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Comment by smrtinsert | Hacker News Reader

Or just work on the east coast. I commute 45 minutes total a week in VA. I make dinner, take courses, work out, play video games, do personal projects/art, and spend quality time with my family, it's great.

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That's not necessarily true in Boston, New York city or Southern New Hampshire.

Could you elaborate on Southern NH? Does this apply to Nashua / Manchester? Been considering moving to that area.

Tech companies in Southern New Hampshire pull partially from the same talent pool as Boston. A lot of people commute to Boston every day and the other way. Those people sacrifice almost two hours a day which isn't great from a work-life balance standpoint.

If you do get a job in New Hampshire itself, the high tech companies that have to hustle to make enough money to keep up with Boston salaries or risk losing people to the commute.

I live in New Hampshire and I love it but I can't say my work life balance is any better than when I lived in Boston. But my quality of life is quite a bit better. I have a house here, I could never have that in Boston.

I imagine it depends heavily on whether you actually work in Southern New Hampshire, or you live there and commute to Boston. There isn't a huge tech scene in Manchester/Nashua/Portsmouth, but there is a healthy number of jobs - more in the 9-5 corporate or lifestylish vein, than in the nose-to-the-grindstone startup type scene.

Lots of people do head down to the greater Boston area, though, and that commute is pretty brutal.

The trick to have a good time in Boston for me has been to live close to the office. It's 40 minutes per day instead of 40 minutes per week but it's still a far cry from what I hear some of my friends are doing in SV. And the housing here is such that it's entirely within the realm of reasonable to find housing that close.

45 minutes a week commute? Are you primarily working from home?

Thats less than 10 minutes a day, which seems extraordinarily low, even for South Western VA traffic which is signicantly better than traffic in NoVA.

It is intellectually dishonest to suggest that getting a tech job on the east coast guarantees all the things you just mentioned.

What do you have to gain from such dishonesty?

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