If cities improved productivity by bringing more people in contact with each other, imagine everyone able to connect from anywhere. And without leaving their local communities, so there's no brain drain and less social atomization.
There is a huge opportunity left on the table by so many of America’s cities to, basically, build a great city that can scale, attract everyone, use taxes to provide public goods, rinse, repeat.
Unfortunately, none of our cities seem to be able to be able to grow without housing getting more expansive and traffic getting terrible.
What you're describing is pretty broadly true around the world. Certainly some cities, especially those with strong urban planning authority, do better with transit and new housing than others. But most cities with high demand to live there worldwide are expensive for locals who are usually also unhappy with various aspects of transit/traffic/etc.
I believe it. I don’t mean to imply this is only true for America — I just didn’t want to overstate my case.
Perhaps once we get really good at asynchronous work, the opportunity will be on the table for one city to try to import substantial numbers of people from all across the world.
One of the challenges is that, with rare exceptions, cities don't build out in advance of demand and, once the demand is there, rebuilding housing, transportation, and other systems is often expensive and disruptive--and can really be hard without a strong central authority.
Singapore is probably about as good an example as any (at least outside of China) of centralized urban planning (and they even have an interesting gallery on it https://www.ura.gov.sg/corporate). But, while getting around Singapore works pretty well, it's certainly not a city you would call especially affordable in general.
The only reason to start a tech company in CA was the proximity to talent and capital. I always found it funny that supposedly cutting edge high tech VC’s wanted you nearby when we had all the tools to base anywhere in the world. Seemed like they were unnecessarily limiting deal potential. Same thing with engineers.
Now that remote work has accelerated into the mainstream, there is zero reason to base in CA, and many reasons to go elsewhere.
Also, the CA of today is very different from the one that cradled the computing industry.
CA still has large and growing industries that could be great clients. I agree there is zero reason to focus on engineering talent in CA but depending on your company it might make a lot of sense to build with a sales team in CA.
I moved to San Francisco a few years ago with the sole goal of starting a tech company. The “cushiness” of my well paid day job has made me a bit lazy in that regard, but it’s still the goal.
However, I’ve become extremely disenchanted with the city and state, so the idea that tech startup == San Francisco is the only thing keeping me here.
You likely want connections that you can only develop there, but once you actually start, VCs don't care where you, just who you are and who can vouch for you.
FWIW I'm working on a tech startup far away from SF, so it's possible. However we're arguably not a startup since we're not really engineered for hypergrowth as much as slowly and methodically building a self-funded, profitable product company. As such issues like raising funding and hiring quickly are not things we're concerned with, which might be why we're doing fine outside of SF. When we do hire it's 100% remote so our location isn't hurting us in that regard.
We feel like this is the best choice for our company as we retain 100% ownership and can focus on a straightforward business model of selling people a product that solves their problem at a fair price. Arguably the possible upside would be higher if we tried to go the VC route and get huge fast, but then the potential downside goes up as well. This way we're working ourselves into what amount to incredibly high paying jobs while also owning the asset that is the company.
>I always found it funny that supposedly cutting edge high tech VC’s wanted you nearby when we had all the tools to base anywhere in the world.
There really was something special about the time and place of San Francisco from the late 2000s up to 2020. The energy that place had was like nothing else I've ever experienced. You can absolutely make great software fully remote. But there's something to be said for being immersed in a culture of likeminded individuals and going to events all over the city every night to share thoughts with them. I'm eternally grateful for having spent the beginning of my career in that environment.
Do you think that environment will come back at some point? I think it is powerful to immerse yourself in such an environment and I would like to have that experience at some point in my career.
I haven't been to CA for a couple years at this point. There's still a lot of tech industry there. I assume that, for better or worse, the Bay Area goes back to tech being at the center of many things--which as I suggest is good or bad depending if you want all tech all the time or not.
> ”being immersed in a culture of likeminded individuals and going to events all over the city every night to share thoughts with them”
This would be my nightmare. I do genuinely love tech and startups, but talking shop with strangers quickly feels hollow. At conferences I was always looking to escape by the end of first day lunch and maybe go to a local museum instead.
