Given that many people come from larger cities, my story is an anomaly probably. I was working on my MS in CS and Applied Math at a local university when I started going to a local meetup. I got to know some people there who were in hiring positions at a local company that had a number of dev teams. They invited me to interview for an internship and ended up hiring me as a contractor instead. My next job after that came from meeting the CTO of a local consulting house at the same meetup. It's all about networking. I haven't gotten an offer from a place that didn't start with a warm intro.