This thread is interesting because I was in a similar (or worse of) situation as you. I was sort of clueless about what sort of company I wanted to join, I love

This thread is interesting because I was in a similar (or worse of) situation as you. I was sort of clueless about what sort of company I wanted to join, I loved living in Austin but Austin has a distinct lack of interesting (to me anyway) C.S. jobs. I finally bit the bullet and decided to move to the bay. The truth of the matter is that there is no easy way of finding an ideal job: Although we are in Hacker News, I am not going to tell you to join a start up because I feel that the nature of the way start ups operate requires hands on personnel. On the other hand, you might get lucky and get into a start up which lets you do remote. There are some big companies (e.g Mozilla) that have a culture of being OK with remote folks but Mozilla is a big company. On the other hand, I have a sneaking sympathy for the idea that investing 2-3 years in a Megacorp learning best practices for large systems is a useful tool before one goes out and wreaks havoc for some startup (This is an idea which I personally haven't implemented yet). However, part of finding an ideal job is making yourself an attractive candidate. In that regard, having a bunch of open source projects on github, a social media profile etc can help. I know there were a bunch of tech meet ups happening at UT, try to go to as many as possible and meet people whom you might potentially want to work for or might know interesting people. Free coffee/beer will help :)