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The fact that everything closed so early blew me away, when I moved there. Compared to the middle of nowhere WV it made zero sense. Even the grocery stores closed by midnight in SF.

In WV, you can find food at most places until 12-1am 7 days a week. And the major local grocery is a Walmart, which is open 24 hours.

Last Easter I had no clue nothing would be open, and didn't prepare for that. So I just had some crap picked up at a gas station to hold me over until the next day. It's a really bizarre situation compared to most other metros, but even compared to a bunch of small towns.

This is one of the strangest things about the Bay for sure. It is like a stereotype of a sleepy little town this way. I stay in Oakland now, and there is one cafe (within bike riding distance for me) that is open to midnight.

I still to this day argue that by a significant margin, the best thing about living in Vegas was the everything goes 24-hour lifestyle where you can literally do or eat anything you want 24/365.

I wouldn't argue against that being the best thing Vegas has going for it.

Cheap housing, cheap decent food options, access to all-you-can-eat-entertainment, relative proximity to SoCal/beach all factor in as well. But the Summer is miserable (IMO) and the people here just don't give a crap about life, so it can be pretty draining to live in Vegas as well.

>...and the people here just don't give a crap about life

Yes and to finish my OP thought, I would argue that this was without a doubt the worse of it as well.

What do you mean "Don't give a crap about life"?

I mean I grew up in Southern California. Now I live in Vegas. I go to the grocery store and I have to be on full alert to make sure I don't hit some random pedestrian who decides for the fifth time in the day to play Russian roulette by stepping into the middle of the street to cross without even looking up to see if anyone is noticing. At the grocery store, people are walking around like zombies in pajamas that they seem to have been wearing for the past three days straight. I leave the grocery store and load up my car, then I push my empty cart to the cart collection bin. When I get back to my car someone else is loading up their car, with their cart behind my car. I get in my car and wait to finish and when they do, they leave their cart behind my car and drive away. Not to mention the very sad sacks who spend all their time and money in the casinos.

The people here are poor, and my perception is that they don't have much hope and/or desire to affect any kind of change in their life. They just seem not to give a crap.

I don't live in a nice part of town, and I suppose it could just be culture shock for me personally having moved from Irvine to Not-Summerlin, Vegas, but that's my perception.

Yes for sure someone like you should head to Summerlin.

I'm in Vegas. A lot of people here are passionate about their community and their personal projects. I'm not sure what you're talking abou the "not giving a crap about life." Just browse our Meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/nv/las_vegas/ If you missed those kinds of people then maybe there was a problem with the way you approached Vegas.

Not maybe.

In my case, definitely.

Thanks for the clarification.

Where in Vegas do you live/shop/drive?

I just moved downtown actually. I work here, I hang out here, etc. My commute is like 3 minutes in a car. A nice 30 min walk if I want.

Just so long as you ignore the colossal waste of water and other resources needed to run a city in the middle of a desert with no real reason to exist.

The water gets recycled, eventually.

Everything closing at 9PM is pretty much par for the course here in Vancouver, another city with the skyrocketing cost-of-living thing going on. I wonder if there's a correlation. Maybe everyone is rich enough to pay delivery services or maids or something to get their shopping done while they're at work, so there's no demand for 24-hour businesses?

Then again, another thing with Vancouver (that I think I've heard said a bit about SF, but less-so) is that there's no night life. The bars close at midnight. (Actually, you can't even get a license to operate a "bar" here; you have to build a sit-down restaurant in order to serve alcohol.) I wonder if the correlation is actually between this sort of Victorian-era teetotaling "healthy living" sensibility, and the sort of generalized NIMBYism that prevents highrises from deflating housing pressure.

I think that reasonable (For the employees) grocery hours are more of a Canadian thing, rather then a skyrocketing cost-of-living one. Businesses in Victoria, Kamloops, etc close up around the same time.

It might also be that for restaurants and retail the employees have been so completely priced out of living in the area that many of them have a 2+ hour commute with all the limitations that entails (quitting time determined by transit availability, etc.).

Vancouver anecdote; bars are not night life. I visited for two weeks and discovered a local music festival (music waste), befriended random folks at parks (parks were everywhere, and people actually used them!). East Van seemed to have a lively night life on par with SF/LA, people hosting live bands in their loft, avant-garde burlesque theater, house parties etc. It sounded like there was a lively festival scene in BC too, and not just electronic, stuff like the Peppermill Festival http://www.peppermillrecords.com/. Quantity of cultural hubs in Van might not be as expansive as other major cities, but the quality certainly sprouts up. That city seems more suited for people who enjoy nature though.

