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Didn't you say before that you were going to Boise for the low cost of living while you increased your software development knowledge by self-training? Also, you've made it clear constantly that you do not like Seattle, so why not try a place you do like? This seems like an exercise in misery.
Seacove.. I thought me and you made peace.. Yes, I tried to start a business here, but I ended up getting a damaged nerve in my neck and was crippled for half a year and my business ventures failed as all I could do was lay on the floor and was bed ridden. Anyhow, my finances are running lower and now I need to find a job , as I do not want to end up homeless before I can start my dreams of launching my own business.
I actually love many things about Seattle, as I told you. Being a native (well raised since my youth) Cascadian, I really miss my beautiful rugged and green Cascade mountains. Indeed, I miss the beauty of Seattle and the Puget Sound very much. And, yes, I use to complain about the people in Seattle. I do not like the liberalism, high cost of living, traffic and taxes, but I will say overall there are many things I like about the area. I actually think the people in Seattle and Washington state are friendlier than Boise and Idaho overall. I didn't realize it until I moved here (for second time) that people here are very insular, small-town minded, cliquey and there is lot of depression, alcoholism and every bit as much as SAD and much more provincialism here. Seattle is far from being the friendliest and cheeriest place on the Earth, but I actually think for a big city it is not the worst place.
Is it ideal? No place is I am starting to find. Anyhow, I miss the big trees, rugged mountains and the beautiful scenery. I want to go hiking every weekend, rain or shine, like I did in my younger years in the ORegon Cascades. I want to live life to its fullest and I know the mountains are where my heart remains. Seattle is expensive, but most cities are far from affordable these days. Lack of state income tax is also a real help in Washington, especially if I ever do get my own business launched.
Anyhow, the job market in Seattle speaks for itself. It has one of the most booming IT markets in the country and being a .Net Stack developer there is potential for me. I still aspire to start my own business, but now I am running low on cash and need to strive to get back into the job market and will pursue my business goals on my spare time.
If you're a .NET developer, then you should have no problem getting a job working at Microsoft, with one caveat -- you will probably end up working as a contractor (i.e. working through a staffing agency like Insight Global or Aditi).
Feel free to message me as I am a local .NET developer who has worked at Microsoft in the past.
Kenneth, I am a .Net Developer with 16 years experience (been using .Net since VS 2002, its inception). I'm a bit lacking in the web skills and now frantically trying to catch up. However, I have been picking up the ASP.Net frameworks quickly and have done some web dev in the past. If you don't mind I would like to message you and discuss with you about potential .Net or MS contracting jobs. I am desperately striving to get some work and I am willing to take a paycut or whatever so I can at least get some cash flow in. I've been out of the job market for 15 years and have some catching up to do.
I moved to Seattle from Atlanta in 2012, albeit I only lived in Seattle for a year before moving to the Bay Area. The competition is pretty stiff, but not what people are making it out to be. Before moving to Seattle I was a solid intermediate at best engineer. Don't get me wrong, I had some experience, but I definitely wasn't a creme le creme guy. The key is don't try to hold out for the top of the top companies. If your goal is to get a job at Microsoft or Amazon, then it's going to be a miserable road. But there are plenty of other tech companies in the area, and they're always looking for talent. If you have some experience, finding a job isn't hard. The salaries aren't all that bad either in Seattle. While I make well well over 6 figures now, I was pulling into the very close 6 figures mark in Seattle and living in Bellevue (Seattle's metros most posh area). I knew people living in my neighborhood who were making 60k.
Seattle is extremely livable on a smaller income, although you do have to make some sacrifices. I don't expect someone with no experience to just hit the ground running, but even juniors should start at 50k. After a few years you should be close to the 100k mark if you make jumps at the right time, and get all of the relevant experience.
I also want to note that I'm am not a .NET developer. I'm a Sr. DevOps/SRE these days. Which is blazing hot market right now. When I came to Seattle I had about 8 years of J2EE, and had worked as a Unix sys admin in the past. I do have a good variety of skills, but nothing more special than your average tech guy in Seattle. While tech is definitely a booming field, tech talent is pretty hard to come by. Most companies need someone in there who know what they're doing. Companies like Micorsoft and Amazon has so much talent in house already that they are usually play the hold out game when it comes to hiring. Other companies don't dedicate majority of their budget to tech, so they're is usually more of a rush to get people in the door.
The fortunate and unfortunate thing about Seattle and the Bay Area, is while they're cities full of qualified people, all of the elite talent all have jobs already. And they're rarely if ever on the market. So that leads to a lot of unfilled jobs.
Last point, I feel Atlanta is a better place to start your career. Seattle to me feels like a more mid career city. If I were to tier cities, I would put Atlanta, Dallas, Houston as "begin your career" cities. I would put Seattle, Austin, and MAYBE DC as "I know some stuff, I want to get to the next level" type cities. And I would classify Silicon Valley, Boston, NYC, Austin as "ok I want to be elite and make a lot of money" type of cities.
