I suppose by the mathematical nature of the situation, people and their social graph end up at one of the two "equilibria". 1) either they know a bunch of people who can't find any good people to hire, or 2) they know a bunch of smart people who work at crappy jobs they'd love to leave.
I have a group of friends (from University of Florida) who mostly graduated just before the west coast was really recruiting there. One works at HP doing server stuff, but that's about as "far" as they got. Another one is the smartest dude at his job at bigco where he puts out fires of bad devs every day, cleaning up $20,000 contracting messes with one SQL query that no one there thought could be written.
To these people, trying to get a "cool" job is borderline impossible because, first, they don't know anyone (their social graph converged the wrong way), and second the combination of being far-away and having to blindly email resumes into the blackhole that is domain.com/apply is just plain discouraging (not to mention ineffective).
I don't know of a good solution to this problem, but if anyone is willing to relocate some of these people, I might be able to refer some really smart people ;)
The best advice I can give to people looking for a "cool" job in the valley is to simply move there and get to know people. If they aren't willing to take that admittedly risky step (almost a rite of passage) then the valley might not be the best fit for them. From what everything on this thread is saying, this is a great time to do it.
I have a group of friends (from University of Florida) who mostly graduated just before the west coast was really recruiting there. One works at HP doing server stuff, but that's about as "far" as they got. Another one is the smartest dude at his job at bigco where he puts out fires of bad devs every day, cleaning up $20,000 contracting messes with one SQL query that no one there thought could be written.
To these people, trying to get a "cool" job is borderline impossible because, first, they don't know anyone (their social graph converged the wrong way), and second the combination of being far-away and having to blindly email resumes into the blackhole that is domain.com/apply is just plain discouraging (not to mention ineffective).
I don't know of a good solution to this problem, but if anyone is willing to relocate some of these people, I might be able to refer some really smart people ;)