Important Note: A number of companies have submitted new listings to me over the last few months, but my life has been too hectic to adequately maintain the page. (For one thing, I got married July 22, and then bought a house in midcoast Maine, to which I'll be moving soon). I apologize for this, and am determined to rectify the situation. If you're a Santa Cruz County high-tech employer (or you know of one that's not listed), please send the relevant information to crawford@goingware.com and I'll add your entry. Even though I'm moving to Maine my roots in Santa Cruz run deep and I'll continue to maintain this page. - December 27, 2000

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.

New: Read my letter of resignation from Live Picture, the company whose move out of the county prompted me to write this web page.

Building a Local Industry

Ultimately what is needed is for people to start companies here, as I did, when I started my consulting business, GoingWare. 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 Internet firm.

Should your company be listed here? This index isn't just for programmers. Submit your company's URL if you employ or hire on W-2 or 1099 contract:

• Programmers
• Electrical Engineers
• VLSI Designers
• Technicians
• Quality Assurance Testers
• Technical Writers
• Web Page Designers and Web Masters
• Network Administrators
• Product Managers
• Salespeople
• Marketers
• Technical Support

The Santa Cruz Technology Alliance

Headhunters and Job Shops

There are companies that do much of their hiring from their temporary staff; by checking you out as a contractor they can assess your job performance without making a commitment to you. Yeah, this sucks but welcome to the 90's. Just be happy that Microsoft got sued and lost - it has to pay full-time benefits and stock options to many of its contract workers. The contract agencies provide some protection against such lawsuits by retaining the workers as W-2 employees; you can make more money going independent on a 1099 but it is harder to get someone to hire you because they risk being liable.

Local agencies:

• SurfSoft
• The Armada Group
• Hall Kinion
• Powermongers

Contractor's Web Pages

• The Software Contractor's Guild
• Janet Ruhl's Computer Consultant's Resource Page
• ICOMM Recruiting

Learn to Market Yourself

• Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

Participate in Job Search Communities

How I Built This Page

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.

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