Get Paid to Move to Maine
bostonmagazine.com
bostonmagazine.com
How much will I get reimbursed if I land a job in Maine?
That will depend completely on the employer who hires you. They have complete discretion to provide a signing bonus or expense reimbursement as an incentive to get you to move to our great state. There is no requirement for an employer to reimburse any job seeker.
In other words, there is no program. There is a logo that falsely implies there is a program, and apparently some kind of marketing budget to get places like Boston Magazine to write sponsored content about said falsely implied program. But that is all there is.
Another oddity in the FAQ is that they actually say that job boards are not allowed to link to their website. I'd love to see such a policy challenged in court, but the fact that they would even come up with such a heavy handed and ridiculous policy, regardless of whether it can be enforced, is very off putting.
- Maine jobs are low-paying and few-and-far-between. Not an issue if you're positive you can line-up recurring remote jobs, but be honest with yourself.
- Income taxes are pretty high.
- You'll want to live in Portland.
- Portland is "expensive" for rent (you're very lucky to get a nice 1br for 1400/mo, with rents on the rise due to out-of-state purchasing of condos for rental-income or airBNB/subsidizing owner-seasonal housing)
- Portland is a driving city. You _do_ have a car, right?
- Food/drink/going-out is a little below NYC prices (they can get away with it due to out-of-state travelers). There are great restaurants, but most are mediocre to bad. The beer's great though. Enjoy your beer per hour, as you'll be driving home.
- Everything is closed by 11 on weekends.
- Housing costs are steeply on the rise and the local culture is on the decline -- it's not a secret Maine is beautiful, and most of the population is retirement age (oldest in the nation!), so the culture is whatever sells to out-of-state money. Hope you're cool with those taxes going up to support the baby boomers leaving the workforce.
Relatively high crime rate, human shit on the street everywhere, terrible schools...
By comparison Portland Oregon is 50% less expensive to rent or buy (1 bed SF = $3500-4500; 1 bed Portland $1435-$2535).
Plenty of high paying jobs but I know that personally I would be up if I moved to any other city and took my companies cost of living adjustment.
Uh, what? I've never been to SF, but I've never heard this before.
When a man's gotta go...
Perhaps it's because those people are not a transient homeless population that (presumably) gets cleaned up after, but they actually live there.
http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down-B...
Beyond that, teacher salaries are a sad joke, and make it basically impossible for teachers to afford housing anywhere in the Bay Area.
There doesn’t seem to be particularly more violent crime in SF than any other city, but there are a lot of car break-ins and bike thefts.
Right. Talking to a wealthy, pretty liberal, upper class white person who sent their kid to a private school. Whatever the "code" they spoke I don't know. They were pretty blunt and factual. They did the research and it turned out that poor minority kids in schools did correlate strongly with disciplinary issues, high teacher to students ratios, overall bad scores for the school.
Their kid was in a public school for a few years, then they switched to a private school.
Knowing them for 5+ years, nothing indicated they were racist or had some kind of agenda against the poor. In this case they simply wanted a better school experience for their kid.
While I don't doubt there are plenty of racist upper middle class white people who deliberately make that the central point of choosing schools, many also just look at the facts and draw conclusions.
I don't have the resources to afford that for my family, so my kid is going to a public school, and that's fine. But those who are wealthy simply have more choices it seems.
- Absurdly expensive. This one is much-discussed.
- The city itself has significant sections that are really not nice (unsafe, garbage on the streets, homeless people begging on every corner, etc.), to a much higher degree than other cities.
- Traffic around the Bay Area has gotten as bad as LA (in some cases worse).
- Highly homogeneous residents. It's difficult to meet someone who doesn't work for a tech company (or who doesn't want to work for one).
- Sausage party. To people coming from cities with a normal gender split in the singles demographic, this one really sucks.
- Good things are always crowded. Ex. Last time I tried to get brunch with someone on a weekend in SF there were 2+ hour lines at every place we tried.
- Weak culture and night life compared to cities like NYC, LA, etc.
I'm sure others will chime in with additional ones or rebut some of these, so YMMV.
It's a pain to find a place to live. Places will have one open house. You'll show up with 20 other people, checkbook in hand, and be expected to make a decision right then and there. It might be something you only go through once, but if you need to move for whatever reason, it's a hassle.
It can be a monoculture. It was neat at first, but there are cities that offer plenty of opportunity in tech without completely dominating the city.
The nightlife is kind of lame. I live in Austin now, and when I want to go out, I feel like I have a lot more options, especially if I want to do more than one thing that night.
There's a ton of neat stuff in the area – it's truly one of the most naturally beautiful areas I've ever been–, but it takes a car to get there and owning a car is a hassle.
I didn't find most people who lived there particular friendly. I also found it difficult to make close friends, maybe because of the transient nature of SF. I'm hesitant to draw a real generalization from this, though. I may have just had a string of bad luck, but that was my experience.
The weather sucks. A lot of people like it, and it was certainly a nice respite from the 100F+ weather I left when I moved, but it sucked after a while.
There really isn't ONE thing that makes SF a terrible city. It's a lot of little things that add up. Maybe those little things won't matter to you or will be overcome by the positives in SF. For some people that's certainly true, but for me, I couldn't wait to get out. I left as soon as my first lease was up.
The medium cities do often strike a balance; but at costs—often limitations on career growth.
Coming from New England, Boston most recently and Portland, Maine before that; I'm loving the San Francisco area (aside from poor public transit)—but I'm already married and tired of being a big fish in a little pond in respect to my career (this was moreso the case in Portland than Boston for sure).
Maine for example has no nightlife, no tech scene, no venture capital / investment to speak of, is a monoculture, you need a car and "cities" are hours apart, is being ripped apart by the tea-party, has massive drug problems, and there's no dating life to speak of—people tend to pair off pretty quickly.
Oh and don't get my started on recent winters; the weather in SF is mild in comparison to massive nor'easters that are trying to kill you. New England was basically out of commission for an entire month when we had 9' of snow dumped on us last year.
"Five to an apartment splitting an $7k rent? Forget my dignity! I NEED to live in the mission!" -most residents, probably
Moved away a year ago, never looked back.
Pros:
- Gorgeous landscapes, forests, mountains and coastlines
- It's hard to be > 20 min from a lake/ocean people swim at
- Portland, ME. has perhaps the best cuisine:population ratio of any city in the nation.
- Cost of living, specifically real-estate, is silly low
- Maine lobsters are cheaper than deli meats in the summer (seriously)
Cons:
- Gov. LePage is a thing
- If you are into the city life, Maine will feel slow.
- The summer heat+humidity and mosquitoes are a unique blend of annoying.
Clashes with another comment
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845054:
> Portland is "expensive" for rent (you're very lucky to get a nice 1br for 1400/mo, with rents on the rise due to out-of-state purchasing of condos for rental-income or airBNB/subsidizing owner-seasonal housing)
> Housing costs are steeply on the rise
Please explain
Seems silly low for NYC/SF. I guess everything depends to what you compare it to.
I recently reached out to a small company in Portland with a posting on its web site that seemed like a great fit. Unfortunately, hiring in ME is no different than MA: they never call, they never write.
I spent a weekend up there looking at neighborhoods. Beautiful area with nice houses and good schools.
I love Maine, I love living here, but it is not friendly to business and for the life of me I can't figure out where the leadership gap is in terms of turning it around.