I actually like going to tech events and am glad they're starting back up again. I find the interactions and connections both fun and useful. That said the Bay Area "If it's Tuesday, it must be a Kubernetes Meetup, if it's Wednesday..." thing pretty tiring pretty quickly.
>That said the Bay Area "If it's Tuesday, it must be a Kubernetes Meetup, if it's Wednesday..." thing pretty tiring pretty quickly.
Depends on where you're at in life, honestly. I'd never want to do it again as a grown adult with a family, but when you're young it's a blast. Eventually it doesn't even matter what the meetup is about anymore, it's just about the free pizza, beer, and networking. And as a broke 22 year old paying bay area rent prices, I practically lived off the stuff.
I disagree. California even ignoring the jobs is a fantastic place to live. The culture, people, food and arts, nature/beaches/forests, diversity and weather is something I have not been able to find anywhere else in the world. That’s not even taking into account the extremely high pay, meeting of the minds and country level GDP engine.
I counter-disagree :) I hope you don't mind. Here is why: It's a fun place and the weather is amazing, however I wouldn't call it diverse (diversity of thought as well) and I wouldn't say the pay is high because of the high cost of living.
Thank you for the counter reply, I'd also disagree with diversity of races comment, but I will step back as I don't think counting people by color is fruitful labor. I'm only replying based on personal experience being all over different parts of the state over the years.
Counting people of color individually in any given setting, probably not. Organically living and working with a diversity of races is something I cherish and would hate to live without.
Very surprised that you feel this way after traveling throughout the state. Honestly, it blows my mind that places like Vallejo, Bakersfield, and Placerville are all part of the same state compared to places like the Bay Area and Socal. They don't feel remotely the same to me.
CA has a lot going for it. but people are fake and no one will really help you unless there is short term money to be made or potential huge long term upside and you have funding or they have known you for 20 years. culture and arts is constrained compared to what you find in europe. food and quality of groceries is indeed really great. the high pay only comes if you work for FAANG or were lucky and got an exit from a startup. and the cost of living and taxes are sky high leading to constant stress. finally, VCs only invest if you do something that falls in their current interests or group think AND if they know someone who knows you etc. the same as anywhere else where there are VCs, with similar adversity to risk.
The greater valley (valley+bay+SF) is still the best place in the world to start your high-tech startup. The talent, resources, and infrastructure are here. The mentors are here. And the general 'work like hell to produce MVP' ethic is also here. Until other population centers duplicate all of these, the valley will remain The Place for Tech Innovation.
It seems to me, from reading the charts, that it still follows power law distribution, just with different cities. In other words, the labor dynamic that creates super star cities are still very much in place, just with new cities. Is that a fair reading?
Also, tangentially, what statistics should I calculate if I want to measure how "concentrated" the distribution is? The first thing that comes to mind is Gini coef, does that apply here or is there something else? The question I'm trying to answer is if the jobs are more dispersed among different cities or concentrated - assuming the cities themselves don't matter.
Well, city size (or really metro size presumably) follows some sort of power law-ish distribution in general. So, if you look at tech employers who historically mostly hired people from certain regions on the West Coast and see where they're hiring today, it's not surprising that they'd tend to cluster around larger metros given that's where a lot of people are. (Or at least there are more people in X large metros than there are in X arbitrarily-chosen smaller towns and cities.)
I'm guessing to study concentration more broadly you really want to study a broader distribution of companies. I'm not sure that looking primarily at CA outflows for future job positions is necessarily an unbiased look at tech job distribution more broadly (and really not just tech jobs but employment at large West Coast tech companies in general).
Too bad the interview process is such a nightmare. It's literally given me PTSD at this point. I'd love to try out a new opportunity, but the thought of that nightmare process leaves me grateful and content where I'm at.
