Seniors: Move to Silicon Valley, Then Get a Job
Why graduating software engineers — or anyone else in a high-demand field in tech — should put their job search on hold
Dear Class of 2016,
About a year after my first day of senior year at Princeton, I took a one-way flight from Newark to San Francisco, and I did not have a job. As you’re experiencing right now, I spent senior year being asked “Do you know where you’re working after graduation!?” about a dozen times a week. My answers ranged from “I’m trying to find a cool startup!” to “maybe product management?” to “I think I’m going to do VC.” Really they all just meant “I have absolutely no clue.”
Towards the end of my last semester, following months of occasional interviews and perpetual anxiety, a friend and mentor Nikhil helped convince me that I’d ultimately be happier moving out to Silicon Valley before taking a job. And so — against every instinct I’d developed over the 21 years of my carefully outlined existence — I stopped trying to figure out what’s next.
Now, it’s early senior year, and you have Google, Facebook, and Microsoft auctioning off your youth with 6-figure base salaries and 5-figure signing bonuses. Let me try to convince you you’ll be happier moving out here first.
Why you should stop looking for a job
Enjoy senior year, do something you’ve wanted to do (e.g. travel or volunteer), and then figure out where you want to work.
If they’re hiring now, they’ll be hiring after you graduate. This is challenging but critical to internalize: you will lose very few valuable opportunities by postponing your job search. The larger tech companies are constantly recruiting software engineers. With a couple of exceptions, including product management programs like APM at Google or RPM at Facebook, the main roles at those places have a short hiring cycle year-round.
Many exciting opportunities will develop over the next year. In 12 months, companies can hit an inflection point towards huge growth, raise multiple rounds, and grow their teams by an order of magnitude. Last week, Wealthfront added 59 companies to their annual list of career-launching companies. That’s 59 incredible opportunities that my classmates might have missed by accepting a job offer last year.
Some currently exciting opportunities will change for the worse. In 12 months, companies can also pivot or see their best people leave. The crazy smart engineer who interviewed you, the sales lead who energized you, the VP of Product that inspired you — they could all be gone. These large-scale changes are obviously more relevant for early companies, but just consider Twitter’s imminent layoffs. At a less severe scale, a company’s direction could change in ways that simply don’t align with your personal values.
Some roles can’t be filled a year in advance. Not every company is hiring next year’s engineers today. Because Google and Facebook have dominated fall recruiting, any startup that can afford to hire early has been forced to do so. Unfortunately, that leaves out a lot of promising companies. If you’re more risk-tolerant and interested in earlier-stage startups, you can find a role at one next year as they often hire talented new grads on an as-needed basis.
You’ll have the time to deeply evaluate roles in a broader range. When you look for a job full-time as an engineer, you’ll have the capacity to look into interesting non-technical roles — perhaps product or VC. Or if you’re a non-technical major who’s taken a CS class or two, you can look into roles that require a little programming experience. Either way, it’s very hard to increase the scope of your search while you’re still in school, since you’re juggling the interview process with everything else you have going on. By seeing what else is out there, you will have an invaluable learning experience about what is actually important to you and what interests you.
Why you should move to the Bay Area first
You could stop looking for a job and choose to move to NYC or Boston next year — but you probably shouldn’t.
Most of the opportunities are here. If you’re doing something as significant as moving somewhere before knowing where you’ll be working, you have to maximize the likelihood of finding the best opportunity for you. 28 of the 33 Breakout List companies are in the Bay Area, as are 72 of Wealthfront’s 136 career-launching companies. There are plenty of successful companies elsewhere, but in terms of concentration, you just can’t beat the Bay Area (reasonable exceptions include biotech for Boston, and adtech or fintech for NYC).
You get to know your prospective teams very well. You’re not going to be happy if you’re not working with an incredible team, and it’s a challenge to get to know people over the phone or even after a day of in-person interviews. Proximity affords you the opportunity to meet face-to-face with your potential co-workers in a less structured format. Here are a few things that happened outside of my interviews at different companies:
- I pair programmed with one of the engineers to get a feel for the culture and how things work there, and even got to see a weekly standup.
