[9oliYQjP]

My advice. Don't do contract freelance work. It is risky in that if you're not a good business person, you will string yourself along under the illusion of paying the bills. But you'll slowly be moving backward as projects take longer than you expect, you undercharge, etc..

You really may need to uproot your family. I know that the tech economy is booming in several major urban areas. I'm up in Toronto, and have headhunters calling me like crazy. There is a dearth of programming talent. I know several people in San Francisco and they say that the valley has the same problem.

The situation is so desperate that I know several companies that would entertain hiring somebody in Michigan to do work for them remotely. It might take a trip up to Toronto to meet with some folks, but that's just a several hour drive.

[pyre]

I'm actually looking to move back to Toronto, where's the best place to look for these jobs? Most of the stuff that I hear about are corporate Java and/or C#/.NET type jobs.

[9oliYQjP]

Seriously, start on Twitter. Everybody who's anybody in the Toronto developer scene is pretty active on Twitter these days. Find a few developers with blogs, follow them, then start following a few of their followers or people they RT. From Twitter, start attending some meet-ups. If you're an iPhone, Android, Python, Ruby or JS developer, it's a pretty good job market right now. Most of the places you'll want to work at are right in the downtown core so you can bike, walk, or subway/streetcar it to work. That also makes socializing vastly easier as everyone is clustered in the same area.

http://www.meetup.com/HTML5-Web-App-Developers/events/225564...

http://techtalksto.com/

I know there are a ton of Toronto lurkers on here too.

[pyre]

  > start attending some meet-ups

This is obvious, but doesn't work so well when you are not living in the area. Flying from Portland to Toronto to attend a meetup is a bit pricey. I did meet someone from Freshbooks at OSCON though.

I'll also mention that when I was last living (~3 years ago) in Toronto, I didn't find it easy to hook up with the local Python/Perl communities. Heck, I sent a request to join the Toronto Perl Mongers mailing list and never got a response. I assumed that there wasn't much of a community.

[ashchristopher]

There are a bunch of big python/django shops in Toronto... more than I can count on two hands... and they are all hiring.

[wyclif]

Just curious, what do they do about visas for American employees?

[pyre]

NAFTA has some exceptions for software-type jobs, but there is a requirement of 2+ years of experience. I looked into this like 6 years ago, though. I don't know what the situation now is. Some companies are not too keen on treading the work visa waters though.

[wyclif]

Thanks, I ask because in terms of geography and distance, it's an order of magnitude different than, say, a programmer coming to the US on an HB-1 or an American going to the UK. It seems like they could get some decent American programmers without the new hires having to move too far. But probably not without visa help, right?

[_delirium]

If you have enough qualification points, and sometimes subject to a province's discretion, you can get a Canadian work permit without being sponsored, which can make it much easier to subsequently find jobs. From what I hear, applying directly to Alberta or Quebec via their provincial-level immigration offices is the best bet (with the latter it helps if you can say you know at least basic French).