Like others, I now work remotely — for an agency out of California, personally. If you’re relatively new to the field, I think local work is a reasonable place to get your foot in the door. Junior remote positions seem harder to come by and I’d be concerned about how effectively you’d be able to learn from others in that environment.

It seems to me that Microsoft application programming is relatively big here, with Jack Henry being a large part of that. Being more interested in web development, I personally got on at Classy Llama a while back and I feel like, while the culture is weird and not for everybody, it was a great place to get technical experience that has led to me nearly tripling my salary and getting freelance work opportunities I might not have had otherwise. Mostly Serious also looks like a great place to work as a web dev though I’ve not personally worked with them.

At a certain point, like others, I did begin to feel like there was too little opportunity (and money, frankly) to stay local so I went remote and don’t anticipate going back local any time soon.