Really sad to hear that Vancouver and San Francisco are plagued by real estate siphoning out all the potential of what those cities could be. Feudalism seems to be a trend everywhere though.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-14/millennial...

Vancouver parks close for the night, usually at dusk or 10pm

They have the parties at home in east van because it is impossible to get a permit and/or a suitable venue for most events. There are very few venues for hosting parties and virtually no practice areas for bands. I've been to a number of events that were held in death-trap condemned buildings. I've even been locked in one illegally because someone called an ambulance and they didn't want to "blow their cover" so nobody could enter or exit for 30min while my friend waited outside in a back alley. Much prefer other cities where I can just go to a normal bar and not deal with entrapment issues.

Where are you going? Seriously. Put a little effort in.

BART really doesn't run late enough (Caltrain to the South Bay as well) to support suburbanites coming into SF to drink at night.

A major factor in this is that the transit services largely die off at 1am in Vancouver. So for any workers at stores or restaurants they simply can't afford to go home after a certain point. The late night bus service is not good enough, take for example the N19. It is full of all the bar kids at 1am. You don't want to take that bus unless you're drunk.

I think you're onto something with the Victorian "healthy living" bit. There is some hypocrisy as well: the way Vancouverites talk down about alcohol drinkers or tobacco smokers all the time but meanwhile promote the pot trade and never talk about the rampant heroin problem in that city.

Sounds like they're not too different from us Californians after all.

Err, well, bars which hold a primary liquor license in Vancouver can operate until 2 AM. Many do, but after 1:00 AM a majority of the night life leaves and you're left with a couple of awesome regulars, someone passed out on a table who you have to help get home, and staff from other restaurants which close earlier.

All the great things that Vancouver has to offer happen in the day or afternoon. The only thing I'm sad about is the Jazz Cellar closing down. RIP Ross Taggart.

Where in WV?

I can't find food after 10pm.

Lewisburg, it means getting fast food or going to a tavern, but the choices are more than I had in the peninsula.

Morgantown also has late hours in my experience, though you might have to walk to High St.

The Irish Pub?

That's one of them, though the food after 10 is a little more iffy. Sometimes there's pizza and bread from the bakery brought over for the pub's patrons.

I'm there fairly frequently.

The Asylum serves regular bar food til about 11 I think. Still later than what I was seeing in SF.

Since you know of it, if you're ever around and would like to grab a pint feel frre to send me an email at james@jimminy.me

Greetings from another WV refugee. Austin by way of Elkview. I have tons of relatives from Greenbrier County.

Safeway is open near 24/7, some close at ~midnight, but that's pretty good. There are also tons of little convenience stores/bodegas that stay open relatively late.

That said, nightlife closing at 2AM is a plus and a minus. I kind of like there being a defined end to the evening, I'd rather not stay out too too late and this way I don't have to be the party pooper :)

Since you're on HN I assume you're doing some kind of software or technical work. What's the market like for that in WV. My family's from Man, a little dot in Logan county.

The market is complete crap. I'm back for what was supposed to be temporary, plan was to go to Dallas, but I have attachments here so don't want to go.

I've spent 8 months looking for a technical position. The only interviews I've managed to get are in Roanoke/Blacksburg, VA. Every interview I've had (not many because the market is dry), either drastically undercuts my experience (one company tried to write down my experience below the length of my last job) or otherwise offers a very meager salary, 30-50% lower than even the cost of living adjusted figure from my last job where I was living SoMa.

Also due to infrastructure, and partially the company who marked down my experience because they don't consider remote experience, I'm no longer interested in remote positions.

Funny you mentioned not being able to get a good meal after 9:30pm. That was the most frustrating thing about being in San Francisco for me. I hated that the whole bay seemed to shut down @10pm - almost as if everybody has to wake up the next morning to work another 12 hour day to pay the insane rent.....

Don't get me started. You get inured to it after a while, but every time I travel outside of SF, I remember what it's like to live in a real city.

I moved here because it had a pleasant climate and (once had) a vibrant art/culture scene that provided ~80% of what you could get in bigger cities, at a discount. It was a city, but with a higher quality of life. For that, you might be willing give up some things.

That's no longer true. I don't know how new people rationalize the costs here, except as an "investment" into something else -- their career, real estate, whatever.

