The punch list (Score 1)

1) Seattle has a ton of Microsoft stack devs, the campus pumps them out by the hundreds and hundreds every quarter. 2) Most non-Microsoft "tech" companies lean heavy on *nix/OSS (dev, test, devops, etc.) (Amazon, Google, Nintendo, etc..) 3) Smaller shops that use MS dev and deployment stacks have the pick of the litter in the area (see #1) and can hire local. Options: 1) First get a local address via friend in Seattle and local number via GVoice, etc Don't lie about when asked, but helps not to get circular filed before at least getting the resume read. 2) Work the Microsoft vendor/recruiting companies hard and get into MS as a vendor or contractor and pay your own re-location. They do not care where you currently are but where you will be in two weeks or less, BUT be ready to jump a flight for an in-person interview at the drop of a hat otherwise someone gets the interview. You can look for another job once here. 3) Apply at Microsoft for FTE role if you have the chops, if you are not at the same level as a X years of experience Microsoft FTE/developer and can not pass the interview process, then Seattle is not the place just to move to. Remember all those ex-MS devs got through that process and 'most' can really code and think... Otherwise you will end up in the vendor/contractor saltmine doing grunt style coding. 4) Go for 'smaller' non-tech companies doing in-house corporate style app development (hope you have Salesforce, Dynamics, SAP, etc experience) 5) Apply a local Window stack consulting companies for project work, but you will be in/out of work based on their project pipeline. Make sure you have a portfolio vs a resume to show them. Skills to get hired in Seattle in 7 days or less (well not really, but ALOT faster then most) 1) NON-Microsoft dev work; rich browser based clients and OSS backends (you'll be hired within a week if you can back that resume up and prove it during a phone and in-person interview). 2) NON-Microsoft programming languages; Can you really code in C++ without VisualStudio? Know how to write OO-based Perl? Ruby-on-Rails at any type of internet base scale, can you really crank out the code for a LAMP stack and start taking user input from a site in one work day or less? 3) Work experience at internet scale. Your code taking millions of web hits per day? Startup/small tech companies here need people that know "scale". (MS based or not) 4) You contribute to OOS projects? Name dropping "known" OSS projects that you work on will get you in the door at lots of places here (big and small) 5) DevOps scaling experience. i.e.: Can you actually write python apps that control 1000 cores on AWS, can you really write Chef recipes that control 300 EC2s across 5 data centers and apply rolling security patches with zero user interruption?, etc 6) Real life "Big Data" experience? Hired in 48 hours or less. 7) Mobile development experience with apps actually in the App Stores (Native apps, not HTML5) : Get hire in 24 hours or less :-) 8) Be one of the top 1% of Microsoft stack developers in the world and go work for Microsoft 9) Willing to work really cheap with no benefits? Go the contractor/vendor route and work at Microsoft as an A-/V- (Again work those vendor's recruiters 24/5 as you are just a number to them, apply for 100 roles and you will get an interview on the campus) 10) Game dev experience? Mobile or fat-client including the supporting backends. Tons of game companies here, again mobile devs rule in this space right now.