An engineer in his early 30s recently asked me for some career advice. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science plus a few years of work experience. He has broad skills in both EE and CS. He wanted to know whether or not it was best to move to Silicon Valley or remain in the Boston area. My answer was that both regions have a large pool of skilled workers like himself, but that Silicon Valley has vastly more money being invested in EECS-type stuff. He should therefore be more in demand in Silicon Valley. Secondly, the broadness of his skills would be of more value to a small company rather than a large one. A big company, for example, may have an entire group of engineers who do nothing but X. The fact that one engineer also has skills in area Y is of no interest to the big company because they have a team of 20 people who are experts in Y.
Finally I argued that he should try to work on big well-funded projects. A project funded with $100 million is more likely to yield an impressive result than one funded with $1 million. Nobody who looks at the widget will ask what it cost to develop. (The best example of this is General Motors. People are excited that the company is turning a profit this quarter, at least by whatever exotic accounting system the cleverest minds of Deloitte & Touche have conjured. Few journalists, newspaper readers, or taxpayers will stop to ask “We invested almost $100 billion in public money in Detroit automakers, enough to have funded 5000 Googles. Shouldn’t we expect to see some return on that $100 billion?” (And in any case GM may yet still be insolvent, depending on its ultimate pension costs, according to this TIME Magazine story.)
What do the Silicon Valley readers have to say? Did I give this guy good advice? Or should he stay in Boston?
A friend of mine (a CS PhD about my age) and I were talking about this a few weeks ago. Neither of us, after graduating from college, picked up stakes, moved west, and joined a startup, even though we were right in time for the second Internet boom. He got a PhD, I did a startup here in Boston.
We both did pretty well for ourselves overall, but it became clear to us that the optimal decision in 2000, rather than what we actually did, would have been to move to San Francisco. I do think the Boston startup ecosystem for EECS types is improving, but we’re still not all the way there.
Is your friend already married? Has he locked that down with a good relationship and some tiny ones? There are three single men for every two single women 30-40 in the SF Bay Area. It’s worse than that; male engineers migrate to SF but the region has no more of that minority of women who are attracted to geeky types than any other place. The dating market is tough for everyone but for engineer types it’s also oversaturated.
On the other hand, maybe your friend really just loves that Boston weather and will be constantly depressed by the warmth and sunshine in California.
You say, “A project funded with $100 million is more likely to yield an impressive result than one funded with $1 million.” Therefor big funding = good.
Bu you also say, “the broadness of his skills would be of more value to a small company rather than a large one” and “We invested almost $100 billion in public money in Detroit automakers, enough to have funded 5000 Googles.” Therefor big funding = bad.
I am confused. Did you intend to say the opposite in the first quote?
He should get a job first, and then have the new company pay for moving him!
Seriously, I don’t understand the idea of deciding on a location based on perceived opportunity there. If you’re flexible about location, then go ahead and look for good positions everywhere and take the best one wherever it may be. Moving across the country while unemployed is a big, expensive undertaking and the payoff is very uncertain.
Do employers really care where their applicants live when they’re applying?
I can’t speak for any silicon valley firm other than the one I work for, but your friend should be forewarned that a PhD. can actually be a black mark. The going assumption is that a PhD. candidate goes down that route to teach (which is not a bad thing), but would probably have dropped out to pursue a start-up or other commercial venture well before earning the doctorate if they had a desire to work in the private sector. That is not to say there are not research type positions where a PhD would be useful, but the majority of engineering openings are not research-oriented.
With that said, the technical positions open here have been somewhat difficult to fill in terms of finding candidates with the right skill-set, even in this economy. It has taken in some cases several months to find a candidate for several positions we have had. If your friend has a broad skill-set and can demonstrate the ability and enthusiasm to get simple things done (i.e. handle simple programming or digital logic exercises during a job interview, something several candidates with PhDs have had trouble with), I think he’ll do just fine!
I won’t name my employer — but it is a sizable and reputable fabless semiconductor company in good economic shape and with a bright future.
Don’t forget New York as an option… Foursquare, Tumblr, Meetup, etsy, bit.ly, and so on – a fair number of well-funded startups are all based here – as well as smaller technology divisions of large companies that are at various stages of figuring out this internet thing (publishers, media cos, financial firms, etc.).. and perhaps most importantly, NYC in general tends to be a rewarding and satisfying place to live if you’re multi-dimensional in your skills and interests. I’m biased in favor of the place, but thought I’d offer the idea.
Newt: As evidence that women are not very discriminating, the subject MIT Ph.D. is married! (Sadly not every woman can find a radiologist!)
AC: A startup in Silicon Valley might typically be initially funded with $5-10 million where the same business plan in Boston might only be able to get angel funding of $500,000. My point was that the same business plan with more funding will likely yield a more impressive result, albeit a lower ROI.
EZ: “He should get a job first.” He wants to work in a startup and that’s kind of like a marriage (i.e., 24/7 work and very little sex). He has a lot of savings and a simple lifestyle, which means he has the luxury of spending time looking for compatible co-founders and/or teams.
JK: This guy is not as useless as the average Ph.D.! He has built a couple of real products.
Paul Graham argues that Silicon Valley is a better place to start a startup than Boston. See http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html. He is speaking from the point of view of a founder rather than someone who is looking to be hired by a startup. The Boston startup ecosystem is improving but will never come close to Silicon Valley. If he stays in Boston, a very good list of Boston startup resources is available at http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2009/10/boston-startup-events-resources-people-you-need-to-know.html.
As for dating, I’ve heard there is a big difference between Silicon Valley and San Francisco. In Silicon Valley, the ratio of straight single men to straight single women is bad from the guy’s point of view. In San Francisco, supposedly a significant percentage of the guys are gay (good from a straight guy’s point of view). In addition, there are a lot of very attractive Asian women which many Caucasian guys go for. So supposedly the ratio of straight Caucasian guys to straight Caucasian girls is very favorable from the guy’s point of view. That’s what I hear; I think pretty much everyone think dating in their own city sucks and it is better somewhere else.
James Mitchell
http://www.jmitchell.me
Silicon Valley is a waste of time for romance but inevitable in a computer science career. The heroines are so cooked from male surplus they’re horrible human beings you’d never want to bother with even if you were the best pickup artist alive. Just focus on machines.
Unless he is in a specialized field where Boston offers comparatively richer opportunities, like medical electronics, he should move to the Bay Area.
It is important to work on funded projects, but I think it is also important to pick technologies which have a chance of being applicable 20 years from now. For example, in the 1980s, GaAs digital logic was hot and very well funded, but a young engineer who saw Moore’s law and its implications and chose to work in CMOS would have more more career opportunities in the 2000s.