An Engineer’s Guide To Finding Work In San Francisco

I got lucky. In 2006, MTV Networks bought a company that I helped launch with two friends while in college. After a year with MTV, I came to the realization that I wasn’t a big corporate developer and that I wanted to roll the dice of life, so I left MTV and moved to San Francisco when I was 27. I had no idea what I was doing.

Today, I’m almost 36.

After 14 years of relentless product engineering at early stage startups, I can tell you life has been pretty good to me here in San Francisco and I cannot complain. However, I look back at my time and wonder if too many of my years were squandered for no particularly good reason.

If you write code at a zero-traction company with an impressive sounding title as I have, you might as well write it in an invisible programming language. Squandering your talent means writing high quality code that nobody wants or uses and having nothing to show...