It's because everyone in SF seems to be a morning person. In my building everyone (except me) is asleep by 10pm. In NYC things are only getting started at 10.

Definitely this, it's ridiculous how early stuff closes around here and how early people go out. Moving from Mexico it was a big shock.

This doesn't square with my perception of SV programmers always mentioning staying late to hack on their startup. Do they actually mean that they got there at 6AM, so staying until 5PM is "late?"

I don't think that it's all hackers. Without mentioning the neighborhood (because this borders on stereotype, and these things usually devolve into an x vs. x neighborhood discussion), I live in a neighborhood where people mostly hold non-technical titles like "marketing manager" and "product manager".

And they've all worked out, shopped for groceries, had breakfast, etc. before 9am.

Engineers might stay up until 2am, but they stay up until 2am at home because nobody else is bugging them. If they eat, it's gonna be cheap stuff or frozen trader joes food from the freezer, more time efficient.

... and it's exhuasting to adjust to when business trips take me from SF to NYC. I usually add two hours to whatever normal evening meetup time I'd suggest in SF when I make plans with my NYC friends.

The only way I could handle my old SF boss expecting people in the office by 7:30 was by being based in Dublin and only making the occasional trip to SF.

Even then, the jetlag only made it work for a week or two.

I guess I always end up in the wrong parts of NYC because I kept finding that all the restaurants closed at 10pm (during the week, at least)... say, in Chelsea.

Chelsea doesn't have the best food options. You could go south to Meatpacking which is a bit better but I'd just walk east. Flatiron / Union Square has tons of food options that are open late plus solid bars. Walk even further to the East Village and you're golden, there's like two twenty-four hour restaurants within a block's radius of each other.

Perhaps part of the reason is the massive wealth gap between the tech migrants (tech workers) and the local population. It causes a lot of friction between locals and the new migrants. The lower earners are being forced out of the city and they probably make a up a large chunk of the service workers.

The public transit system shuts off by 12 AM - 1PM, and most service workers would likely have to live outside of the city, as well as most people coming into SF to work. The city is forced to shutoff at a certain time because of the transit situation, even if not for any other reasons.

> Perhaps part of the reason is the massive wealth gap between the tech migrants (tech workers) and the local population. It causes a lot of friction between locals and the new migrants. The lower earners are being forced out of the city and they probably make a up a large chunk of the service workers.

The current disparity certainly causes plenty of concerning issues, though SF's early closing has been a thing since at least 2007 when I first lived there, at which point cost of living was somewhat reasonable.

I find it to be one of the mysteries of bay area. I don't understand how a city this size can manage to have nothing open after 10 pm. Is there a reason to this? Surely it can't be all shop owners getting to gather and saying ok let's all close shop at 10..

I don't know if it's true for SF, but some cities have noise ordinances that pretty much shut everything down by a certain time.

As others have noted, people who have the sorts of jobs that put them behind a register can't afford to live in SF, and public transportation shuts down at midnight or so. If you were working a restaurant it would have to close by 10:00 so you had time to clean up with a little buffer to make sure you were on the last train.

But you can. The Brazen Head in the Marina, Thai Noodle on Haight and a bunch of places in North Beach will happily serve till 1 AM or later and at a quality that doesn't even compare with fast food. In fact since I've moved to SF, going on ten years now, I've found pretty much most of the rest of the country (NYC and LA excepted) to be quiet a sad food desert.

> I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros where you can't get a good meal after 9:30.

This one took me by surprise when I visited SF for the first time five years ago. I thought it would be booming with activity just like NYC, so I thought nothing of trying to find food when I arrived at ~11pm.

NOTHING. Nothing was open.

It must be a huge bummer to live in a city with NYC prices without that (very important --- to me) NYC perk.

Aren't most major problems also major opportunities?

Has nobody started a great 24/7 food delivery service bringing overpriced food to tech workers on demand?

NYC is really the outlier. Not that I'm typically out eating late in the city but what you describe isn't all that different in Boston/Cambridge (and Cambridge bars closed at midnight until relatively recently). And, last time I got into downtown Chicago late (11pm or so) on a business trip, the only food available near the hotel was takeout delivery from some pizza place.

That's a major over exaggeration and you know it. Name any neighborhood in the city, and I'll give you at least one place open until midnight.

You probably couldn't see anything open from your hotel in Union Square or SOMA, but it's there. Just open foursquare or Yelp.