- I went back for a casual lunch and had an interesting conversation about philosophy with employees I hadn’t previously met.
- I happened to arrive when the team was about to cut a birthday cake for someone. I guarantee you will never get Skyped in to sing “Happy Birthday.”
Above all, you’ll figure out what you really care about. When you’re in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, your friends are in tech, and so are your friends’ friends, and their parents, and their dog. I’ve had honest conversations over coffee, lunch, and dinner with former coworkers, alumni, and other friends and mentors about what they’ve learned and what they value about their past and present. When they can’t answer a question, they connect you with someone who can. Every conversation you have — from casual meetings to day-long interviews — will teach you something about what you want to do, and what you actually care about.
I’m very close to my family and friends in New Jersey and New York, so moving out here was really hard. But in the end, this process led to discovering an incredible opportunity at AngelList, where I will be working with an amazing team doing both product and engineering work to support startups and people who want to join one. I couldn’t be more excited!
4 reasons this might not be right for you
Unfortunately, my advice is not meant for everyone going into tech. Here are a few compelling reasons why you may want to work hard to find a job as soon as possible:
- Qualifications: If you don’t have enough experience, it may take more time and effort to find a job. If you’re unsure, and moving to the Bay Area seems too risky, you can use fall interviews to gauge whether this process might work for you. If interviews generally go well, there’s no need to worry about whether you’ll receive an offer once you’re here!
- Peace of mind: There is a great deal of mental, emotional, and social satisfaction that comes with having your job determined. If you choose to wait, the year-long period of uncertainty can be stressful at times.
- An existing incredible opportunity: If you have the utmost conviction about an opportunity right now, by all means, take it! Just be sure that it is what you want to do (talk to friends, mentors, alumni, etc.).
- Financial security: In many cases, it’s unreasonable or impossible to sustain the financial uncertainty that comes with waiting to find a job and going months after graduation without working. However, if that doesn’t apply to you, don’t let yourself disproportionately weigh the size of an offer. Startups pay more than enough.
I’m extremely fortunate to have been in a position where these reasons did not end up stopping me, although I did struggle with getting past most of them. These reasons are strong, and it’s hard to logically reject them all, but I urge you to think sincerely about if you are able to do so. For most people, this decision ultimately comes down to risk. If you’re able to bear the risk of possibly going a long time without finding a job, it’s entirely worth it.
If you’re not a software engineer, I’m not personally equipped to discuss the risks of this approach, but it absolutely could work. In fact, Taylor did this last year after graduating from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and is now on the New Markets team at Stripe.
Ultimately, do what will make you happy!
I’m writing this because I care about helping students discover what they love to do, and because there’s an immense amount of unnecessary pressure to find a job early on. I do happen to think that many soon-to-be graduates will be happier with the learning experience and responsibility they‘ll get at a smaller startup, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Plenty of posts have been written about why you should join a startup.
People told me the same advice you’re receiving every day: optimize for learning, look for a challenge, find an amazing team, etc. It’s fantastic advice. But it turns out that that’s really hard to do while you’re in school. I’m telling you my story — letting go of the job search senior year, moving out to San Francisco, and then finding the right opportunity — because it’s one way to follow that advice, and to figure out what will make you happy.
I will be as supportive as I can to anyone who does this, so if you want to have a conversation about anything I’ve said or what the process is actually like, feel free to get in touch with me (@narang_rishi)!
Sincerely,
Rishi Narang ‘15
Venture Hacker, AngelList
P.S. It’s just your first job. I’m told there will be many more.
Thank you to…
- Nikhil BT, Nikhil K, Jacob, Stephen, Chris, Pareesha, and Mom for feedback as I wrote this post
- Daniel, Nikhil, and everyone else who helped me figure out this process along the way and understand how to look at a first job
- My family & friends back home for accepting FaceTime as a reasonable replacement for me living on the east coast
