This is Silicon Valley. It’s the heart of the software industry, the epitome of American entrepreneurship, the ultimate place to be a Software Engineer. As you drive along highway 101 from San Francisco down to San Jose, you inevitably drive by companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Yahoo, Sun, Intel, eBay, Network Associates just to name a few. When you get off 101 in the South Bay, don’t be surprised if you find yourself driving by the headquarters of tech companies such as Adobe, HP, AMD, Google, Facebook and the like.
Right at the center of it all, sandwiched between Google, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and NASA is Carnegie Mellon West, or shall I better say Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley? We've been told that the school is preparing to be renamed to Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, to better reflect the grand opportunities that arise from being situated right at the pulse of Silicon Valley.
And, boy, what a difference it makes to be here in the valley. The good is that you build networks and connections like crazy. For lunch, I sometimes leave the Microsoft campus and hop over to Google or Apple to have lunch there with classmates or former co-workers. The “Lunch 2.0” group is organizing get-to-know-the-company lunch events, where I find myself eating and mingling with employees over at LinkedIn, Meebo and the like. You are being constantly approached (sometimes very aggressively) by recruiters trying to persuade you to leave one high-paying job for another high-paying job. Last time, I was having dinner by myself at this shady Vietnamese Pho restaurant, and was doing my assigned reading in the Ruby on Rails book, only to be approached by the CEO of this RoR shop and been given a business card in case I am interested in doing RoR professionally. There are technology events, conferences, workshops and user group meetings sprinkled throughout the valley—CMU West even hosts many.
As I am doing my practicum with PayPal, our team is working diligently on a very cool ASP.NET/Silverlight-based website that uses PayPal’s service-oriented architecture and last week, our Carnegie Mellon team had lunch on the beautiful eBay/PayPal campus and presented the state of our product to one of the directors and his team there. After the practicum, they gave us a grand tour of the facilities and even joked that we might as well just pick up the job application too.
Silicon Valley is just a vibrant area, full of ideas and innovation and Carnegie Mellon knows how to foster it. Besides the popular innovation and entrepreneurship classes taught by startup veterans, we also have an “entrepreneur-in-residence” at CMU West. He’s a venture capitalist who can give guidance on starting your own company, and heck, he might be interested in investing in it. The valley is just full of people with ideas—it seems like everyone from your co-worker to the janitor has an opinion and idea of the next disruptive technology, and are probably already putting a business plan together.
Now, the flipside of being in the heart and center of Silicon Valley, is that you can’t escape it. In an area, where the ratio of men to women is skewed enough for San Jose to be nicknamed “Man Jose”, it’s really disappointing to go to a social event only to be surrounded by nerdy engineers who just haven’t learned the etiquette of not talking about work outside of work. Most annoyingly are those that practice geek speak in the movie theater/Starbucks line in an intentional loud voice. Have they never learned that the first rule about computer club, is to not talk about computer club? I myself always resist the urge of asking someone I first meet where they work or what they do, because I know that like Pringles, once they pop, they’ll never stop.
Yet, overall, Silicon Valley is definitely a quite interesting place for software engineers. It’s a place where not only can you see history being made by the minute, but also where you have every opportunity to be part of making history.