[pjmorris]

I spent a long time in the South Florida IT job market. In an area with millions of people and thousands of companies, it never ceased to amaze me how many people in the field knew each other. One of the key factors in job-hunting, then, was your reputation. If you did good work and people liked working with you, there was usually something available. If either of those things wasn't true, life was more difficult. A consulting firm founder down there used to say 'People like working with people they like to work with'. It pays to invest in your friendships and your decency as well as in your technical chops.

[oinksoft]

I'm not going to lie, this sounds like hell. Places like that make outcasts of anybody who makes the rest "look bad" by "working too hard." It's nice to be valued for your technical skills when you consider the alternative.

[pjmorris]

I never saw someone become an outcast in the community for working harder or smarter. A given organization might operate like that, but the whole point of a community is that there's more to the world than one organization and one job. I've seen plenty of good people pulled out of bad situations by the community.

[drpgq]

Well it is South Florida. I worked with a German software company that for strange reasons opened their US office in Miami. We had a terrible time getting people, although a lot of that was on us. We eventually moved it somewhere else and things were a lot smoother.