I've also noticed a lot of rising credentialism in the industry. BS CS is now listed on practically every job posting. With the massive rise in CS grads in the US I truly don't know how a self taught dev like myself could even get a shot at a junior role anymore.
Start doing some freelancing like Upwork and build a resume. Even though it’s a global platform you’re still going to have an advantage as a US based dev if you price yourself in the Eastern European bracket ($40-ish per hour). After a few successful jobs you’d have good credentials to either charge more or just migrate to a full time work.
As a hiring manager, I can’t imagine the time spent doing Upwork would be directly valuable enough in a portfolio or credentials sense when looking for full-time work. (It might give you practice and focused effort and so make you indirectly valuable, but if your prime worry is credentialism, I don’t think it helps.)
Not sure why. Having completed projects successfully with the right technologies and receiving positive reviews should, in theory, be a stronger indicator for capability than just having had a fulltime position somewhere or passing an arbitrary technical interview.
But then I always tended to hire people based on attitude rather than specific credentials or experience.
Still:
a. Upwork could lead to full time opportunities
b. You still get money while working, and $40/h gathering experience sure as hell beats a third of that working in retail.
It costs almost nothing to get reviews planted in upwork. Have a confederate (or your alter-ego) post a project, pay you, and leave a glowing review. You’re out only upwork’s commission.
Almost every position I've ever seen says "BS or equivalent experience".
I never look at resumes when conducting interviews unless I'm asking the candidate about past projects. It makes you form biases. I don't look at the school at all.
As a data point, some of my coworkers went to MIT, CMU, and Stanford. Many others didn't go to college at all or graduated with entirely orthogonal degrees. I'm at a fintech with $500k total comp packages.
Degrees are bullshit unless you're doing research, using an expensive lab, or need mentorship. You can learn data structures, algorithm analysis, and distributed computing on your own from home using free resources. That's more than enough to land a good job.
Any interview pipeline asking you dynamic programming problems has a broken process.
Sure, yes you can. Statistically speaking how many people actually do this for several years while being focused on other things? I know there are some, absolutely, but I’ve met lots of people with and without CS degrees. It’s pretty clear to me that on average, the ones with degrees are better prepared for programming jobs than the ones who dabbled. I would say it’s also clear that a small minority of self-taught people are even better prepared for jobs than the majority of degree holders. And the best programmers I’ve ever known do a metric ton of both academics and self-schooling, because they devour it in all possible ways.
> Any interview pipeline asking you dynamic programming problems has a broken process.
So the question is: what is the right process? Are you saying the interview should not ask any algorithm questions?
The trouble with being self-taught is few manage to teach themselves calculus let alone advanced calculus, and one can have yawning gaps in knowledge and be completely unaware of their existence.
I've known many engineers who could have simplified their work if they'd used calculus, but they were afraid of calculus and went to considerable lengths to avoid it.
For example, I know one who was trying to reduce the noise in an electronic circuit. He randomly tried adding resistors and capacitors of various values. Until eventually a coworker looked at it, calculated the right values in a few minutes, and eliminated the noise.
I've seen this sort of thing again and again, in diverse fields.
There is a fellow I know who gives embedded design seminars, and he -- intentionally -- puts up one slide that has an error in showing Maxwell's Equations. He notes that in Europe, especially Germany, almost every time he puts up that slide, someone politely points out his "typo". In the USA? He said about 1 in 50 seminars somebody does the same. If you are doing engineering, and you don't know cold both multi-variable integral and differential calculus, you have no right calling yourself an 'engineer' IMHO.
Sadly, I'd flunk that test. Although I was taught ME, and understood them, and still remember what they are and do, I don't recall the exact form of them anymore.
But if I did need them, I know enough to know just were to look to refresh my memory :-)
Your example will only resonate with a small minority since most of us here
are web and CRUD jockeys. Also, your claim to have "seen this sort of thing
again and again, in diverse fields," is patently disingenuous. Even the most
maths-intensive groups in tech deal largely with discrete methods.
