- Home
- Contact:
- Employers
- Developer Blogs
Tell a Friend!
Please link to this page from your website, your weblog or from message boards.
Find a Computer Industry Job
in Santa Cruz, California
The Santa Cruz Computer Industry Index:
links to local employers as a public service to the Software Industry as well
as those who want to work near home.
Do you drive over The Hill just to put bread on your table? Spend countless hours stuck in traffic jams on Highway 17? Perhaps it's time you do something about it.
You may be suprised to know that many Santa Cruz County software companies find it difficult to locate talent, and pay outlandish headhunter and contract agency fees, or even move from our beautiful county to smog-infested Silicon Valley in hopes of finding more engineers, as my former employer did. My urgent search to find a replacement job when the company moved resulted in this list of employers, and my wish to help coworkers at that company stay local was what made the original for this web page.
Building a Local Industry
The solution to traffic gridlock isn't widening highway 17, busses or commuter lanes as some have proposed. The only real answer, here in Santa Cruz and in any other community, is for people to live where they work, and work where they live.
That means, for folks like me, building software companies in the community I live in rather than driving to them. That means putting the effort into hunting out the local jobs. That means taking the time, if you're a Santa Cruz employer, to find local talent, rather than hiring a Silicon Valley job shop who will find you someone to commute the other direction.
Ultimately what is needed is for people to start companies here, as I did, when I started my consulting business, GoingWare Inc. Also what is needed is local investment, as a friend did when he sold his local web hosting service and founded NextShift, Inc. a local consulting firm.
Should your company be listed here?
Quite likely.
This index isn't just for coders. Submit your company's URL if you employ permanently, or retain on W-2, 1099 or Corp-to-Corp contract:
- Programmers
- Electrical Engineers
- VLSI Designers
- Technicians
- Quality Assurance Testers
- Technical Writers
- Web Designers
- Web Masters
- Network Administrators
- System Administrators
- Product Managers
- Salespeople
- Marketers
- Technical Support
How I Built This Page
If you're not from Santa Cruz, or you're looking for companies that aren't on my list, you can use the same technique I did to build this page. It just takes some patience and cleverness with Internet Search Engines:
- Czech Republic
- People's Republic of China
- Russian Federation
- Japan
I figured out some good tricks for searching for local companies. Do the Advanced Query on WWW.AltaVista.com and search for "software and 95060" or "jobs and 95060" or "employment and "santa cruz"". (Substitute in your own postal code and city). There will be lots of bogus matches (including the resumes of many local software engineers!) but there will be jewels to be found - the web pages of local software companies.
New: lately I've been finding the search results on AltaVista less and less useful. They've definitely sold out to the increasing trend towards paid placement in search results. Great for the advertisers and the search engine companies but worse than useless for someone trying to research something of importance on the web. Some web indices (hand-categorized websites) like Yahoo no longer make a serious effort to include a site in the index unless you cough up about two hundred bucks per site per index.
A reasonably good search engine these days (although not completely free of paid result placement) is Google. Note that Google automatically assumes multiple word searches require all the words to appear in a page (a Boolean AND) without actually saying AND in your search string - this is a really bright idea.
Be sure to send me any additional companies you find.
One Must Not Trifle With Wizards For It Makes Us Soggy And Hard To Light.