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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Yep.

I moved to SF from Slovenia. The percentage of my income that I save* is smaller, but the absolute number is still bigger. Turns out the glass ceiling for "smart dirty immigrant" jobs is much higher than the ceiling for "remote dude" jobs as well.

Add the nice bonus that there's simply more to do in a megalopolis of 6mio people than a city of 300k and it's kind of a no brainer. Unless of course you're okay stagnating in your career. Then staying home is financially more sound and you can lead a cushy life then retire at 35 or 40. But meh, life's too short to limit yourself out of cushiness.

*save and/or use as disposable income

PS: one thing I've noticed is that those of my friends who couldn't get visas are the loudest opponents of moving to the US and those of us who could are the loudest proponents. It's probably all bias and it doesn't really matter where you are if you're a good engineer. Work will find you.

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I'm in the opposite boat as you. I am by no means a "fantastic" programmer, but I did indeed receive a job offer for working in NYC a couple of years ago (I now live in an Eastern European capital of about 2 million people). I concluded that living in a shared appt while I'm in my 30s it's not for me anymore, at least if I can avoid it, and there was almost no way for me to live on my own in NYC unless I had commuted from very far away.

I also couldn't fathom putting an entire ocean between myself and all the people and things I love. I see myself living in Berlin, let's say, but living half a world away was just too much for me. I was also well aware of the money I decided to leave on the table when I refused the offer.

I agree. Having a girlfriend from here and sharing an apartment with her (she also makes 6 figures) rather than strangers makes things a lot easier.

She's an EU/US dual citizen so she could move to Europe with me, but opportunities for soft skills people are hella scarce on that side of the pond. It's hard enough over here.

And 2 million capital vs 300k capital is big difference in "amount of things available" ;)

I'd prob wanna move to Paris or Berlin or NYC eventually. All cheaper than SF.

Hm thats weird, I was a junior engineer and living in Manhattan. And aside from simply being able to afford it with less than 30% of your monthly income, there are more than enough ways to get lucky on rent in NYC.

> Add the nice bonus that there's simply more to do in a megalopolis of 6mio people than a city of 300k and it's kind of a no brainer.

Can you give an example? I've lived in London before and I don't think I saw a single thing available there (that I was interested in) that wasn't available in much smaller cities. I mean, why do you need thousands of restaurants and nightclubs, when in a small city you still have dozens of them, and you don't need to suffer in the tube?

Variety? Also, theatres, cinemas, shops... Most of all, the fact that no matter what sport/hobby/game/activity you're into, you can always find people to do it with.

Restaurants and nightclubs aren't the only things people want. There is the arts and exposure to other cultures and languages, educational opportunities, recreation for kids (e.g. parks), and a number of other things that aren't actually available, generally, in these lower cost of living smaller places.

"Ok, which of the 3 decent restaurants am i going to today?" Gets really boring after a while. New ones to try open every few years instead of every few weeks.

You look at Yelp or similar and you've been to everything it suggests and decided it's meh. Or your friends have been and aay it's kinda meh.

There's also that argument that Oatmeal mentioned once. In a small city you have Asian restaurants. Maybe Chinese, Japanese, and Asian. In a big city you have Cantonese, Sushi, Japanese Grill, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Singaporean, South Thai, North Thai, Dim Sum etc etc

Maybe SF is a special case. The city itself is only 800k people, but it's surrounded by 6mio people which makes it feel a lot bigger than it is while retaining a lot of the smaller city feel. It's basically Bay Area's lower to mid Manhattan.

PS: London is massive. 13mio people in the metro area. That's twice the size of the entire Bay Area so yes, law of diminishing returns definitely kicks in at some point.

I don't get this whole hang-up about restaurants. To me, "the number/type of restaurants in the area" is something I don't even consider when deciding if I want to live somewhere. Admittedly I'm not a restaurant guy. I pretty much never go to them. To me, they're just an expensive way to eat food. And they are a pain in that you need to do so much just to "enjoy" the experience. Get dressed up, drive or walk to the place, wait in line, get seated and wait again, place your order and wait again, finally you get to eat, trying not to think about how much of your life you just wasted, then when you're finally done enduring all that, drop $100 that you could have used to buy groceries for a week.

Same goes for nightclubs, museums, movie theaters, "culture". This is really why people want to live somewhere???

People like different things. What a shock!

> Same goes for nightclubs, museums, movie theaters, "culture". This is really why people want to live somewhere???

