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2 comments
The hiring market in SFBA is one of the hardest for employers in the entire country. Your intuition about the bar for hiring in different regions is understandable, but misleading: you'll have an easier time getting a role in SFBA than you would in a region with fewer tech employers and less competition for talent.
Your profile says you have been working at a company for a year and a half, and you list no projects. Your github link contains a tic tac toe solver. You've given us nothing to judge you by.
Everyone has Ruby on Rails, TDD, Agile, and the other buzzwords on their resume. It really doesn't mean much, to be honest. Any intelligent person can pick any of that up if they haven't been exposed to it, and any unintelligent person can list it on their resume and repeat the buzzwords.
A "challenging company" in the bay area is going to throw you head first into a technology that not only you do not know, but nobody knows. You will be expected to create original algorithms and ideas. Your work will be regularly reviewed for patentable ideas. Every day when I walk into the office I walk into the unknown - google and textbooks are no help except to point the way. It someone else had already figured it out they would already have the business. I have no idea if you are capable of that or not, but nothing that you've linked says you are. Change the links, or your plans ;)
It's really expensive to live here, the traffic is horrible, and you may end up living your work. Either the work, or the bay area better be really important to you. If you just want to write some Ruby on Rails, there are much cheaper, better quality of life places to do that. with that said, in some ways my paragraph above is a caricature. There are plenty of jobs here where you are cranking out apps or such, and people with mediocre skills do fine. Silicon valley goes way overboard in talking about how everyone is the best and the brightest in my experience. In that sense any decent programmer is a good fit. There is no particular reason to be intimidated in trying to get a job here if you can program, but is it worth moving across the world just to be average? Maybe, but that doesn't seem to be your question.
I'm not trying to run you down - it's encouraging that you know SICP, for example. But you have a year and a half experience and have only shown us toy projects. As it stands I would have no interest in interviewing you, which could very well be my loss, but who has the time? If you are better than most programmers around you, you will do very well here. Come on over, polish up the resume, and accept that your first job might be a place where you do little but prove that you can produce in a fast environment. As another poster has pointed out, there are a lot of job openings here.
Everyone has Ruby on Rails, TDD, Agile, and the other buzzwords on their resume. It really doesn't mean much, to be honest. Any intelligent person can pick any of that up if they haven't been exposed to it, and any unintelligent person can list it on their resume and repeat the buzzwords.
A "challenging company" in the bay area is going to throw you head first into a technology that not only you do not know, but nobody knows. You will be expected to create original algorithms and ideas. Your work will be regularly reviewed for patentable ideas. Every day when I walk into the office I walk into the unknown - google and textbooks are no help except to point the way. It someone else had already figured it out they would already have the business. I have no idea if you are capable of that or not, but nothing that you've linked says you are. Change the links, or your plans ;)
It's really expensive to live here, the traffic is horrible, and you may end up living your work. Either the work, or the bay area better be really important to you. If you just want to write some Ruby on Rails, there are much cheaper, better quality of life places to do that. with that said, in some ways my paragraph above is a caricature. There are plenty of jobs here where you are cranking out apps or such, and people with mediocre skills do fine. Silicon valley goes way overboard in talking about how everyone is the best and the brightest in my experience. In that sense any decent programmer is a good fit. There is no particular reason to be intimidated in trying to get a job here if you can program, but is it worth moving across the world just to be average? Maybe, but that doesn't seem to be your question.
I'm not trying to run you down - it's encouraging that you know SICP, for example. But you have a year and a half experience and have only shown us toy projects. As it stands I would have no interest in interviewing you, which could very well be my loss, but who has the time? If you are better than most programmers around you, you will do very well here. Come on over, polish up the resume, and accept that your first job might be a place where you do little but prove that you can produce in a fast environment. As another poster has pointed out, there are a lot of job openings here.
> A "challenging company" in the bay area is going to throw you head first into a technology that not only you do not know, but nobody knows. You will be expected to create original algorithms and ideas. Your work will be regularly reviewed for patentable ideas. Every day when I walk into the office I walk into the unknown - google and textbooks are no help except to point the way. It someone else had already figured it out they would already have the business. I have no idea if you are capable of that or not, but nothing that you've linked says you are. Change the links, or your plans ;)
Thanks for taking time to write such an honest response. I realize my mistake that I haven't listed any projects explicitly.
I expected people to look at "Repositories contributed to" in my github profile for project experience. I guess it was my fault for assuming something like this.
Aside from projects listed there I also worked on the eval server for http://rubymonk.com/ and http://pythonmonk.com/.
I expected people to look at "Repositories contributed to" in my github profile for project experience. I guess it was my fault for assuming something like this.
Aside from projects listed there I also worked on the eval server for http://rubymonk.com/ and http://pythonmonk.com/.