Thanks for sharing this information, Bran.. It is very helpful.. I'm in dire need of work now and think I will be relocating back to Seattle to get a job. Once I get more stable and build up my resume more, I'm hoping to leave Seattle and move out to the Southeast for warmer weather. Although, I will have to see how things go.. Seattle's tech market seems to be booming and your assessment seems rational. The hottest and in most demand developers generally are not readily available, which is why they can get paid the high salaries. Many senior devs are making in the mid $150k range and these are not even the top of the line.
I wish, however, I could have started from day one being a J2EE guy instead of a .Net guy. Being on the .Net stack would be great if I was trying to launch my own start up as I did in the past. However, as far as looking for a job there is a lot more demand for Java people it seems, although maybe there is also a lot more Java developers. I've also had a great affection for Spring and JaX-RS web framework and feel it is a step above the ASP.NET framework. At least, it is more clear cut with the RESTful Web development than Microsoft's new and confusing Core framework, which merges REST into MVC, a framework I would like to separate from, yet is still in high demand.
I keep hearing about DevOps and it definitely seems to be all the rave. Sadly, I know almost nothing about DevOps, but obviously need to learn more about it. I'm trying to catch up with newer technologies and being off the market for so many years has put me at a major disadvantage.
Thanks for sharing this information, Bran.. It is very helpful.. I'm in dire need of work now and think I will be relocating back to Seattle to get a job. Once I get more stable and build up my resume more, I'm hoping to leave Seattle and move out to the Southeast for warmer weather. Although, I will have to see how things go.. Seattle's tech market seems to be booming and your assessment seems rational. The hottest and in most demand developers generally are not readily available, which is why they can get paid the high salaries. Many senior devs are making in the mid $150k range and these are not even the top of the line.
I wish, however, I could have started from day one being a J2EE guy instead of a .Net guy. Being on the .Net stack would be great if I was trying to launch my own start up as I did in the past. However, as far as looking for a job there is a lot more demand for Java people it seems, although maybe there is also a lot more Java developers. I've also had a great affection for Spring and JaX-RS web framework and feel it is a step above the ASP.NET framework. At least, it is more clear cut with the RESTful Web development than Microsoft's new and confusing Core framework, which merges REST into MVC, a framework I would like to separate from, yet is still in high demand.
I keep hearing about DevOps and it definitely seems to be all the rave. Sadly, I know almost nothing about DevOps, but obviously need to learn more about it. I'm trying to catch up with newer technologies and being off the market for so many years has put me at a major disadvantage.
Well to be honest with you, Java is pretty hot, but a lot of startups are moving away from it. It's incredibly hard to configure and maintain after awhile, and Java is painfully outdated compared to a lot of newer languages like Clojure or Scala. The JVM is still in heavy use though, and a lot of different languages run on top of it. Similar to how the .NET CLR has been working for years. Anyway, Java still has a pretty big place in enterprise and really big companies. And there is a lot of legacy code. But Java is not being looked at as the best starting point when trying to architect a new app.
The industry is hot right now for a couple of reasons. For one, there is a lot more data, so big data has been a big push for nearly every company. With that said, because big data is a big push, then staying ahead of competitors also is as well. Hence the emergence of DevOps practices. It's a way to get away from siloed environments where Operations and Development aren't really on the same page. So the goal has been to release often. And that takes a lot of adoption of good best practices, process, and Agile methodologies. DevOps is often seen as a job title, but it's suppose to be the blueprint of culture. As a result, companies like Google hated the term and adopted a new term called Site Reliability Engineer or SRE. SREs are essentially a miss mash of developers/sys admins/ cloud engineers and other things. Roles outside of straight dev have essentially merged into "jack of all trade" type of jobs. So Sys Admins are expected to know how to code. It's not that they code, it's what they code that separates them.
As far as web technologies are concerned. They're not too hard to learn. Most software platforms usually have some sort of MVC framework that's used. Below are some:
Java - Struts
Python - Django/Flask
Ruby - Ruby On Rails/Sinatra (far less popular, but still notable)
Scala - Play
For the most part, a few tutorials online, and some hands on coding, you can learn most of this stuff. Another big things is exposing parts of your app to others to use. This is done via an API and usually done in REST. Essentially it makes your app functionality into http endpoints. Web developers are usually sort of doing something like this, typically taking core functionality and wrapping them into endpoints.
Javascript has become pretty essential as well. For better or worse everyone has to know how to use it in some way. Angular and Node.js are stupid popular and hot right now. As well as things like the MEAN stack.
But anyway there are 2 hotter things way hotter than web development, and that's cloud and big data. Machine learning is huge, and big data is a large part of it. Generally big data guys command super high salaries, because it relies on you actively developing algorithms to deal with large volumes of data. And it requires that you learn how to utilize infrastructure to get the most out of it. The same thing goes for cloud development. Learning how to standup entire environments in the cloud via code is freaking huge right now. And it's something a lot of people really don't know how to do.
If I were you, I would stay on the Microsoft track, believe it or not the ability to work with Windows and microsoft is becoming very rare. Microsoft is really starting to encorporate strong dev ops practices in it's software and OSes. And Windows in the enterprise isn't going anywhere anytime soon. People underestimate how many companies are tied to the hip with Microsoft.
