I worked in the LA area (aka "Southern California") for 4.5 years in three different companies in three different industries--image restoration/movie post produ

I worked in the LA area (aka "Southern California") for 4.5 years in three different companies in three different industries--image restoration/movie post production, network test and measurement, and finance. FWIW during that time I also interviewed in Silicon Valley and got job offers in the Bay Area, but elected to stay in SoCal. I recently left the US primarily for family reasons and the farcical US immigration system. It's true that there isn't the same concentration of high-tech companies in SoCal compared to Silicon Valley, but then it's a much bigger place in terms of population. In the Hollywood area (e.g., Burbank, Glendale, Studio City etc.) there's a ton of animation and post-production shops that develop a lot of software. If you're a system administrator you can run some of the largest render farms in the world. If you're into computer graphics, whether it's image processing for post-production or 3D for animations and games, SoCal is probably the center of your universe. E.g., the technology to shoot 3D movies like Avatar was largely developed in SoCal. Further west in the San Fernando valley and Calabasas there's a healthy cluster of mid-sized world-class companies like DataDirect Networks, Ixia, DTS and Fulcrum Microsystems. Further south in Orange County and San Diego there's a bunch of companies like RED, Blizzard, Broadcom and Qualcomm. Suffice it to say that there's a lot of very good high-tech work being done in Southern California!