I worked at Yelp, and I've lived here for nearly a decade, and I'm here to tell you: there are maybe ten decent restaurants open in all of SF at midnight. On a good day. You're screwed on a Monday night.

Even if we lower the standard to include fast food and/or greasy post-drunk food, the number jumps to perhaps 30, on a weekend night. So there might be a late-night restaurant in every neighborhood, but there's definitely no more than one. If you want something good, you need to eat before 9.

Great, now even Yelp employees think that they're food critics.

Also, get off your high horse for implying that a greasy spoon can't be good or have high standards.

NYC is not that different. The only things open 24hrs are bodegas and diners, which serve shitty food. Even the Whole Foods in Union Square, the busiest in the nation, closes at 11pm, which is later than the grocery stores in suburban TX. I guess bars can stay open late.

As someone who routinely worked quite late in NYC, that's just not accurate.

I routinely had good meals at 10pm or 11pm at night. Never once did I eat at a diner.

Lots of restaurants stay open later in NYC, and then there are plenty of gastropubs serving great food even later.

Used to be out real late and always got food. Pizza at 4am for a dollar, chicken gyros from the halal carts, chinatown restaurants.

Its not just about the stuff in your neighborhood.

In NYC at 4am, I could Seemless any meal/quantity I wanted!

In Seattle, I can only get pizza past 2am.

You can find bunches of places in lower Manhattan (for example) that serve good food and are open til 2 or 3am or 24 hours.

Completely agree with you. The whole point of software and the internet is to destroy boundaries and borders, especially physical ones.

Companies neither have to have physical offices nor do they have to be located in the Bay Area. And unfortunately culture dictates that an office is always necessary and that you need to locate your tech company in the Bay Area for dubious reasons like fundraising (which should only take a small portion of the operation of your company anyways), hiring (good engineers might come here if they agree with the lifestyle, and the job opportunities, but that doesn't mean jobs should come here because good engineers are here), or synergy (the belief that the physical proximity to other tech firms may help your company. Only applicable to certain markets at best).

Ha, yeah this makes me laugh. Startups that run completely on virtual machines in the cloud and their mission is to disrupt industry X but all of this can only be done from an open plan office space in SOMA.

Oh the irony of Slack opening up a bunch of offices around the world.

Beautiful SOMA.. where your ultra expensive, tiny office comes complete with a group of crack heads sleeping in tents in front of your office doors. If you need some light pre-lunch entertainment watch them drunkenly shout profanities at each other, at you, or sometimes at the sky.

Even the crack heads in SF are high class though. Where else do you see homeless people sleeping in $250 REI tents?

> Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.

Sorry, but this is flawed logic.

Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as well — Twitter, Square, Uber, Google, Facebook, Reddit, AirBnB, Apple, Oracle, Box, Palantir, Pinterest, Lyft, Stripe, CloudFlare… not that these are all of tech, but finding even a fraction of these anywhere (other than perhaps New York) is a stretch.

Given that, it's patently worth it to pay the extra cost per employee, when the relative value of each employee to the company ends up being so high compared to other industries.

This is not to say you can't build a strong tech company in other parts of the US, but you're stacking the odds against you by doing so.

You missed the point, parent commenter is saying that communication technology should enable you to build a successful tech company with a geographically distributed team.

Parent commenter claimed that "the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence". I argued against that, and in my opinion the available data appears to back me up on this.

Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.

Yeah, my personal theory on this is that the short to medium term success of tech startups is mostly based on factors and advantages other than product quality and technical excellence.

Having a distributed tech team is not hard, but most startups aren't distributed because the VCs aren't distributed. They want face to face meetings.

Surely the fact that a huge portion of startups start in SF could account for the fact that a huge portion of winners came from SF? You're also biased because you're paying more attention to startups in SF - the Bay area doesn't even come up with half of the big startups, and yet you failed to name a single one from anywhere else.

A quick scan of Fortune's unicorn list* shows 12 out of the top 25 are from outside of California, and two of the Cali ones are LA, bringing SF down to 11 (after generously counting Palo Alto in SF, because I assume you meant the Bay Area). Without numbers on how many startups are started in various places, I'm not sure what these numbers mean, but it doesn't obviously favor your winner-takes-all argument.

* http://fortune.com/unicorns/

Of the top 25, only two American companies are not in the Bay Area, and one of those is still in California.

For an area with less than 2% of the country's population, that is overwhelmingly dominant. I'm not sure if you could have underscored my point any more succinctly.