I would try to learn a functional language like Scala, and play around with frameworks like Spark. Also try to get familiar with NOSQL databases. For better or worse, they're a thing, and I can see more people moving towards them, not away from them. Go is a new language that's gaining popularity and it's very C like in syntax. It's also considered a lot easier to use, though I'm not a fan of it. Also if I were you I would take the time now to develop a body of work. With cloud services around now, you probably should be trying to do proof of concepts just to put something in your portolio. And it's essential to get involved in your local meetup scene especially if you're looking for work. I knew a guy who was close to 60, very out of data (he was a Fortran coder) and eventually landed a job. Why? Because he was very active in the meetup scene, and really started learning new stuff and getting involved in hackathons. Building that network is essential. And this should be a given, but, open up LinkedIn account if you don't already have one.
I moved to Seattle from Atlanta in 2012, albeit I only lived in Seattle for a year before moving to the Bay Area. The competition is pretty stiff, but not what people are making it out to be. Before moving to Seattle I was a solid intermediate at best engineer. Don't get me wrong, I had some experience, but I definitely wasn't a creme le creme guy. The key is don't try to hold out for the top of the top companies. If your goal is to get a job at Microsoft or Amazon, then it's going to be a miserable road. But there are plenty of other tech companies in the area, and they're always looking for talent. If you have some experience, finding a job isn't hard. The salaries aren't all that bad either in Seattle. While I make well well over 6 figures now, I was pulling into the very close 6 figures mark in Seattle and living in Bellevue (Seattle's metros most posh area). I knew people living in my neighborhood who were making 60k.
Seattle is extremely livable on a smaller income, although you do have to make some sacrifices. I don't expect someone with no experience to just hit the ground running, but even juniors should start at 50k. After a few years you should be close to the 100k mark if you make jumps at the right time, and get all of the relevant experience.
One thing to consider is places like Amazon, Google, etc. have high turnover, not only in FTE roles but especially in contract roles. Many stay one year or less. Plus the Amazon interview process is pretty long. I was making six figures very early on/quickly in my IT career but it may have to do with my specialty and demonstrated problem solving ability (in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King). I will say I have noticed the competition has become a lot more stiff now than it used to be. I see 20 jobs for my specialty in Tampa for every job I see in Seattle.
In my personal opinion as a guy who owns a lot of rental properties ranging from 150 to 700K I find it hard to believe anyone is living in Bellevue in a single family household off 60K a year income unless they are living in a bad area, a tiny little historic house, with room mates/family or are living pay check to pay check. I'm a pretty frugal guy, but to live in decent commuting distance to Bellevue even with 20% down on a say a 500K house you're looking at a a mortgage of $2,400 a month even with a low interest rate. Add food, gas, utilities, insurance and other expenses and you're living pretty tight or doing some combination of the above.
Thanks for sharing this information, Bran.. It is very helpful.. I'm in dire need of work now and think I will be relocating back to Seattle to get a job. Once I get more stable and build up my resume more, I'm hoping to leave Seattle and move out to the Southeast for warmer weather. Although, I will have to see how things go.. Seattle's tech market seems to be booming and your assessment seems rational. The hottest and in most demand developers generally are not readily available, which is why they can get paid the high salaries. Many senior devs are making in the mid $150k range and these are not even the top of the line.
I wish, however, I could have started from day one being a J2EE guy instead of a .Net guy. Being on the .Net stack would be great if I was trying to launch my own start up as I did in the past. However, as far as looking for a job there is a lot more demand for Java people it seems, although maybe there is also a lot more Java developers. I've also had a great affection for Spring and JaX-RS web framework and feel it is a step above the ASP.NET framework. At least, it is more clear cut with the RESTful Web development than Microsoft's new and confusing Core framework, which merges REST into MVC, a framework I would like to separate from, yet is still in high demand.
I keep hearing about DevOps and it definitely seems to be all the rave. Sadly, I know almost nothing about DevOps, but obviously need to learn more about it. I'm trying to catch up with newer technologies and being off the market for so many years has put me at a major disadvantage.
I know devops guys that make 180K a year here. Most of the software and systems folks are making MUCH less than that. Devops is def. hot but also involves some long and stressful after hours work. Would have to do devops for some major retailer, pushing code that worked fine in test but raises all kinds of problems in production because they don't match exactly or such crazy scenarios.
I know devops guys that make 180K a year here. Most of the software and systems folks are making MUCH less than that. Devops is def. hot but also involves some long and stressful after hours work. Would have to do devops for some major retailer, pushing code that worked fine in test but raises all kinds of problems in production because they don't match exactly or such crazy scenarios.
This is the problem DevOps is meant to fix. The main issue with the state of DevOps, is that there is the culture of DevOps and then there is the job title DevOps. A "DevOps guy" is meant to bring new changes to the culture by introducing a tool chain and workflow to avoid the above situations. Some shops just end up using their DevOps enginers like some souped up Sys Admin, and the DevOps guy isn't really allowed to introduce anything. I've found managers who really love reactive nonsense generally don't really utlilize DevOps practices very well.
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