Attention job seekers: the East Coast’s startup culture is booming. Computer Science majors and workers, this is where you want to be.
If you have been keeping up with Spark Hire the past week or so, it’s evident that the idea that links startups with Silicon Valley as the only area to grow is quickly changing. Startups in New York and Massachusetts in particular are growing at a fast rate and have very high success rates as well. To reiterate this fact, Computer World published an article covering a startup tech job fair that is to be held Friday this week in New York.
The job fair is the Silicon Alley Talent Fair and is sponsored by Ideeli, “a flash sale e-retailer based in New York’s Soho neighborhood that had an IT staff of 12 just a year ago. It now has more than 60 IT employees and continues to hire tech workers.” In total, Ideeli has over 240 employees. According to the article, more than 80 startup companies will be participating in the fair and they expect at least 750 job seekers to attend. Ideeli CTO Mark Uhrmacher addressed the misconception that startups need to be in Silicon Valley to grow and succeed. “There is a perception in the top technical universities that if you want to have a serious career in technology you need to go out to California. What’s really interesting is the vast majority of the top engineering programs are in the Eastern half of the United States, yet their top grads almost exclusively go out to California.” To combat that, co-founder of Silicon Alley Labs – the startup that is organizing the job fair- Tarek Pertew has been working with East Coast university computer science departments and alumni groups to attract more attention to the upcoming fair. He estimates that through this job fair the companies intend to fill 200 to 250 jobs. For a lagging job market, it’s a great opportunity for recent graduates or soon-to-be graduates to try and secure themselves positions in the startups.
Aside from trying to attract the attention of new graduates and the like, Pertew “also wants to attract people who are working for New York’s corporate icons, in finance, retail and other industries who may be unaware of how active New York’s startup tech culture is.”
Representative of the startup company culture, the job fair will have music, beer, ping pong and a networking lounge. “We want people to feel comfortable,” said Pertew. As startups continue to take off in New York, the old adage that Silicon Valley is the place to be to grow as a startup is slowly seeming to fall away.
SOURCE: Computer World
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