How is the IT job market in Austin, TX?

I am based in So. California and the high taxes along with ridiculous housing prices have finally gotten to me. We are thinking of moving to Texas (I prefer Austin for its music scene) and would like to get info from professionals who have worked there for some time. I know several companies e.g. Cisco, Dell are based there so that is a plus. I can check the usual job sites but that doesn't tell how easy/hard it is to get picked by companies. Any other transplants out there?

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Hammer80

What is your speciality or what do you want to specialize in?

Pretty hard to give you direction without knowing your education and experience background. I am quite familiar with the city also know as "Baby Silicon Valley", this town is extremely educated so you will have competition but there are plenty of jobs it just depends on what you want.

One that I would stay away from is Dell, benefits are great but they treat their employees like crap, there are metrics for everything. Dell actually has entire dept dedicated to cooking up new metrics it's the only way they keep their jobs reinvent the wheel every 6 months with a whole new set of expectations. It's also very cult like and it has zero company culture. Everybody and their mother has worked for Dell one time or another and 9 out of 10 people refuse to ever go back.

The rest of the companies in Austin are pretty good to work at, Samsung, IBM, Cisco, Apple, Electronic Arts, HP, Google, Microsoft, pretty much every tech company has a operation here.

JoJoCal19

Hammer80 wrote: »

One that I would stay away from is Dell, benefits are great but they treat their employees like crap, there are metrics for everything. Dell actually has entire dept dedicated to cooking up new metrics it's the only way they keep their jobs reinvent the wheel every 6 months with a whole new set of expectations. It's also very cult like and it has zero company culture. Everybody and their mother has worked for Dell one time or another and 9 out of 10 people refuse to ever go back.

Is that true of the whole company, specifically SecureWorks?

SixtyCycle

Hammer80 wrote: »

What is your speciality or what do you want to specialize in?

Pretty hard to give you direction without knowing your education and experience background. I am quite familiar with the city also know as "Baby Silicon Valley", this town is extremely educated so you will have competition but there are plenty of jobs it just depends on what you want.

One that I would stay away from is Dell, benefits are great but they treat their employees like crap, there are metrics for everything. Dell actually has entire dept dedicated to cooking up new metrics it's the only way they keep their jobs reinvent the wheel every 6 months with a whole new set of expectations. It's also very cult like and it has zero company culture. Everybody and their mother has worked for Dell one time or another and 9 out of 10 people refuse to ever go back.

The rest of the companies in Austin are pretty good to work at, Samsung, IBM, Cisco, Apple, Electronic Arts, HP, Google, Microsoft, pretty much every tech company has a operation here.

I'm at the start of my IT career working as a junior network admin at an MSP. I would like to switch to linux administration in a year or two while developing my skills in Python and other scripting languages. I'm hoping to get my VCP, CCNA and Linux+ certs this year. I don't have to be in a well known corp but salary and benefits are top priority.

Hammer80

Not sure about SecureWorks as they became part of Dell in 2011, but I remember when they bought Alienware and the quality control went to hell and their employees were very unhappy.

SixtyCycle you should not have any issue then in getting a job here, there is also many small and medium sized companies that will happily give you a job with those skills. The only thing that sucks is housing the apartments are at 95% capacity so I would recommend buying a house but something to be aware of is we have very high property taxes to the tune of avg. 2.5% a year.

darkerz

As someone from Seattle area, I love how 2.5% is very high. I would kill for that rate. I'm at 4.97%.