If you don't work in webdev or the equivalent mobile apps then it is important for quite a lot of jobs. If you work in webdev then I agree there is not many reasons to get a degree, but what if you want to work in some other fields where it helps? I really doubt that the number of people who works in webdev matches how many people have a passion for webdev, feels like many would prefer to work in fields which requires a bit more technical skills than that.
Math is the fundamental building block for doing so many interesting things with programs, so to me every interesting programming job requires boatloads of maths. Sure you can do forms and crud and authorization checks and messaging apps and large distributed systems etc without maths, but that doesn't sound terribly exciting to me.
I used to write device drivers, advanced math never came up. I did devops and wrote applications still no advanced math.
Like I enjoy the fact I know calc but I’m not about to oversell it’s usefulness for most programming. Math is not the fundamental building block of software imho, logic is.
What the hell does calculus have to do with 99% of all "tech" jobs? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I can't even fathom why knowing anything at all about calculus is going to be useful when automating things, writing APIs, or doing anything that nearly every business wants their "tech" people to do.
Ordering parts out of a catalog and assembling them per instructions is what a mechanic does. An engineer designs the parts and writes the instructions.
Some things you can't do without math: curve fitting, statistics, implementing Shazam, 3D graphics, write a game engine, do data flow analysis, implement a neural net, non-trivial use of floating point, write a lunar lander game, etc.
I'd suggest that even for more mundane problems learning calculus will expand one's ability to think at a higher level. Being exposed to an advanced maths with real theory behind it like calculus gives even the most routine code jockey exposure to concepts and patterns of thinking beyond even the brightest scholars 1000 years ago. Even just the notion of a derivative yields a lot of benefit for basic financial thinking.
I remember two pages of math in a college economic textbook. Reading it, I realized they were doing differentiation by going around the horn. Instead of requiring calculus for the class, they taught it.
Except they never mentioned the words "calculus", "differentiation", or "integration". I suppose they figured those words would dissuade people from the class :-/
The amusing thing is the poor schlubs taking the class would never realize that they'd learned calculus!
"You can't Google things you don't know exist" is a guiding principle to how I try to learn things.
FWIW Teaching things yourself is much easier now, i.e. you can get pretty much any textbook for free (nudge nudge wink wink). It's a truly great time to be fascinated by things
I think of the Shazam app. When I first encountered it, I thought "must be using Fourier Analysis". Of course, that turned out to be true.
But if I'd never gone to college, I would not know that FA existed, or if I did, I wouldn't know what it was good for. I'd probably invent some sort of ad-hoc ineffective algorithm for it. I've certainly seen a lot of ad-hoc kludge algorithms from smart people who simply didn't know there were excellent mathematical methods to solve it.
Learned advanced calculus in college in my CS program, never used it in professional life writing code. It was just to weed people out. Just an IQ test.
It’s getting tougher for the first job but not for the 2nd, where word of mouth (a strong referral from a colleague who worked with you) carries much more weight than resume.
My understanding is the Googles of the world are de-emphasizing degrees but they can’t hire everyone. And you have to pass their technical interview.
>It’s getting tougher for the first job but not for the 2nd, where word of mouth (a strong referral from a colleague who worked with you) carries much more weight than resume.
I've gotten plenty of employee referrals in the past because people I've worked with know I'm a solid developer, but honestly I just politely refuse them at this point. Every single time it happens, the company just drops you straight into the standard interview pipeline with zero benefit other than perhaps skipping a recruiter phone call. And when I'm inevitably not able to solve some random whiteboard problem or whatever, and I get rejected, it makes the friendship weird from then on.
The first is employees put the names of people they know and have maybe worked with a bit into the system attached to an open position with the hope, in part, that they'll get a referral bonus down the road. That's going to basically go through the regular process.
When I've gotten a job directly or indirectly through someone I knew, it's been through people I've worked with in the past and were usually in a position to at least influence the hiring. I'm not sure any of those jobs (which I've just had a few of) was even against a posted position.
Employee referrals do you no good if you don’t want the job.
