I have lived almost my entire life in Ca. The first half was up near San Francisco; the last half down here. I can tell you that I have no love for this place and much of Mr Sobek's comments resonate with me. If it is private spaceflight that might drag you into the living **** of the LA basin, have you considered the booming enterprise up here in Mojave? Virgin Galactic (and their spacecraft spinoff company) seem to be hiring like crazy.
I've looked at Virgin Galactic and at the moment, they're not hiring anyone with my skillset. Honestly, I was very surprised that SpaceX was hiring someone like me.
(I shall digress for a moment and explain my current situation)
I'm a web developer, I'm doing quite well in my current job, but the stuff I build inspires me not at all. My current job search is not to find the next step up on the career ladder, it's to find something that I can do and feel personally motivated about. I've talked to Robert at Dynon about possibly transferring my knowledge into embedded systems and doing avionics work; it's a possibility, but they're not hiring and I need to teach myself more anyway before I could competently do the work. If I was already a competent embedded developer, there would be lots of things open to me...pretty much any avionics company, maybe even Virgin, who knows?
But I'm not there yet. In the meantime, I got to thinking that maybe there were aircraft-related opportunities I could apply my current skills to. On a long shot, I checked the SpaceX job listing, expecting to see nothing matching...and I was stunned that they had something that I was a
perfect fit for! It turns out, based on my research, that they have an internally-built and maintained Web app that pretty much everyone in the company uses. That's pretty unusual, and it makes this opportunity pretty unusual as well.
So basically, the job I'm applying for with SpaceX isn't likely to carry over to any other company in the same or similar biz. I'd go so far as to say this might be a one-of-a-kind opportunity.
So while I have numerous reservations about moving to California, on the other side of the coin, I have a very unique chance to take the skills I've already been honing for years and immediately go use them to put stuff in space. Any other path I might take would be probably a year or more in the future, and I'd be almost certainly taking a pay cut to do that mini-career change. With SpaceX, I have a good chance to maintain my income, which is just an added bonus to finding compelling work.
Anyway...that was kind of long, but that's where I am.