I've often thought that for the exceptionally bright but really technical hands on programmer that some of these startup incubator or shared workspace environments might be the ideal place to work.
The problem is that at any one company there aren't enough challenges to keep you interested, you're the heavy hitter, the impact player. You can come on the field, and in 15 minutes score more goals than everyone else put together, but then you get bored and need to go off and do something else. I think there is an analogy to science - there is the big glamourous science with its breakthroughs, and then there is the 'janitorial' science of the guys who coem along behind and tidy everything up.
The problem with trying to create a 'floating' programmer type position is how do you compensate them? But that will come back to a much more fundamental (and unsolved) problem, how do you measure the input of programmers.
Additionally, if we buy into some of the recent discussion about personality types and programming, it may be that the best impact players are the manic/depressive types. They might come in to the shared workspace for two weeks and flit from company to company solving an amazing quantity of problems... and then they go and hide under their bed for four weeks and you don't see them again for a month. Someone's got to keep the momentum going in that time (so we can't all be impact players).
Additionally, thinking back to the times that I've been the guy to walk into the room, take a quick glance at the other programmers source code and say "there's your problem" and then ride off into the sunset, you really need to have some kind of base level of understanding of what they're trying to do.
For me I think I also have 'language snobbery' issues. I'm not going to want to help some 20 year old MBAs put some scammy B2B together by coercing two fundemantally different PHP frameworks to talk to each other (and even if I did the compensation would be even more of an issue, because they'd never believe just how difficult it is).
So it'll probably always be a pipe-dream for me...
The portlandten.com link is dead. I don't know if there's an official voice for the Portland startup community, but Rick Turoczy at http://siliconflorist.com does a pretty good job rounding up the local startup news (among other topics).
Great list, I figured I'd give you a few more for the corner of the world that I do know:
Toronto also has "Basecamp Ventures"/Mantella Venture Partners (http://mantellavp.com/), which is focused on early stage companies. PushLife (which just last weekend sold to Google for a reported ~$25M) was a graduate of that system.
Pretty sure there's an incubator at Michigan Technological University in the states upper peninsula but I couldn't find a link. I think the University of Michigan also has a student incubator.
The only one of them that functions like a typical YCombinator style incubator is Momentum.
In Japan, there is also Open Network Lab, run by Digital Garage, the company responsible for bringing Twitter to Japan, Netprice and Kakaku.com (both are big players in ecommerce there).
Does the "brand name" of an accelerator matter? I figure more well-known accelerators come with a larger, more established network to pool from, but I imagine there must be a great deal of merit to be gained from any accelerator you choose, right?
One of these I noticed isn't actually a startup accelerator in the sense that they offer funding. GangPlank is more of a collaborative workspace than anything.
It is great for applicants, but a little bit annoying for departments who want to hire -- it is now easy and common to simply apply for every job out there, so departments get tons of applications from people who are probably not actually interested.
The problem is that at any one company there aren't enough challenges to keep you interested, you're the heavy hitter, the impact player. You can come on the field, and in 15 minutes score more goals than everyone else put together, but then you get bored and need to go off and do something else. I think there is an analogy to science - there is the big glamourous science with its breakthroughs, and then there is the 'janitorial' science of the guys who coem along behind and tidy everything up.
The problem with trying to create a 'floating' programmer type position is how do you compensate them? But that will come back to a much more fundamental (and unsolved) problem, how do you measure the input of programmers.
Additionally, if we buy into some of the recent discussion about personality types and programming, it may be that the best impact players are the manic/depressive types. They might come in to the shared workspace for two weeks and flit from company to company solving an amazing quantity of problems... and then they go and hide under their bed for four weeks and you don't see them again for a month. Someone's got to keep the momentum going in that time (so we can't all be impact players).
Additionally, thinking back to the times that I've been the guy to walk into the room, take a quick glance at the other programmers source code and say "there's your problem" and then ride off into the sunset, you really need to have some kind of base level of understanding of what they're trying to do.
For me I think I also have 'language snobbery' issues. I'm not going to want to help some 20 year old MBAs put some scammy B2B together by coercing two fundemantally different PHP frameworks to talk to each other (and even if I did the compensation would be even more of an issue, because they'd never believe just how difficult it is).
So it'll probably always be a pipe-dream for me...