They are massively useful if you see a job you want and can’t figure out how to convince the Applicant Tracking System or non-technical HR rep that you’re worthy despite a non-standard background.
Not needed if you have no trouble getting interviews, and it doesn’t replace having to do the interviews.
> how a self taught dev like myself could even get a shot at a junior role anymore.
Contribute meaningfully to open source. Many contributors to the D community have leveraged that into well paying jobs, without the usual academic credentials.
i can relate to this. My last job search had me considering a new career, it was so demoralizing. I just couldn't get anything. I can go on an on about how its such a a horrible experience. Even the things just out of my control. Then the new job it self can be hellish experience. After some real terrible teams and companies why even risk it if your not totally miserable. There are some sociopaths and truly terrible people out there and just completely incompetent.
The definition of “tech” keep expanding. Amazon is a retail company, not tech. Walmart would be “tech” too. Loan processing is not tech, neither id advertising (all social media companies).
I’m a traditional EE, and don’t want to be associated with “tech” even though I actually work in technology.
What are some of the most underrated US cities for tech? One that comes to my mind is Nashville. It seems to have a considerable tech scene, the music scene is great, and it's much more affordable than, say, Austin.
I suppose it depends what you mean by "for tech." If it's to work in tech locally, the situation with smaller cities is likely to be mostly a function of what jobs are available there. And note that many tech employers--indeed most until fairly recently--were in office parks not downtown.
If you have more flexibility with remote work, there are a ton of smaller cities that many people like. You mentioned Nashville. Some others that come to mind are Raleigh, Minneapolis, Portsmouth NH, Portland ME... The one caveat I would make with a number of these cities is that the walkable (gentrified) downtown is often pretty small so it's really a very different experience from living/working in a large city.
Can confirm. Live in Madison, WI. People here call it a "city" and "tech hub" but the downtown is like 3 square blocks and there's like half a dozen """tech""" companies in the area and maybe twice as many small startups. lol
A ton of college towns are like that. The college/uni does bring some degree of "culture" and other entertainment and spur some tech-related companies you wouldn't find in an equivalently-sized place that didn't have a college attached, but the options are limited.
I worked in downtown Nashua NH for a number of years. The downtown was actually quite nice. On the river, quite a few restaurants, some shops, etc. But yeah, outside of a few blocks adjacent to maybe 5 or 6 blocks of Main Street, things either started to get sketchy or just started to blend into the strip mall and industrial parks south of town. Raleigh, where I sometimes travel to because we have a big office there, is very similar.
Good point—personally what I'm thinking of are cities where I can work remotely but still participate in the local tech culture through meetups and events, and hopefully connect with other founders. Raleigh and Minneapolis both seem like great examples. I visited Minneapolis last week and was impressed by their downtown and art culture. I'm not very familiar with Portsmouth or Portland ME, but I'll look into those.
Portsmouth NH had a somewhat flowering tech scene in the dot-com era. Don't know about today. Might want to reach out to @sogrady about "real" Portland :-)
ADDED: I'd add that if living in "downtown" (such as it is) isn't a major consideration, I'd point out that aside from some places like the Bay Area it's pretty easy to live outside many major cities like Boston but easily go in for meetings or evening events.
Is it much more affordable than Austin? They seem to be within the same range (for comparable locations and all) and that the gap has quickly filled in, just my observation but I look at TN stuff way more than TX.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadUnfortunately, none of our cities seem to be able to be able to grow without housing getting more expansive and traffic getting terrible.
Perhaps once we get really good at asynchronous work, the opportunity will be on the table for one city to try to import substantial numbers of people from all across the world.
Singapore is probably about as good an example as any (at least outside of China) of centralized urban planning (and they even have an interesting gallery on it https://www.ura.gov.sg/corporate). But, while getting around Singapore works pretty well, it's certainly not a city you would call especially affordable in general.
Now that remote work has accelerated into the mainstream, there is zero reason to base in CA, and many reasons to go elsewhere.
Also, the CA of today is very different from the one that cradled the computing industry.
