[vonmoltke]

I would drop the "especially". Outside of a precious few areas, networking opportunities are hard to come by outside of the few companies that have offices in your area. Even then, more likely than not those companies have HR policies that require applicants to go through the black hole regardless of where they came from.

The whole world is not the Bay Area. Most of us do not have it so easy as to be able to walk into random meetups and leave with three potential contacts at decent tech companies.

[htormey]

I have been living in the Bay area for the last 8 years but originally I grew up and went to university in Ireland. Hardly the center of the tech universe at the time.

I made a lot of contacts by organizing local meetups, travelling to different conferences in other parts of Europe and fostering relationships online.

I now work as a software engineer at Facebook, prior to that I worked at Apple. Effective networking takes a lot of work and can be achieved even if you are living in a remote area.