Boulder is an incredibly difficult market to hire in. I was talkign to the head of Google Boulder when he mentioned they can't even get engineers hired there.

Living in Boulder, I'm curious as to why?

I'm seeing the other side of the coin, where getting hired is proving very difficult. The joke here is even the dirtbag climbers have PHDs.

It might be hard to get hired writing perl in Boulder (I checked out your profile) but if you're interested in other languages, I can do some intros for you.

Or you could always move to Amsterdam: http://blog.booking.com/

Having visited Amsterdam, I'd be curious to live there on a permanent basis, although I am also in love with mountains (which the entire country lacks...) - as I think a lot of people who end up in Boulder can relate to.

Booking does have a somewhat strange reputation when it comes to their coding style, I'm not sure if I could really come on board fully with their workflow.

Ha. I haven't gotten a Perl job in Boulder since 1999, and I don't know if I've seen one posted since then, either. My expertise is a little broader than just slinging Perl, fortunately, but I do find it to be a most agreeable language to a creative, visually-oriented mind.

What am I referring to is the scenario where you can apply for a job, and rarely even expect to hear back from a potential employer, as the total number of people also applying makes that impossible. This, I don't think, is very different from other areas of the country.

Google moving to Boulder is sort of a mixed bag, and there is a number of people who are not looking forward to them coming.

> What am I referring to is the scenario where you can apply for a job, and rarely even expect to hear back from a potential employer, as the total number of people also applying makes that impossible. This, I don't think, is very different from other areas of the country.

Right, I think that is a function of resume spraying, to be honest. I agree that it is pretty common.

Note to employers! You can stand out by treating applicants as human being and simply replying 'no, it doesn't seem like a good fit' when someone applies for a job. I love what Zapier does, for example--they respond to everyone.

> although I am also in love with mountains (which the entire country lacks...)

Luckily there there are countries not far away (closer than most US states to Colorado) that provide some serious mountains. Imagine living in a large (fictional) cultural and tech hub in the plains 100 miles east of Boulder. That's what Amsterdam may be like in this regard (distances are off, but infrastructure looks much denser in the Netherlands and its neighbors).

The mountain side is still more distant than in Boulder, but "different country" means a different thing in Europe.

He mentioned a lot of things related to hiring - but specifically it was that there are a lot of engineers in the Denver Metro (in fact I think the highest grouping of software engineers in the US), but that many enterprise companies kept them employed. He mentioned that it was difficult to hire younger SW engineers out of school as they were going to startups. Also, that their average age is skewing older, which is driving up their benefits (healthcare, etc) costs.

Boulder is weird... I was all set to go there, and got a better offer in Bend, Oregon, which is significantly cheaper in terms of housing. I'm kind of happy about how it turned out. I didn't like the idea of turning over such a large portion of my paycheck to a landlord.

Things are not cheap here in Bend, but I have more of a feeling of getting in earlier, while things are still growing.

I loved Bend when I visited a decade ago. It has a lot of the benefits of Boulder plus an ocean not too far away (but further from an airport and major metropolitan area).

Didn't seem like much business was happening when I visited, though (other than tourism).

Is there a tech scene now?

> Is there a tech scene now?

Yeah - it's small, but seems to be taking off.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223997

I had some doubts about moving back to the US from Italy, but so far we're really happy in Bend. We'll see how the winter goes.

How was the tech environment in the portion of Italy you were in?

Interesting. I applied to Google a while back and never got a call back (except someone called me trying to get me to move to Mountain View or NY for a devops team).

I know they are building a bigger campus[0] so maybe they are having a hard time because it is a bigger number of reqs than in the past?

0: http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_27063628/google-build-...