Thanks for asking. He's been searching in the Bay Area and in the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex primarily. Relocation is certainly an option; in fact, we would both love to live in the Bay Area, and it's a good chance that I could find rewarding work there. We're willing to spend time living apart if that's what it takes, but obviously that's not our first choice.
A lot of companies in the Bay Area can't find enough good programmers, even while offering very high salaries. If he has some downtime between his job hunt, it'd probably be very good for his eventual prospects if he spent some time learning to program and practiced, practiced, practiced.
I imagine it has a good number of uses in Civil Engineering as well (modeling? automating repetitive tasks?).
In an economy like this, you might be in for a rough ride only having two preferred places that are already popular for job seekers. I do wish you and yours luck.
