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Here is the answer: simple supply and demand. If you enjoy and are skilled at something, you should be able to productively contribute to many different organi

Here is the answer: simple supply and demand. If you enjoy and are skilled at something, you should be able to productively contribute to many different organizations. You'll need to take the set of organizations that you'd like to work at, reduce it to the set where you can get an interview, and then sample the interviewing process until one instance produces a positive result. Every choice that you make which constrains the addressable set of interviews makes it more difficult to get that positive result. In my case, when I returned to SF after working in finance for ~7 years, I spent a very difficult year or two trying to find a trading job. The problem is that there are a tiny number of firms at which one might work trading in SF, and a huge number of applicants. At one interview I was told, "You're a great fit but there are a ton of folks out there. I'm going to interview a different person every day for the next two months and then make a decision." At this point I decided to go back to my roots and become a software developer again. Surveying the market I identified iOS and Rails as having favorable supply/demand imbalances. So I spent 3mo learning Objective-C, Cocoa, Ruby, and Rails, as well as the rudiments of CSS. I very quickly found work, enjoyed it very much, and have now made my way back to finance, this time as a technologist.

gtirloni 13y ago
Did you use any specific technique to identify this imbalance? It's often so difficult to get a realistic picture.
- Legion 13y ago
  Go to local meetups. You'll see the supply and demand play out right in front of you. How many employers are there, and how big of a group of potential employees are they talking to?
- joncooper 13y ago
  I didn't, it was pretty hand-wave-y. But I do know a fairly large number of people in the Bay Area tech scene so I took stock of what they were saying, in particular around hiring difficulties. Also, I did some tinkering with the things that seemed to have merit from a supply/demand perspective and stuck with the ones that I enjoyed most. One other thought: Coursera classes are an excellent way to give yourself an additional bit of edge in terms of getting the interview. Taking and doing well on Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class, for example, doesn't necessarily mean that you can do ML vocationally, but it does speak to your willingness and interest in continuing education.

gtirloni 13y ago

Did you use any specific technique to identify this imbalance? It's often so difficult to get a realistic picture.

Legion 13y ago
Go to local meetups. You'll see the supply and demand play out right in front of you. How many employers are there, and how big of a group of potential employees are they talking to?
joncooper 13y ago
I didn't, it was pretty hand-wave-y. But I do know a fairly large number of people in the Bay Area tech scene so I took stock of what they were saying, in particular around hiring difficulties. Also, I did some tinkering with the things that seemed to have merit from a supply/demand perspective and stuck with the ones that I enjoyed most. One other thought: Coursera classes are an excellent way to give yourself an additional bit of edge in terms of getting the interview. Taking and doing well on Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class, for example, doesn't necessarily mean that you can do ML vocationally, but it does speak to your willingness and interest in continuing education.