Come join me in Ashburn and find yourself a systems job at ANY of the major companies in the Reston / Fairfax area. The focus in this area is more IT but there are also a good number of engineering positions. We have all the major players here in one form or another.

Like everyone said, real estate / rent prices are sticker shock. I came from AZ and it's a depressing jump. Good luck and let me know if you have any specific questions about the area.

 

FYI, Virginia has been the perfect jump from AZ for me. Mountains/mountain roads nearby, reasonably mild winters, still relatively easy going in the outer burbs, decent S2K community, and the seasons have been awesome. Skyline Dr is about 2 hours away and its very reminiscent of Devil's Highway in Arizona. There are even a few Canyon Lake like local roads to enjoy as well.

Shoot me a PM, I still rock my AZ #.

 

Keep in mind that the PAX base is 1 hr south of Waldorf

NOVA is expensive to live there but there id definitely more going on up there.

Which ever you choose, I am sure you will enjoy it. SOMD and NOVA are both pretty nice places but definitely have there own things going for them.

 

That's a good point BaZurk -- Pax River is about an hour south of Waldorf. In fairness to Charles/St. Mary's County, you can get a Single Family Home with a garage and yard for about the price of a really nice TH in NOVA. Of course if you find a job in VA, I would strongly suggest living in VA, b/c commuting as others have pointed out can be really tedious. The DC area in general, you have to factor traffic into all of your plans. Kind of annoying, but what can you do? Once I was in Louisiana and this woman I was talking to said her commute was an hour (61 miles). I told her mine was also an hour and it was 20 miles. Her face was priceless.

Also check out Tysons, McLean, Arlington, Alexandria in your job searches, I forgot to include those in my previous post.

Good luck.

 

Thanks everyone. To be clear, the job location will dictate the general area in which I will/would live. I was only zeroing in on a few areas because those are closest to jobs that I have been interviewing for. Ideally I would be able to move to NOVA, or out near Frederick, MD, or some of the other nicer areas in MD, and VA, but it all comes down to the job!!

I have a short commute now, but I am from the east coast and know all about traffic and commuting, same goes for here in PHX. It takes over an hour to travel 25 miles at rush hour. I will certainly not put myself in a bad position to commute! For a job at PAX the commute would be long, but it would be mainly because of the mileage, not the bumper to bumper traffic. I am ok with driving further, as long as I am actually moving and driving haha!


I am searching for jobs in pretty much every area people here have listed. Unfortunately my skills reside mainly in the DoD world and things are moving very slowly right now because of budget cuts, and company re-orgs.

I really appreciate those of you that have reached out to my via pm and offered to pass along my resume, gotta love S2KI!!!

 

Don't be fooled. Base traffic is not something you want to under estimate haha. My office is roughly 10-12 miles from my house in Hollywood and it can take me anywhere from 20-45+ minutes to get home. There are only two main roads to funnel thousands of drivers so if there is an accident of heavy traffic already you are SOL.

I will say that you don't want to live across the Solomon's bridge on the Calvert side and work on the base. The traffic is bad across that bridge and Calvert County has emissions testing

 

Thank you for your input/advice Do they do visual inspections, or just plug the car in and read codes? My car passes AZ emissions thanks to flashpro.

 

I'm not entirely sure actually. I just sent a text to my friend though. I want to say that they do a visual inspection as well but they don't scrutinize too much

 

They do both, although the visual is not very comprehensive.

 

I just went through the emissions testing in my truck... No visual test was done, strictly plug and play.

My truck had a CEL so I reset it. They flagged it for a re-test after a month because I hadn't driven enough miles for the computer sensor checks to finish catching up. A month later, I reset the code yet again, drove 12 miles, PASSED the test.... I'm not too worried about their testing. It's just a crock of shit to generate income if you ask me.