My assumption about such an app is that similar to couch surfing, the most motivated users are guys looking for a hookup, and that will probably be a turn off for other demographics. I don't have an Iphone or else I'd be interested in testing the hypothesis.
Unfortunately, CS turned into what you described but even when it wasn't so apparent, it was still happening "secretly". Before it overtly became about guys looking for a hookup, I was a frequent participant in events in a big city, and after a few months, I got to know the 'seedy' underbelly, ie who had hooked up with who, etc etc. In most of these cases, they weren't locals hooking up with locals so perhaps the missing foreigner-hunting aspect of Four&me will help to keep things more level...who knows, though
A) Working in startups is more interesting/fun (If you can have fun being stressed out) than most companies. A lot of people will compromise compensation for fun.
B) The benefits of income have diminishing returns (Very scientifically through the tax system, but also because you mostly only become able to buy things lower on your priority list.)
C) Lots of people make do under 60k, software engineers are mostly able to make do as well as them. (A couple of exceptions for engineers who live in very expensive cities, have a lot of student loans, or are likely to burn out quickly)
Crytek is a huge mess, even by game dev standards (Which has a lot of huge messes). They've recently gone through periods where they just stopped paying their employees, they have a 2.5 score on glassdoor (That's pretty low.)
Here's a couple of possibilities, put some time into all of them, but gravitate towards the activities that you enjoy/tolerate the most.
* Take some time to learn how to interview. Learn the logic puzzles, how to chit chat about linked lists and binary trees. Learn how to white board, how to handle the 30ish standard programming questions in short time on a white board. Typically, if you're looking for a high-level language job (Ruby and Javascript in my experience), a lot of the time people will ask you to solve low level problems ignoring the abstractions such languages provide, so learn how to write C++ solutions in Python. Reading books like Cracking The Interview Code will get you most of the way through this, but I'd also advise to read up on internet fundamentals (http, etc.)
* Apply to a bunch of places. Embrace being repeatedly told that you don't seem good enough for the people you want to associate with, for a variety of unfair seeming reasons. Look forward to the day when that feeling is transformed to a dull sense of belonging based on your economic utility.
* Put yourself into experiences that come closer to typical software work experience. Work with other people, work under a time pressure, work to meet existing customer needs, work for payment. You could try hackathons, freelance work, contributing to open source, working with other people on their projects.
* Meet more developers. Ask for their opinions on how to best develop themselves, inside scoop on jobs available, etc.
* If possible, broaden your search beyond a single city. I'm assuming you're in SF. SF may have a lot of software jobs, but it has a lot of developers too, and the fact that they have to pay people a large enough salary to offset the costs of living there make it a bit more competitive than somewhere without absurdly high costs of living.
The subtext I read from your life-decision making is "I'm lonely, and money = women, so I'm going to get money."
Money doesn't really equal women as much as A) If you're destitute, dating can be more difficult (but not impossible, lots of homeless people get married.) and B) If you have a lot of money you can pay other people a lot of money to have sex with you.
If this sounds like you, I would start descalating your career, your yuppie lifestyle and start escalating your pursuit of things that really interest you and finding connection with other people.
I would like to say this in the nicest, most hopeful-for-your-future-potential way possible: Everybody can see through your bullshit.
I think most people aren't sure what you're being dishonest about, but they can tell that there's something up.
Real software employers will generally not hire anyone that they can smell a lot of dishonesty on, because they have to put a lot of trust in you. Besides your impact on their company through your contributions, you're usually given access to a lot of sensitive information.
I can empathize with you because I'm pretty sure you came from a poor background, and that's the only culture you're really aware of. I did too, and I would like it if it was a lot easier for poor people to make a living in tech.
Unfortunately you can't make a successful career as a bullshitter. Some people can, but that isn't your strong point. You have to understand someone's culture better than they understand it to be a good bullshitter, and you don't understand buisness culture well enough to do it.
The "do challenges to improve" concept is pretty widely applicable. So far social anxiety is our focus as the whole team that made metamorfus suffers from it.
We do have visions of making sister sites based on the metamorfus codebase for professional development, the honey badger movement, no more mr. nice guy movement, etc. That would be a long ways off (if ever), as metamorfus itself is at MVP quality at best right now and is just a side project for us.
I don't think social anxiety is a bad focus at all. I personally suffered from a lot of social anxiety 10 years ago.
My personal focus right now are more like social finesse, being slightly more fun at parties, handling difficult social situations (Calling in debts, interpersonal arguements, close relationships with difficult people, etc)
If you keep up with the social anxiety focus, I'd really like to see some kind of roadmap for success - Examples of what people using the service or similar approaches have accomplished. My understanding of social anxiety is that there's varying degrees of accomplishment for the same effort that people put in - some people are always going to feel awkward.
I haven't heard of those last two movements personally. Have you thought about how your site relates to the PUA movement? I've noticed some similarities. I don't mean that in the I'm currently raising pitchforks way. I think there was some concern within that community about how to help men with social anxiety that got drowned out with all of the fuzzy tophatted snake oil salesman and face-tattooed guys that want you to murder your step kids.
Ah ok, in that case yes we do hope to expand into those areas you mentioned. Our overall goal with Metamorfus is to become a really good resource on getting better at socializing, regardless of your background or goals. We definitely recognize a website can only do so much and people will respond differently.
We are still building the core of the site and bootstrapping. But we hope to eventually team up with therapists and relationship/communication experts to help provide content and guidance for people. So if you decide to take on a "go to a party" challenge, we hope to also provide tips, advice, and steps you can take to help make going to a party more successful, and cater that advice to your needs and skill level. One member of the team is a therapist who specializes in anxiety, and so we already have a good start on that.
I think the PUA gets a bad rap. Yes it has its problems, but at its core it always felt like a positive thing to me. I don't mind getting compared to it. We will definitely strive to keep metamorfus gender neutral and not make anyone feel uncomfortable though.
Honey badger is the "don't give a f movement" (http://www.reddit.com/r/howtonotgiveafuck/), their overall goal is to flat out not care about anything at all. Which has its pros and cons, of course. But so far metamorfus has responded well with that community, many of metamorfus's current members joined from htngaf communities. And No More Mr Nice Guy is this book -- http://www.amazon.com/No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy/dp/0762415339 -- there are in person communities around the country that follow the book, and the book itself contains many challenges and exercises, so a Metamorfus-type site could potentially become an online NMMNG community.
and btw, if you come back to the site you should find it much faster now. It was embarrassing how slow it was, we found and fixed the bottleneck :)
Is your idea something that you think has to go into motion soon or else its not going to be nearly as successful? If not, I'd recommend the same thing I would to someone who wants to date - Go to where the co-founders are, meet people, work with people on small projects if possible, don't expect results super quicklly.
I've talked to a founder who hired external contractors for their site and they ended up with something pretty unmaintainable for $3.5k. They ended up working with a more technical advisor to vet new people working on tech. I'm not sure if such an arrangement could work for you, but if I was in your shoes I'd find someone who seems upstanding and has had success with contracted teams, and then get them on as a contracting advisor.
I have another suggestion I'd like to share with you privately if you want to put your email in your account.