What do you do in the afternoons? Almost every home-hobby I can think of is improved by company of people with similar interests. Rather than do DYI in a garage, I'd rather go to a hackerspace. Rather than play the same N boardgames with the same X people, I'd rather to go a boardgames meetup.

And well, while you might not be into 'culture', there's a reason why nightclubs, museums, theaters, cinemas, etc exist. People like entertainment!

> Get dressed up, drive or walk to the place, wait in line, get seated and wait again, place your order and wait again, finally you get to eat, trying not to think about how much of your life you just wasted, then when you're finally done enduring all that, drop $100 that you could have used to buy groceries for a week.

Well, here's the opposite view. I don't cook at all; I'd much rather place a delivery order at one of 20 great restaurants around, depending on whether I feel like italian, thai, vietnameese, british, american, or any other cousine. Why would I spend hours buying ingredients and preparing food, when someone else can do the same for me, but better?

Going out to restaurants is a bit different - when you go as a group, the fact that you have free time as your food is being prepared is a benefit, not a cost. That's the main reason you go, after all - to spend time together, while at the same time enjoying a good meal.

> People like different things. What a shock!

For sure, I get that. I just find it pretty amusing that restaurants, of all things, constantly get brought up in these "Why do engineers move to the city" stories. Anyway, aren't we all working 60-80 hour weeks? Even if I liked restaurants and night clubs, I'd have no opportunity between work and sleep to partake, so it would make no difference whether there were good ones around!

> Anyway, aren't we all working 60-80 hour weeks?

Without a commute that's plenty of time for restaurants and bars ;)

> Anyway, aren't we all working 60-80 hour weeks? Even if I liked restaurants and night clubs, I'd have no opportunity between work and sleep to partake, so it would make no difference whether there were good ones around!

And you don't think that's a problem? But no, we don't all work 60-80 hour weeks. Work shouldn't be your life, and 40-45 hours is already a lot of time.

Thank you for answering that. It's still totally alien, but thanks.

Small cities, under 100,000 people even, can have hackerspaces. Maybe they aren't to your standards. (local one here has CNC, laser cutter, 3D printers for plastic, etc.)

To not cook is odd. Even when I lived alone in Boston, I cooked my meals. If you cook, you can be sure that nobody: picked their nose before handling your food, spat in your food (politics maybe), sneezed on your food, scratched their ass before handling your food, failed to wash the salad, plucked out a mouse and called it good, etc.

There are only a few restaurants where you can dine naked, you'd be seen by others if you went there, and you might have to suffer seeing people that make you want to rip your eyes out. At home there is no problem.

While waiting for your food at home (as it cooks), you can spend time together. It's the same as what you get, but with privacy. You can be as politically incorrect as you like, you can cry or shout, you can hold a burping/farting contest, whatever.

At home there is less trouble with kids. I'm guessing you might be single... if yes, how do you find any meaning in life? I remember being single, and I found it to be horrible. There was such a feeling of my existence being pointless. I very nearly jumped off a bridge. So life without family is unfathomable, and family makes restaurants awkward. It takes consistent discipline to keep a crowd of them under control, meaning that one can not relax.

Restaurants are nearly always too dim. I suspect it is so you can't spot defects in the food. At home I can put a 4000 lumen bulb in every socket, which is 6x or 7x normal.

You can go as a group to the supermarket. You can cook as a group. If you want peer bonding, this does it.

There's also just the joy of cooking. It's a skill, no different than programming. I feel the same pride in improving my cooking skills as I do my programming skills. It's nice to make things, and make them well.

> Admittedly I'm not a restaurant guy. I pretty much never go to them

Imagine that, a person who never goes to restaurants doesn't consider them when making decisions. Shocker.

I go maybe once a week. Sometimes twice. And I almost always end up going to the same few. But once in a while I like to try something new and it's great when that option is available.

And I don't know where you eat, but my fav kind of restaurants are in the $20 to $30 per person range. $100 is for special occasions.

Fun fact: in Ljubljana (my home city) you can barely even find $100/person restaurants. So even if you want to special occasion, you can't. And when you do, the food is often closer to a San Francisco $30/person restaurant.

So yeah

Speaking for myself: I'm a massive nerd. I need friendships with other nerdy people to be sane. There aren't that many nerdy people in my middle American home town of 300k people. There are many, many nerdy people in San Francisco.

Oponents / proponents sounds a lot like sour grapes / rationalisation.

Exactly. I think there's a lot of that.

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