Somehow you've managed to miscount the numbers, misrepresent your wrong numbers, and miss the point all at once.

The point is that you still have contributed no idea of what portion of startups are starting in SF. If 95% of startups come out of SF but only 80% of winners do, it still has an overwhelming majority but is by the numbers a terrible place to start a startup.

Of the top 25 international, only about half are American, so stop pretending the denominator is 25 if you've decided that international companies for some reason don't count. There are 2 in LA, one in Boston, and 1 in NYC (what list are you looking at?), giving the Bay Area something like 2/3 of American companies, and about 1/3 of all.

I've thought about that, but as far as I can tell, it means about $10-$15k of equipment and a dedicated work room. I need a mobile-connected "smart" whiteboard for every team member, a good microphone, webcam, speakers, a separate computer + monitor devoted to video conferencing, and a team that is geographically dispersed rather than partially-colocated.

...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.

I'm not suggesting that you have to have a distributed team -- though, you certainly can, and $10-$15k is trivial compared to the economic penalty of hiring good engineers in SF.

I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.

They aren't in the valley for customer nor for techies, but for easy vc money access brought by locally connections. For now.

Well, that's an aspect of it. But there's a heaping helping of cargo-cult superstition, too. For example, ask an entrepreneur to consider locating their office in Oakland: it's becoming more "acceptable" now that Uber has committed to a huge space over there, but a year or two ago, I had people telling me that locating in Oakland was the equivalent of wanting your company to die. For being a 20-minute BART ride from downtown SF. People have lost their minds.

Also, of course, few around here believe that there are good programmers outside of the city. Mostly, though, I think it's about 20-somethings who want to feel like they've made it because they're running a startup in the most expensive city in the country.

The cult is powerful, for such a group of disruptive, innovative thinkers.

The difference in competitive salary for me between SF and PDX (where I live) is ~$70k.

Which you have to pay yearly, not as a one-time discounted cost. In fact even down at the very, very low-end of tech-related jobs (~$50k in PDX) the difference between SF and PDX is ~$18k.

There is literally no shape of tech-oriented business you could operate where having to spend only $15k per employee when they're onboarded isn't a net financial benefit compared to having to pay SF-area competitive salaries for the same positions.

The only hard requirements are a good headset and decent Internet. And when I say "decent," I don't mean "fabulous." I worked remote for five years, three time zones away from headquarters, and never even thought of getting a mobile-connected smart whiteboard. It might have been nifty, but it's by no means a requirement.

The main requirement is that everyone communicate over the same channels. No planning sessions at the watercooler. Take it back to your desk and have the conversation in Slack instead.

I hope that by "mobile-connected smart whiteboard for every team member" you mean "laptop or tablet with touchscreen, and a stylus".

You shouldn't need most of the rest of that, either. Make sure everyone has a 2nd monitor, and you'll need to buy a $30 webcam if they don't already have laptops. I wouldn't worry about the headset, either - cell phone headsets or earpods generally work fine and most everyone has a decent one nowadays. Wait for the folks who want something nicer to ask for one.

Cheap internet is fine. I worked from home with rock bottom residential service, the cheapest they would give me, and my connectivity was fantastic, better than anything I've ever had from an office. The secret is that nobody's on the Internet from home during the day, so you've got infrastructure that was meant to handle the whole world watching Netflix at 8pm more-or-less to yourself.

This is assuming a distributed team. mind. They have a tendency to self-assemble. Partial co-location is where things get messy and you start needing to worry about smart whiteboards and fancy videoconferencing equipment and all that crap. All that's really for is to make it an eensy bit more likely that the co-located folks will be willing to collaborate with the remote folks rather than forming a clique and forgetting that the rest of the team exists.

By the parent comment, I was assuming a distributed team.

Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck.

But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.

Yea, with partial co-location you need to budget at least 25% of your person-hours to hostage negotiations and koombeya meetings about people's hurt feelings.

0/10, would not try again.

Funny story... A lot of places have more reliable internet than the bay area.

>or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere

If people really figure out how to consistently develop any kind of software remotely, with any team size and with average programmers, a lot of programming jobs will move away from high living cost areas, as happened with manufacturing jobs.

If you're in the US, where software developer salaries are much higher than most of the rest of the world (even on developed countries average programmers don't earn 6 figures), you'll be probably be on the losing side.

...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere.

This is a false alternative, since it's not something SF government can do.