The people were super friendly. The weather was great (two days of sunny blue skies). The food was great. Even the roads were easy to deal with
I do take bitcoin.
Seriously though F* 405 traffic. The new "Toll route" is a nightmare and now everyone is using side roads making my drive to work from a quick 10 min jaunt into a 25-30 min parking lot.
The real solution, as pointed out above, involves incentives for desired behavior from all actors via taxes/tax breaks (stick/carrot). Parties that should be affected include businesses, employees, housing providers, and civic planners on all levels. The true cost of living rural should be felt (you should /pay/ for your share of the infrastructure required to provide /you/ with modern services; but you should /get/ them, including actual /good/ Internet). The true cost of employing should be felt (pay for the infrastructure to get workers to you, and for the education that trained them). Housing should be more consistently priced, in city and out, and should also scale up large enough to have 'raise a family well' sized dwellings. Also while you're at it, discount taxes slightly for better auditory insulation (or make it a side effect of /awesome/ fire codes).
This way workers would be more likely to be able to afford to live, and thus move closer to their jobs. With the lack of 'lifetime employment' at a company, responsible living is now an apartment, not a house.
Seattle from October through January is nothing like this. I literally didn't see the sun for over 20 days straight at one point (it's foggy and rainy non-stop during the winter).
Smart-assery aside, yeah, Seattle has awesome summers, albeit mighty short some years. November comes, you better head down to the NorthFace outlet and get a GoreTex jacket or two.
Which is of course what happened -- they decided they wanted the technology and the engineering team (including me) and after some negotation got to a price that worked for everybody. Moving up to Redmond was part of the deal.
At the celebration party, people gave me various presents -- including a scuba mask, flippers, rubbers, several umbrellas...
And yeah, everything they say about the winters here is true. So please please please don't move here :)
Huh, just noticed this: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2007/11/low-hanging-late-harves...
It looks like you and I left Microsoft in the same week. Funny timing.