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I was in your position a few years ago. A year older than you, I left my job completely, moved to a new city (SF) and live a fantastic new life. What you need is to find your people, be among peers who you respect and feel good about what you do.

The Bay Area is the place to be, if you're not there.

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Wow. I also live in a city where tech is not popular. How many people here have found the same thing when moving to SF?

I live in Seattle but the people hear are all in institutional tech, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Not too many truly innovate startups here either, mostly B2B. Was in The Bay recently and really liked it.

Is it just me or does it seem like people glaze over how hard it is to land a job with the major players. I have a degree in CS and every time an article popups about their interviewing process or a random comment on a successful applicant I am extremely discouraged. Graph theory, cutting edge technologies, bit shifting and IEEE 754 are not things I use on an everyday basis and topics such as these always pop up. I interviewed with Microsoft coming out of school and the high level discussions were great but when it came to white boarding algorithms in c for finding substrings and palindromes recursively I fizzled out. Believe it or not I am actually one of the "stars" at my company but feel woefully inadequate compared to people hired by the well known SF companies. If only it were as easy as Hacker News makes it seem.

Ugh. I really need to move to a city where I can meet people who have the same mutual interests in and out of work.

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