It was at that time that I decided that nothing would stop me from working in Silicon Valley. After graduation from Iowa State University in MIS, in '98, I decided that obtaining a job in a nearby market was the best medicine temporarily, and after working for a short time, the Valley beckoned me! So in '00, I decided to follow my dreams.
I was going to be upending my life and did not have a job awaiting me, so I had to have assets to tide me over until my first gig. After looking at the rental rates for apartments in SV, I could see that they were out of reach without full time employment. So I decided to rough it and camp out either on the fringes of SV or in a National Park. And, before you ask, no, I had never camped before.
After checking the annual weather and temperature patterns for the state of California for late Summer, I decided that initially, I would be in a National Park in Southern California. I settled on the San Bernardino National Forest, and according to the Internet site for the National Parks, for a $21 I could live in one location with a tent for up to three weeks, move, and set up camp in any of the other parks in California, rotating every 21 days. The National Park Park Pass is a great buy to this day!
Within just a few weeks, I had broken my 401K, sold everything that I had including my then ailing '87 notch-back, 5.0 GT Mustang, and bought supplies for the trip from the North Face. I picked up a lightweight two man tent 10'x10' waterproof mat with stakes, a sleeping bag good for 30F,and a sleeping bag air mat. But I had one problem. No transportation! There was no way that I could afford a new, reliable car, on what I had so again, I deferred to my dreams.
Having already owned and raced a Kawasaki GPZ 550, full F1, Champion Moriwaki race built bike, I knew what I wanted. I called around for availability and then went down to the dealer with cash and within two hours brought home a 2001, GSX-R750. 123HP, 187MPH top end...just what I needed to get to Silicon Valley without wasting a second! I took two weeks of tooling around on it to obtain my license, packed and drove in 21 hours to the San Bernardino National Forest to a remote cap site!
By the time I reached the San Bernardino National Forest, it was Fall. It was dry and the evenings were getting chilly. One thing I learned is that one person sitting around a campfire is no fun, and Cisco and Linux books are very hard to read by the campfire. I didn't waste my valuable daylight. Every day, I awoke to a scene from Bonanza, a high alpine forest. Baths were in the creeks nearby. Hypothermia I found was a state of mind. And you had to scrub in your tires every morning on the mountain roads so they would stick like glue.
Soon thereafter, I would set out to a State of California university having open access, to apply for jobs. The coldest that it hit was around 30F for a few evenings, and I landed two job interviews in Silicon Valley. One listened to me describe where I was located, six hours + to the South, and they told me that I had to get a cell phone and mailbox and they would hire me immediately! Done and done.
Within a month, I went from a very drab entry level job to working in Silicon Valley, in a NOC, as a NOC Analyst, overseeing more than 2,200 nodes globally on large fat pipes. The second company that I interviewed with, a biotech start-up, had been nagging me the entire time, and only then wanted to hire me, and while working for four weeks at the first employer, I negotiated a $15K raise, a $10K signing bonus, and a $15K milestones bonus. I took that job and oversaw the complete demolition of a two story commercial infrastructure, the bidding processes for all major tasks, sat in on all of the architectural meetings, and began unboxing 60 desktops, 10 servers, 20 printers and was tasked with site system administrative duties. Now this is all done via VDI, but at the time, it was heady project management experience.
I'm no longer in Silicon Valley, but, I'm still living the dream. How about you?
#vDM30in30
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