You’re living outside the US and want to get a job in San Francisco? I got a few requests by email asking me about this, so here goes my tip. Please note that applies to Software Engineer (and people working in the tech industry as Engineers) and I can only compare to what I’ve previously known: French companies.

I’ve worked almost 15 years now, I’m 32 years old but started very early in my business life, after leaving the University at 18 I had only joined because I got rejected from a better school I wanted to go to. In the end, I think starting early was the best move and the best thing than happened to me. Today I’m focusing on Ruby on Rails & iPhone development.

Because I have a few years of experience, and a few projects than worked (the most popular in France is probably the French website linuxfr.org which has millions of hits a month, and a few dozen of thousands of users), I would get people asking me for Engineers to hire. In France my word would almost be enough for someone to be hired, they would get a few more questions but people would trust my judgment and hire the guy.

In the US, it doesn’t make a difference. It took me quiet a long time to understand this, but even you have a very good referral, you will still go through the usual hiring process, which is much longer than the one in France. I believe it to be much better, as you can see how good and experienced is the candidate. For example, I’ve been interviewed at Twitter and went through about 11 people during 2 days (I think almost the entire mobile team at the time), spending hours at their office (answering most of the time the same questions, that was boring but ok). Google does the same, and so does most companies in the bay area.

Questions are way way way way more technical. The reason is you’re surrounded by Engineers in San Francisco, and companies need to know how good you are compared to others. They don’t always need an answer, and might just want to see how you think, how you interact when having a problem and so on, but you will get tough questions. And remember you’re not home, you’re stressed because of the interview, and it’s not always easy. The interview might include pair programming for a few hours with one of the employee.

Questions could be writing a substring() function and being able to tell how fast it runs using Big O notation (I knew nothing about this before coming, and still got offers…), sorting arrays with specific sort methods, writing games, etc. It will involves doing something in a limited amount of time, it will require you to know coding, I highly suggest you code for a few weeks before applying if you’re not confident doing it at any time of the day without notice.

Before those “on site” interviews for jobs, you need to actually be in San Francisco. My best advice is go to San Francisco for a few weeks, do some sightseeing, enjoy the city and contact all the companies you want to work for before coming. Try to have your days full of appointments and meet as many as possible while being here. Many cool companies are hiring (Causes, typekit, Twitter, etc) and always have a job listing on their page. Send your resume, get in touch with them. Usually you’ll have phone screens first, then it could even be remote pair programming but if your English isn’t perfect, I’d suggest just doing it from San Francisco.

A list of things you should have before applying:

• A resume, properly done. My (old) resume using Latex.
• A linkedin page, startups use it a lot, really. My linkedin page.
• A github account with published code. My github page.
• A website is nice, a blog is too, mostly if about technical stuff.
• Know coding, awesome languages often requested these days include Objective-C, Ruby, Python. I know there are more, more requested but I don’t like them (they usually are named by 3 letters).