[expertentipp]

> only a handful of our tech-oriented students had participated in hackatons, contributed to open-source software, had started a personal blog or answered questions in online help communities such as StackOverflow

It's Eastern Europe, so those even marginally competent who haven't left are employed for peanuts in outsourcing centers, working on brain-numbing projects 9-5 or even 8-6. Ain't nobody got time for that.

[paganel]

It depends, there are quite a number of exceptions. Yeah, if you're going to get yourself into a farm-like outsourcing company as a fresh CS graduate then you'll have a pretty numb programming life in front of you. But there are also lots of start-ups/small companies which do really interesting stuff (some of them have been acquired by Western companies for quite a lot of money or have grown into "middle" companies).

I for example have started doing Django-based projects back in 2006, me and my other programmer co-worker were at the time I think the only Django programmers in our Eastern European country. We had also done some quite cool map mash-ups. But pretty soon after that people around us also started doing Ruby stuff, Plone/Zope (maybe not so cool, but interesting nonetheless), we had a local site that had done street photos the same as GStreetView 2 or 3 years before Google started covering our streets, some Information Retrieval/AI projects, it was not all a technological desert. And in recent years things have started becoming even more dynamic, but I have to admit I stopped paying that much attention to the local IT scene.

But, yeah, Eastern Europe (and Europe in general, with the possible exceptions of London, Berlin and maybe Dublin) will never get even close to the "feeling" one gets as a programmer in SV. In my mid- to late 20s I was pretty well aware of that I and was kind of let down, I was feeling that I was losing out by me not being in SV, but now, that I've grown a little older, I feel like I didn't lose that much by staying here.

[Kaizeras]

> But, yeah, Eastern Europe (and Europe in general, with the possible exceptions of London, Berlin and maybe Dublin) will never get even close to the "feeling" one gets as a programmer in SV

That's exactly the thought that hits me every morning I wake up. That "feeling" that you're in the right place and in the right time to build some truly revolutionary technology. I hope that I start getting this feeling here, in Bulgaria, soon. Otherwise I'll have too many reasons to emigrate for a few years.

[mgkimsal]

> That "feeling" that you're in the right place and in the right time to build some truly revolutionary technology.

How many of the people in SV have that 'feeling' yet are completely wrong? Or... maybe a better question - how many actually build that 'truly revolutionary technology'?

There's a chance you'd get such a great 'feeling' every morning you wake up in SV, but there's more chance you can have an impact on the lives of people in your country by working with others and expanding the pool of opportunity right there.

You're in a position to help create a revolution in your geographic area, vs just sharecrop on someone else's revolution plantation.

[expertentipp]

For each success story I'll give you a failure counter-story. To engage in such project one needs funding, hardware, spare time, some decent side income. These are very difficult or even impossible to obtain over there.