[woan]

I don't follow unless you are saying that other areas are less competitive.

There is a good reason that CA is hot for tech companies. It's the whole ecosystem.

Were it not for the ecosystem, these same folks are smart enough to found or move their companies elsewhere.

[nkassis]

I think he meant that not being in California is an advantage because you don't have 3 hulking giants (and more) taking practically 100% of the available engineers. Whatever is left is fiercely battled for by the smaller companies.

[dlsspy]

Some people just want to work in small companies. I get recruited from Google and Facebook regularly. I'm not ready to work in that kind of environment. I know lots of people who aren't. I work with several of them. We want to do things those guys aren't going to do.

[ardit33]

ditto here. After my experience with Amazon, it definitely made my mind that big corporation are not happy places in general.

Sure, I could tell people I worked on the Kindle and I did a bunch of the ui and framework (worked well in bars with girls), but the bureaucracy of a large company just sucks your soul. You have to cut through so much b.s. to just get anything done. I remember at some point the documentation of some features were taking more than the implementation and testing itself, just to satisfy some guidelines.

Aslo, unless you are starting your own company, a lot of smaller companies are a crapshoot.

I really think that mid-sized nimble companies are the best (between 50 and 180 people). If they are doing well, and are growing, there is a lot more opportunity in such companies career wise, and friendship/social wise than in a large corp. You just create better bonds with your mates, working towards a common goal, without political bs., and you have the chance to see all parts of the business closer (in large corps, you are just in some part of engineering, with no visibility to the business decisions).

This month I just moved to Yammer, and so far it has been awesome experience. (btw, if any of you guys are looking for something new in SF let me know [e-mail]. We are looking for great engineers, both server and client side. Also this is a company that practices http://programming-motherfucker.com/ for real. There is no forced scrum, tdd, tbd, or whatever. It is up to the individual engineers in teams to come up with something that works well for them, as long as things go well.

I would say other similar companies to Yammer in the Bay Area are: EventBrite, Square, Evernote, etc...

Stable, growing, real business models, and yet fun to work at.

If you are an up and coming hacker, join one of these companies, work for a while (and get real salaries, and equity), meet great people, and move on to your own thing when you are ready.

Just my 2 cents.

[samtp]

If you're a small company outside of California, you don't have to compete with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zygna.... for the best engineers. As a startup you can never match their salaries. Sometimes it's good to be a big fish in a small pond.