Dear HN,
I'm currently on the lookout for a new job. I studied CS and finished my PhD a year roughly a year ago. Since then I have been working in the same institute and things are getting worse by the hour.
My first plan was to try self-employment and startup stuff but this hasn't worked out as planned for various reasons. In general my interests include the infrastructure level of "things", e.g. OS, libraries, parallelization but also image processing, graphics et al. Probably unfortunately I can be seen more as a generalist than a specialist.
I looked through a lot of job offerings in my vicinity but the vast majority of these want mechanical or electrical engineers with programming skills. If there are offerings tailored to CS grads they are mostly (imho) buzzword-laden (i.e. App, hype.js or enVogueAsAService) and mainly want front-end or GUI devs. This is probably due to my location (Germany) where the main industrial power is still concentrated in the automotive sector and the (pure) CS sector is virtually non-existent. Granted, there may be some startups but the overall situation is dire.
Now, when I recently skimmed over a number of offerings in the valley and generally in the US, I immediately found jobs that were to my liking. Apparently, in the US, old-school CS guys are still being wanted. Of course my whole evaluation is very much biased by my interpretation of 'interesting' but when cross-comparing jobs in my city and in the valley, the valley wins by a large margin.
I don't want any personel job counsel here, but my question would rather be if you can still recommend moving to the valley nowadays? Is the job situation still great or is this a deception? Is it worth it financially? What about the house pricing/cost of living? How about the prevalence of "social media guys"? I wouldn't be staying more than 2-4 years probably - is that short a stint recommendable at all? Anybody want to share their experiences coming from other countries?
