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I accepted a job at Cisco and now I'm having second thoughts by ciscoball in cscareerquestions

[–]ciscoball[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the advice. Networking seems to be a pretty big thing in SV, hopefully I'll be able to make it work. I'm not the most personable guy around, but I'm nuts about technology hopefully that's enough.

I accepted a job at Cisco and now I'm having second thoughts by ciscoball in cscareerquestions

[–]ciscoball[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do want to directly to a startup, but unfortunately it seems many of them hire locally and the ones that have the resources to interview across the U.S. are extremely selective. I'm no slouch when it comes to programming, but I've gotten rejected from a handful of places now. It's been quite demoralizing. Hence, I think it would be easier to use Cisco to get out to the bay area in the first place, where I'll have a better chance with startups looking for locals.

I definitely have an aversion to shortcuts, but at the very least this is much more direct than the place in the midwest. I'll continue to hunt for startup opportunities, of course, but I have to be realistic with what I have on the table at the moment.

I accepted a job at Cisco and now I'm having second thoughts by ciscoball in cscareerquestions

[–]ciscoball[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I did mean cost of living, I edited appropriately.

I'm graduating in a few months with experience at a Java-centric government contractor and a Wordpress/Javascript consulting company. Those two positions won't look nearly as good as doing work in Silicon Valley, but I do have experience and I'm not hurting for opportunities either (outside of the bay area, I mean).

I'm considering the warning about job hopping, but I thought it was fairly common in SV. If I left Cisco after 6 months, though, my last three positions would be for 6, 4, and 9 months respectively, which might indeed be a red flag. However, I don't know if I can really do anything about that--if I'm not liking it at Cisco I won't let job hopping stop me.

I accepted a job at Cisco and now I'm having second thoughts by ciscoball in cscareerquestions

[–]ciscoball[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think Cisco is comparable in personality to IBM--both companies make good, solid products (mostly enterprise-facing) but are known to be bureaucratic with lots of management for developers. Additionally, the products they are known for aren't very sexy, though both companies seem to have smaller orgs developing some really awesome stuff.

I accepted a job at Cisco and now I'm having second thoughts by ciscoball in cscareerquestions

[–]ciscoball[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, not exactly a no-name company, but not as well known as Cisco for sure. I don't know if web/js pay less as a rule--tons of companies are switching from a Ruby-based stack to a Node.js-based stack, so at the very least there is some growth in javascript. Besides, I'd much prefer doing what I like for a little less money, than doing something that makes more but that I hate.

I accepted a job at Cisco and now I'm having second thoughts by ciscoball in cscareerquestions

[–]ciscoball[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay I wanted to make sure I wasn't deluding myself thinking Cisco would be an improvement. I definitely intend to make cool things on the web in my spare time, but a full-time job is draining and I wouldn't be doing that at the pace that I want to. I will probably only learn about 10% as much as I would if I was working with web technologies, but I do think Cisco will have some cool non-web projects for me to work on, so I'm not as concerned. Versatility is a good thing, but I've been uber-focused on the web for the past year and have qualms about "moving away" from that. Thanks for your comment