I just moved to San Francisco about 2 weeks ago, and I find that there are so many opportunities here and so many people to meet that may share your interests and passions. There are many meetups for tech types such as hackers and founders, ruby, rails, python and python drinkers, django, startup people and many more. And in a few days, 30 CEOs from Austin, Texas are coming to recruit in California. Also there is a TechCrunch hackathon today.
Although programmer types may not always be very outgoing, it’s something you just have to do in order to be exposed to the opportunities that are out there. It’s easy to just sit at home, get sucked into your computer and program all day, but I encourage you to come out and meet people and be open to new experiences. In my case, I left a cozy job in Northern Virginia where I was uninspired and unmotivated. Some of you may be in that same situation, and I guess I’m just here to say that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re motivated and willing to learn a lot on your own, you can get pretty far. And when others see your dedication and passion, hopefully they’ll see that as a reason to recruit you.
Don’t let failure discourage you or keep you from doing what you really want to do. I’m Asian and it’s kind of embedded in my culture that failure is shameful/embarrassing. But that’s the completely wrong mentality to have when it comes to reaching your goals. If that’s the case for you, unteach yourself and be bold. If you’re relatively young like me, what do you have to lose other than some face or a stable/crappy job?