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How can small town techs get out to tech hubs?

1 points by baweaver ↗ HN
I seem to have a bit of an interesting quandary here. I'm a fairly recent graduate (December '12) with 1.5 Years experience as a Ruby DevOps (I was allowed to pick my language) in an area where RPG and COBOL are some of the most heavily used languages.

I want to be able to find mentors or find a way to relocate to a more tech-centric area, but I keep on running into issues of "3-5 years of experience plus" whenever I have the skills necessary to perform the job if not more.

How does a small town tech head get out into the wide world? I want to find more senior mentors so I can grow instead of being likely the most senior person in the area in Ruby.

I want to find an area that's passionate about technology, where people unabashedly sing praises of the latest hacks in clojure and lisp, where people enjoy their jobs. Not where people don't want to ever touch a computer off of a company dime.

The big question here is how do people from small towns get out into tech hubs?

Thanks for your time in reading.

5 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 13.6 ms ] thread
davismwfl
where are you at? even just roughly. simple answer is move to CA/NY if you want the biggest markets.

Aside from that you can do a ton of stuff right from where you are if you are happy there otherwise. I am in a small area, town of 50k people or so, and definitely not tech heavy. There are tons of ways to get involved. Get into an Open Source project, people will mentor you on those. Go to conferences, meet people etc. Basically think of all that as investing in your own sanity and future, not "oh damn that cost me 2k for that conference".

baweaver
Currently on GitHub and ramping up into some OS projects under https://github.com/baweaver . Now that I have enough of a skillbase to be useful I feel a lot more comfortable in submitting and joining in.

Located in Joplin, Missouri. I would go to conferences but I have a 40 hour work week and no vacation until this coming February which makes it extremely difficult. Work won't send me to conferences either, I've tried to play that one a few times.

davismwfl
Yea, the vacation time sinks the week long conference idea real quick.

Open source is definitely a good way to start, and you are in the middle of the states so you are in a good place to be able to get places. Not sure what kinda of drive it is to Kansas City or Oklahoma City or even St Louis, but you could do weekend trips there and find a meetup to go do. Find a hackathon in one of those cities and meet some people that way. See if you can find a startup in St Louis or KC and go see them, talk to them, we all work over weekends at least some. Usually I find people pretty cool with letting someone stop by for a short time and learn something. Hell, all they can do is say no, just keep asking around till you get a yes.

Sven7
If you are serious about it pack up and move to NY/NJ or the valley. Find a family or friends place you can crash at for a couple months during your job hunt. Or room with students living around college campuses, cause that's a great network you can tap into, to figure out where the jobs are at. It's what I did. Wasn't easy but once you get that first job it definitely pays off.
baweaver
When I'm employed full time already and making well into the 90th percentiles of College Graduates, I don't particularly think this is a good idea. Minor in business means that I know how to plan these things, have contingency funds, and know what happens if you jump off a cliff. Too many risks and variables, and right now I have every right to be picky given my position.