This is a follow-up on yesterday’s post
My sister is in Ireland. She is drunk right now (It doesn’t matter what time of day you are reading this, I stand by that statement), happy and having the time of her life. God love her I don’t think I have ever been more proud. You see, my sister is, or was, a very introverted person. She always clung close to home and took whatever jobs were within driving distance of the folk’s place. That, I told her more than once, was a teriffic recipe for Suckjob pie because she had no options and her bosses knew it. The last company pushed her so far that, one night in a desparate cry for help, she requested applications from every college in Europe with an english website. There was no grand plan involved, it was more like walking into the Merchant Marines recruiting office in the hopes they would take you far away no questions asked. Thing was, she was exactly what some no-name program in Dublin (*cough*Trinity*cough*) was looking for. They needed someone with her skills in the program and she needed some program to need her skills. Perfect fit!
Those same set of circumstances apply to many people in the tech field looking for gainful employment. One avenue I neglected to address in yesterday’s post was the double sided nature of location centric job searches. If you have worked in an industry like the tech sector for at least a couple years, one of your greatest assets is your network on contacts. While those contacts are a fantastic resource for finding work, the options available are pretty limited to geography because the ‘mike knows a guy who needs a server dude’ chain will only stretch so far. Think of it as a small, heavily spoked spiderweb centering on your immediate location. If there is a job in your field, chances are your network knows about it and can get you hooked up. Its just that the number of hookups is directly related to the size of the community. Here people in urban areas have an advantage over rural and major metropolitan over small cityscape. Even still, outside of SF, NY, Seattle, Chicago, and Austin, most local networks can be pretty weak sauce even in high population demographics. Those areas are technology and media company hotbeds, groups that use ten times the average number of tech people for their size. This is where being location flexible gives you a huge advantage when looking for a good job because you can tap into these and other hotbeds, live and work amongst your people, and grow ever more impressive networks.
Being open to relocation can make all the difference when searching. Believe me, I know the reasons why you have dismissed the idea completely. I too have a house, a family, community ties, school ties, a bad market for home resale, and friends and loved ones right here where I live. But the chance to find a ‘Perfect Fit’ with your career can make an extremely compelling case to ignore those reasons and relocate anyway. [Note: the author of this post lives in Michigan and his snowblower committed suicide from sheer exhustion, your regional contentment may vary]. It all boils down to work/life balance. I’ve personally found that when I love what I do and enjoy the place that I do it, I carry that contentment on home with me. Equally, when I hate what I’m doing and who I’m doing it for, that discontentment follows me home and permeates everything I do. Finding one that fits is much easier when you spread your options across the map.
Though there are times when making that life changing jump just isn’t worth it… I’m looking at you Web Developer in Anchorage, Alaska.
Photo attributed to genvessel
If you are in software development, take a good hard look at the code you are writing right now. If the string of Roman characters resemble Java or .Net or C/C++ then I have some wonderfully awful predictions about the next ten years of your life; That language is your scarlet letter and will follow/define you for the next two jobs you end up accepting. That sounds bad but you are the blessed among the damned – You can and will find that next job. For Bleeding Edgers, the road is not so well paved.