I moved to San Francisco a few years ago with the sole goal of starting a tech company. The “cushiness” of my well paid day job has made me a bit lazy in that regard, but it’s still the goal.
However, I’ve become extremely disenchanted with the city and state, so the idea that tech startup == San Francisco is the only thing keeping me here.
We feel like this is the best choice for our company as we retain 100% ownership and can focus on a straightforward business model of selling people a product that solves their problem at a fair price. Arguably the possible upside would be higher if we tried to go the VC route and get huge fast, but then the potential downside goes up as well. This way we're working ourselves into what amount to incredibly high paying jobs while also owning the asset that is the company.
There really was something special about the time and place of San Francisco from the late 2000s up to 2020. The energy that place had was like nothing else I've ever experienced. You can absolutely make great software fully remote. But there's something to be said for being immersed in a culture of likeminded individuals and going to events all over the city every night to share thoughts with them. I'm eternally grateful for having spent the beginning of my career in that environment.
This would be my nightmare. I do genuinely love tech and startups, but talking shop with strangers quickly feels hollow. At conferences I was always looking to escape by the end of first day lunch and maybe go to a local museum instead.
Depends on where you're at in life, honestly. I'd never want to do it again as a grown adult with a family, but when you're young it's a blast. Eventually it doesn't even matter what the meetup is about anymore, it's just about the free pizza, beer, and networking. And as a broke 22 year old paying bay area rent prices, I practically lived off the stuff.
Also, tangentially, what statistics should I calculate if I want to measure how "concentrated" the distribution is? The first thing that comes to mind is Gini coef, does that apply here or is there something else? The question I'm trying to answer is if the jobs are more dispersed among different cities or concentrated - assuming the cities themselves don't matter.
I'm guessing to study concentration more broadly you really want to study a broader distribution of companies. I'm not sure that looking primarily at CA outflows for future job positions is necessarily an unbiased look at tech job distribution more broadly (and really not just tech jobs but employment at large West Coast tech companies in general).
I've also noticed a lot of rising credentialism in the industry. BS CS is now listed on practically every job posting. With the massive rise in CS grads in the US I truly don't know how a self taught dev like myself could even get a shot at a junior role anymore.
But then I always tended to hire people based on attitude rather than specific credentials or experience.
Still: a. Upwork could lead to full time opportunities b. You still get money while working, and $40/h gathering experience sure as hell beats a third of that working in retail.
I never look at resumes when conducting interviews unless I'm asking the candidate about past projects. It makes you form biases. I don't look at the school at all.
As a data point, some of my coworkers went to MIT, CMU, and Stanford. Many others didn't go to college at all or graduated with entirely orthogonal degrees. I'm at a fintech with $500k total comp packages.
Degrees are bullshit unless you're doing research, using an expensive lab, or need mentorship. You can learn data structures, algorithm analysis, and distributed computing on your own from home using free resources. That's more than enough to land a good job.
Any interview pipeline asking you dynamic programming problems has a broken process.
Sure, yes you can. Statistically speaking how many people actually do this for several years while being focused on other things? I know there are some, absolutely, but I’ve met lots of people with and without CS degrees. It’s pretty clear to me that on average, the ones with degrees are better prepared for programming jobs than the ones who dabbled. I would say it’s also clear that a small minority of self-taught people are even better prepared for jobs than the majority of degree holders. And the best programmers I’ve ever known do a metric ton of both academics and self-schooling, because they devour it in all possible ways.
> Any interview pipeline asking you dynamic programming problems has a broken process.
So the question is: what is the right process? Are you saying the interview should not ask any algorithm questions?
The trouble with being self-taught is few manage to teach themselves calculus let alone advanced calculus, and one can have yawning gaps in knowledge and be completely unaware of their existence.
For example, I know one who was trying to reduce the noise in an electronic circuit. He randomly tried adding resistors and capacitors of various values. Until eventually a coworker looked at it, calculated the right values in a few minutes, and eliminated the noise.
