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[Pedro Picasso]

I need your help. Rather, I need advice, and I consider y'all my "smart friends."

If I wanted to meet hot women, I could find a book that told me how to do that. (Though the fact that I reach for books first means I'd would probably have little in common with most of them.) If I wanted to meet famous politicians, I basically know where they work. If I wanted to meet really talented and somewhat experienced computer programmers, where do I go for that?

I am a computer programmer. The fantastic, wonderful, and basically Disneyland place I work at might possibly someday hire someone new to work with me, maybe.

A stack of books and some personal experience tells me who you hire is pretty much the most important decision you can make for a project/group/company. (e.g. Good to Great by Jim Collins leads with that premise.) I've also learned that it is heck of difficult to find really good computer programmers, and that if you don't find any really good ones it's in your best interest not to hire someone who is "just okay." Hiring "just okay" turns out to be a very bad move as they can create more problems than they solve.

I don't get to hire developers, but my recommendations carry some weight. I need to meet great developers in my area (or willing to move to my area) so that if a job comes open, I have someone I can recommend, and we're not just casting about. How do I accomplish this? Are they in bars? My book says the women might be in bars.

I have a lot in common with at least one hot woman. We read books together.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Hmmmm.  Is there a developers consortium, user group, professional certification organization for your field where you could go network and shit?  I have a couple of IT/consulting certifications, and their respective organizations are always having conferences, educational sessions and what-not where you can schmooze people up.

[wombat]

When the Tech Staff worked as a consultant/freelancer, he used to belong to a consultant's group. I think it was sponsored by the IEEE. The idea was networking and such, since freelancers need to network more than people who have full time real jobs.

To be honest it was unclear to me whether most of the members were quality people who'd chosen to be unattached, or people who were doing it out of necessity because they couldn't get real jobs. But at least some of them, like the Staff, were, and did eventually go back to having a real job. So you might want to find out if there's a group like that where the 'consultants' in your field hang out.

[Lister]

Get involved with Stack Overflow or some of the other programming message boards.  You get to learn new things and see new code, and people tend to network through them when needing/changing jobs.

[Pedro Picasso]

I like those suggestions but I gotta warn you...don't let on why you're there unless you want to be as popular as the easy girl at the prom with three drinks already in her.

Cogent advice.

[Pedro Picasso]

Get involved with Stack Overflow or some of the other programming message boards.  You get to learn new things and see new code, and people tend to network through them when needing/changing jobs.

I really like Stack Overflow. I'd like to sift their user data by location. Maybe I can write a script to do that.

[jaydub]

If you do, you could use it as an example of your script writing skills when you're freelancing.

Ooh, circular.