Yesterday, after work, I got the chance to meet up with Yosi & Lior and see where they work(at SPL). Later we grabbed our cars and headed out for a small dinner(I still can’t eat anything even now, and its already noon the next day) and got to talk about all the things that us geeks talk about when we get together and have small dinners with no one to stop us from speaking about the geeky stuff we like to talk about [this sentence has been cut for readability’s sake].
One of the things we talked about was a bit of a drag – “Getting there from here”.
This subject means different things to different people, but to me, this means “making it” in the software world, getting recognition, and do what I love in the process (i.e. “working at Microsoft”).
Now, I know that the chances of me getting a job at Microsoft USA are pretty darn slim. In fact, it does not even matter if I were one of the greatest minds on the planet. I wouldn’t get there without one of two things:
· Networking
· Exposure
Without these two things, I can have skills from here to New York, and still no one would know. I could write a resume and submit it to Microsoft’s career site(which I did), but it seems that me being is Israel would mean that it wont even be read.
No. My only chance is to expose myself(and this blog is a start) to the world and hope that the right person stops by and picks me. Either that, or I have to have a network of connections going up all the way to Microsoft, and this network has no be connected to that right person who picks me. That’s situation I find myself in(And I thin I’m not the only one).
This is not to say that I can’t find a great job in Israel and have the time of my life there, it just means that my dream job is practically a dream. Without a work visa to the US – almost any job in the U.S is a dream.
Getting back to my post, After 3 hours of geek talk, we decided that this was too fun to stop now, so we arranged to meet up later that evening , each with his wife/girlfriend, at the “Stakato” restaurant in Herzliya.
This place is located right at the heart of one of the most hi-tech oriented city blocks in Israel, and can be compared to Times Square, only on a much much smaller scale(this is Israel, remember? Everything is smaller here). At night the place is swarming with people and lively restaurants, each with different music coming out of its loudspeakers, and you can hear it all a mile away.
It makes for an interesting “carnival-like” feeling, although the music is not Brazilian(mostly), just plain hip-hop,dance or other modem stuff.
The get together was great. We had a lot of laughs and talked about our backgrounds, what we do, where we live, stuff we went through. You know. The usual. It was nice to go out and have some laughs and drinks. I was a total geek and wore my “Visual Studio .Net” T-Shirt. I got some good news that evening: One of my articles will be republished on the MSDNAA site, which really flattered me.
Yosi asked me whether I’d like to give a talk in the next Tech-Ed in Israel(in about a year) about advanced regular expressions and parsing. How could I say no to that? Of course, its not a done deal. It was just a thought, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.
Later in the car on the way home Tal, my wife, told me “Great guys!”. I knew it.