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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the lesson here is "quit trying to get jobs at tier 1 name brand companies". There are, by definition, only 500 companies in the Fortune 500. There are hundreds of thousands of smaller companies around the country that could use your skills.

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A friend of mine has been trying to get me to start a consulting company along those lines. For companies that need computer help sporadically, a lot of automation to their tasks, and regular checkups. But not full time staff. I think it would be particularly appealing to older engineers who have other things they are interested in and want to be able to scale their hours to their schedule rather than the other way around. Certainly something to think about.

What post did you read?

"Smartling* Cloudflare AppDynamics* DigitalOcean Placemeter* Hatch AppNexus* OpenX ThoughtWorks* Roost"

They may not all be 'tier 1' companies (I just made up the phrase 'tier 1' - 'top tier' may have been better), but there's a commonality to many of these - they're largely well-known names in many communities.

I knew Google, Facebook, Amazon, Samsung, Cloudflare, appdynamics, DO, openx and thoughtworks without even batting an eye - the others sound familiar, but I can't say definitively if I know what they do.

"Midwest-city tool and die cutting" probably needs someone with this person's skills just as much, perhaps moreso, than digitalocean needs yet another devops guru.

Many companies on that list like thoughtworks are not tier 1 companies.

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