I've seen this sort of thing again and again, in diverse fields.
But if I did need them, I know enough to know just were to look to refresh my memory :-)
Math is the fundamental building block for doing so many interesting things with programs, so to me every interesting programming job requires boatloads of maths. Sure you can do forms and crud and authorization checks and messaging apps and large distributed systems etc without maths, but that doesn't sound terribly exciting to me.
Like I enjoy the fact I know calc but I’m not about to oversell it’s usefulness for most programming. Math is not the fundamental building block of software imho, logic is.
I can't even fathom why knowing anything at all about calculus is going to be useful when automating things, writing APIs, or doing anything that nearly every business wants their "tech" people to do.
Some things you can't do without math: curve fitting, statistics, implementing Shazam, 3D graphics, write a game engine, do data flow analysis, implement a neural net, non-trivial use of floating point, write a lunar lander game, etc.
I remember two pages of math in a college economic textbook. Reading it, I realized they were doing differentiation by going around the horn. Instead of requiring calculus for the class, they taught it.
Except they never mentioned the words "calculus", "differentiation", or "integration". I suppose they figured those words would dissuade people from the class :-/
The amusing thing is the poor schlubs taking the class would never realize that they'd learned calculus!
FWIW Teaching things yourself is much easier now, i.e. you can get pretty much any textbook for free (nudge nudge wink wink). It's a truly great time to be fascinated by things
But if I'd never gone to college, I would not know that FA existed, or if I did, I wouldn't know what it was good for. I'd probably invent some sort of ad-hoc ineffective algorithm for it. I've certainly seen a lot of ad-hoc kludge algorithms from smart people who simply didn't know there were excellent mathematical methods to solve it.
Every interview method ever presented on HackerNews has been labeled "broken".
My understanding is the Googles of the world are de-emphasizing degrees but they can’t hire everyone. And you have to pass their technical interview.
I've gotten plenty of employee referrals in the past because people I've worked with know I'm a solid developer, but honestly I just politely refuse them at this point. Every single time it happens, the company just drops you straight into the standard interview pipeline with zero benefit other than perhaps skipping a recruiter phone call. And when I'm inevitably not able to solve some random whiteboard problem or whatever, and I get rejected, it makes the friendship weird from then on.
The first is employees put the names of people they know and have maybe worked with a bit into the system attached to an open position with the hope, in part, that they'll get a referral bonus down the road. That's going to basically go through the regular process.
When I've gotten a job directly or indirectly through someone I knew, it's been through people I've worked with in the past and were usually in a position to at least influence the hiring. I'm not sure any of those jobs (which I've just had a few of) was even against a posted position.
They are massively useful if you see a job you want and can’t figure out how to convince the Applicant Tracking System or non-technical HR rep that you’re worthy despite a non-standard background.
Not needed if you have no trouble getting interviews, and it doesn’t replace having to do the interviews.
Contribute meaningfully to open source. Many contributors to the D community have leveraged that into well paying jobs, without the usual academic credentials.
I’m a traditional EE, and don’t want to be associated with “tech” even though I actually work in technology.
If you have more flexibility with remote work, there are a ton of smaller cities that many people like. You mentioned Nashville. Some others that come to mind are Raleigh, Minneapolis, Portsmouth NH, Portland ME... The one caveat I would make with a number of these cities is that the walkable (gentrified) downtown is often pretty small so it's really a very different experience from living/working in a large city.
I worked in downtown Nashua NH for a number of years. The downtown was actually quite nice. On the river, quite a few restaurants, some shops, etc. But yeah, outside of a few blocks adjacent to maybe 5 or 6 blocks of Main Street, things either started to get sketchy or just started to blend into the strip mall and industrial parks south of town. Raleigh, where I sometimes travel to because we have a big office there, is very similar.
ADDED: I'd add that if living in "downtown" (such as it is) isn't a major consideration, I'd point out that aside from some places like the Bay Area it's pretty easy to live outside many major cities like Boston but easily go in for meetings or evening events.