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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
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.
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.
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?
Recruiters are waste of time. They have nothing to offer and only collecting resumes.
Apply directly!
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.
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
Wow. You would think throwing out so many insults, that you would learn how to spell properly and use basic grammar. As it is, you sound like a semi-literate, drooling moron.
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.
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 realize it's a weird personal quirk, but I actually prefer gloomy weather to bright sunny days.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I moved country (from Australia to New Zealand) and it was the best thing I ever did.
I want to move again (now to SoCal or the Bay Area but visa issues yay) and am really looking forward to it.
People SHOULD move and experience life in a new area. Especially in a different country where possible.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
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.
It's not that bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEBCS006HvA
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
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.
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.
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.
I liked the weather
Ok, first off i know your lying.
Wait, what? I have lived in Seattle my whole life and I LOVE the weather here. I know it's hard to comprehend in your small mind, but some people in this world actually like rain. Grey, overcast weather does not bother me. Sunny, hot days do bother me. I fucking love Seattle weather. It's never too hot, it's never too cold. Rarely snows in the downtown Seattle area, gets lots of rain (which cleans the city). Beautiful out year around. Weed is legal.
Seriously, I am in heaven living in Seattle. I understand it's not for everyone, but understand how you like to live, isn't how everyone else likes to live.
Be seeing you...
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.
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
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.
Really? Oh no! We'll all be turned into godless communists who are in league with the Bolshevik Martian invaders. Soon we will force everyone to wear their underpants on their heads!
Relocation ain't cheap - cost a Houston company over 30K to move me from Miami, plus whatever the recruiter took.
Yes, really. You're not their target employee.
Former military enlistees getting out after the enlistment are their target demographic. That, or you get into a company on the commercial side and talk them into dealing with getting you a clearance so you can work on the good stuff.
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.
Only becasue you haven't lived anyplace with regular sunny weather.
You have no contrast.Sure it's better weather then the nothing else you have tried.
You have tricked yourself into thinking you love the weather, just like a slave can trick themselves its not all bad becasue they have no reference.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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
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
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.
I moved country, from the UK to New Zealand and it was the best thing I ever did.
I moved again from NZ to the Bay Area, and I'm not regretting it for the experience, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to head back to New Zealand in as short a time as possible. Your sig is pretty accurate.
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.
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
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.
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
Quoting the GP:
And I'm not a programmer
That's probably going to make writing apps somewhat more difficult.
Write failed: Broken pipe
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.
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?
.NET isn't dying, it's still by far the best enterprise and commodity business software development platform. Nothing else even comes close.
As the the MS Stack, being someone who knows something about computers I'd say that means .NET + SQL + Windows Server and associated technologies. Not hard to figure out...
I'm not from Seattle -- 90 miles north of it. Anyway, I lived in Santa Barbara for one year and I went absolutely berserk. It rained only in January -- the rest of the time it was totally cloudless, and I hated it. The most boring weather ever. I couldn't get out of there quickly enough.
Where I live, there is always something happening in the sky and I love it. Besides, without clouds, you can't have interesting sunshine -- the type where the air itself seems to turn gold -- requires the just the right level of recent drizzle, thick cloud cover, sun peeping in from a shallow angle above the horizon -- you get the most amazing super-saturated colors. It's like living inside some special effect.
In contrast, bright garish light washes every color down to some shade of gray. And gives you cancer.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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
Move first. Then look for jobs.
How much money should one have in the bank before moving from, say, northeast Indiana to greater Seattle?
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 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.
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.
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.
"And if you've got medical problems or any chance of getting pregnant"... so basically what you're saying is, you only hire guys (or women over 40)? That *seriously* doesn't sound legal.
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.
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