Developers Developers Developers!
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The recruiter was telling me something I should have already known. It was all over those emails. C#, sockets, winforms and threads. Those were the skills that Wall Street was buying. Those were the keys that would open doors. The tools I would need to get close enough to the action to find out the truth about capitalism.
But they were also great skills for a person wanting to envision a new way of computing. I focused my search on .Net jobs, but outside of finance. I tried to avoid the web programming jobs because I had learned that it was all about desktop and networked apps on Wall Street. I also learned that my resume would go straight to the bottom of the pile if I looked like a “web programmer” or a “VB programmer.”
Not elite enough.
It was hard to find work doing distributed applications outside of finance (and without going into war, or games). But once I knew exactly what I was looking for the search became easier. I found a job at a small consulting shop that wanted to launch a social networking service for college students. Unlike the other social networking services, ours would do everything in real-time. It was in Hartford. It was perfect place to start my career.
That project consumed the next two years of my life.
