commodity types of negotiation and transaction are simply Epic Fail. Note I've worked in tech for 30 years and have done sales and design marketing/sales/support business processes for Fortune 20 companies so I have a slightly different spin on this. Despite being a techie's techie, I no longer believe technical talent or processes are the center of things (which is what most young nerds chose to believe - myself included at one time). Instead it's about broader factor which are harder to quantify and carry far more risk to money-holding parties than ANY technical problem ever entails. For this reason, and as demonstrated every day in business, high risk negotiations and transactions are primarily handled differently than how you'd handle buying a ton of coffee or wheat or how you'd buy anything off of Amazon. These are commodity E-commerce systems where the transaction risk is TINY compared to many other transactions. So instead for "risky" transactions like committing to hire someone with all the legal and financial obligations that entails for an employer, other means work better.
These other means include networking, personal referrals, direct interaction and generally traditional "meatspace social networks". Now the ideology on the web and may kids today is that this is obsolete and irrelevant but reality says that ideology is a load of stinky crap. The fact that people have hard times getting jobs exactly as the OP is asking about is proof of that. If the world actually worked in the web ideology sense, this kind of situation could simply never happen because on the net no one knows you are a dog. But if there are risks of getting a dog instead of an engineer/programmer/etc. then suddenly the ideology is simply Epic Fail in practice. 30 years of experience have told me the same thing.
In general, for instance, if you were face-to-face vs. online, people always have a harder time refusing requests or avoiding spontaneous offering of help. This is simply how meatspace is difference from cyberspace. And this is where cyberspace as a job search technology is fail. All of economics and society is still ultimately a meatspace process. Cyberspace is only meaningful within the ultimate context and limits of Meatspace. So start actively networking to jobs and hiring managers rather than passively waiting to be asked to dance. The latter is exactly like being the wall-flower at the prom without a date that never gets asked.
But that's Microsoft.
1) Seattle has a ton of Microsoft stack devs, the campus pumps them out by the hundreds and hundreds every quarter. 2) Most non-Microsoft "tech" companies lean heavy on *nix/OSS (dev, test, devops, etc.) (Amazon, Google, Nintendo, etc..) 3) Smaller shops that use MS dev and deployment stacks have the pick of the litter in the area (see #1) and can hire local. Options: 1) First get a local address via friend in Seattle and local number via GVoice, etc Don't lie about when asked, but helps not to get circular filed before at least getting the resume read. 2) Work the Microsoft vendor/recruiting companies hard and get into MS as a vendor or contractor and pay your own re-location. They do not care where you currently are but where you will be in two weeks or less, BUT be ready to jump a flight for an in-person interview at the drop of a hat otherwise someone gets the interview. You can look for another job once here. 3) Apply at Microsoft for FTE role if you have the chops, if you are not at the same level as a X years of experience Microsoft FTE/developer and can not pass the interview process, then Seattle is not the place just to move to. Remember all those ex-MS devs got through that process and 'most' can really code and think... Otherwise you will end up in the vendor/contractor saltmine doing grunt style coding. 4) Go for 'smaller' non-tech companies doing in-house corporate style app development (hope you have Salesforce, Dynamics, SAP, etc experience) 5) Apply a local Window stack consulting companies for project work, but you will be in/out of work based on their project pipeline. Make sure you have a portfolio vs a resume to show them. Skills to get hired in Seattle in 7 days or less (well not really, but ALOT faster then most) 1) NON-Microsoft dev work; rich browser based clients and OSS backends (you'll be hired within a week if you can back that resume up and prove it during a phone and in-person interview). 2) NON-Microsoft programming languages; Can you really code in C++ without VisualStudio? Know how to write OO-based Perl? Ruby-on-Rails at any type of internet base scale, can you really crank out the code for a LAMP stack and start taking user input from a site in one work day or less? 3) Work experience at internet scale. Your code taking millions of web hits per day? Startup/small tech companies here need people that know "scale". (MS based or not) 4) You contribute to OOS projects? Name dropping "known" OSS projects that you work on will get you in the door at lots of places here (big and small) 5) DevOps scaling experience. i.e.: Can you actually write python apps that control 1000 cores on AWS, can you really write Chef recipes that control 300 EC2s across 5 data centers and apply rolling security patches with zero user interruption?, etc 6) Real life "Big Data" experience? Hired in 48 hours or less. 7) Mobile development experience with apps actually in the App Stores (Native apps, not HTML5) : Get hire in 24 hours or less :-)
8) Be one of the top 1% of Microsoft stack developers in the world and go work for Microsoft
9) Willing to work really cheap with no benefits? Go the contractor/vendor route and work at Microsoft as an A-/V- (Again work those vendor's recruiters 24/5 as you are just a number to them, apply for 100 roles and you will get an interview on the campus)
10) Game dev experience? Mobile or fat-client including the supporting backends. Tons of game companies here, again mobile devs rule in this space right now.
I recently moved here from Atlanta, am working for Microsoft; we're hiring developers like crazy (I was living in Atlanta, contacted by a recruiter through LinkedIn). The market looks much nicer than Atlanta's.
Umm, F5 has 82 open headcount in Seattle and 225 open world wide. Try looking at what companies actually need. MS technology is everywhere in Seattle and we have incredibly experienced Microsofties in droves to pick from. We can’t hire Linux/UNIX folks fast enough as they are a tougher breed to source.
I'm graduating soon with a PhD in bioinformatics [...] and I'm not getting any interviews
I've been advised to "never hire a PhD". My interview dataset of one did not contradict. I found a huge gap between his insistence on his great skill in a topic and his practical application of that knowledge. Have a senior level brutally honest friend outside of academia "interview" you, and make sure you're not similar.
Get a job with a company in Southern Cal that allows you to work remotely. Then move to Seattle.
Texas has hurricanes.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I challenge you to find a position where relocation benefits are offered for anything less than CxO or VP x positions.
Pro: I got relocation benefits to move for my previous job, and I'm not C-level, I'm just a principal software engineer.
Con: It was to Sierra Vista, Arizona. They really do need to pay people to move there.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters