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Comment by wgerard | Hacker News Reader

> the presence of other industries like finance, media and advertising

This is a huge part of why I didn't enjoy being in SF (admittedly for a very short few months).

Every party I went to, most conversations I had (or overheard in a coffee shop) were tech-related. It felt impossible to have a conversation about anything else, and all conversations naturally gravitated towards tech like some sort of awful singularity.

It's pretty refreshing regularly talking to people who work in the arts, finance, education, administration, etc. If nothing else, just for novelty's sake - more interesting conversations happen when you can't talk about your work all the time.

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I think this says more about the extensive tech-party/meetup culture in the bay area than any meaningful population statistics. Tech isn't even the largest industry in San Francisco [1]. As anywhere, you'll have a diverse set of friends/acquaintances in your hometown, but if you come to SF for tech reasons, chances are, you'll only meet tech people.

It only took me a slight active effort to diversify and you can meet the most interesting people in Healthcare, non-profits and tourism. New York, though remains unmatched in diversity along every dimension possible. It is not even quite the fair comparison given the population size differences between SF and NYC.

[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Tech-isn-t-biggest-S...

"As anywhere, you'll have a diverse set of friends/acquaintances in your hometown, but if you come to SF for tech reasons, chances are, you'll only meet tech people."

It's not even remotely the same "as anywhere". If you come to SF and live a middle-class life, you'll be surrounded by tech people. It breaks down on economic lines -- well-off people are in tech (and perhaps law and medicine), and everyone else is struggling.

Can you make friends outside of your industry? Sure, I had plenty. But it was increasingly difficult to meet those people without making a conscious effort to do so, and that's the difference.

Having spent the last few months living in the Bay Area after decades on the east coast and Midwest I find the constant banter about technology refreshing.

In other parts of the nation that I’ve lived there is less mono culture but I often hit a wall chasing my ideas.

In the Bay Area there is limitless possibility not just embraced but quarterbacked by seemingly everyone I meet.

If New York or Chicago had a culture that not only embraced these other wonderful cultural aspects of life but also had this focus of building big ideas so deeply engrained in their way of life then I’d be there and not here.

That said, the rent is too dang high out in the Bay. Time to end NIMBYISM in this state!

This is one of the biggest appeals NYC has over Silicon Valley in my opinion. It's also why, when I had the choice to intern in Silicon Valley, I chose to intern in Santa Cruz instead. It's close enough to the Valley that I could attend cool tech events (albeit with a not particularly pleasant commute), while Santa Cruz still enjoyed the Bay Area's good weather and is not (yet) a tech monoculture.

I remember a while back someone was talking about how one thing they love about living in SV is how you can go to a bar and end up spending the night chatting about JavaScript frameworks with the guy sitting next to you.

That just horrified me. Sorry, but that's work stuff. Work stuff stays at work. If you hang out with people in different industries, you're less inclined to talk about work stuff because neither of you will understand the nuances of the other's job.

> you're less inclined to talk about work stuff because neither of you will understand the nuances of the other's job.

Yes, thank you for this! I was struggling to articulate why those novel conversations happen, but this is totally the reason.

Its not just work though. It can be learning a new framework to build an open source tool or something that can generate side income. And in my experience, I sometimes get unstuck on "work stuff" by a chance conversation at an event/bar, which makes me happier/helps my career :)

I guess this goes back to pg's essay on the messages cities send [0] that was posted here the other day. One person offered a particularly insightful comment on the message of my city, Dallas. I'll quote the most relevant part:

> I'd also say the message to me is "work hard, play hard, and keep a work life balance". People in Dallas get shit done, but they aren't going to work for more than 40-50 hours/week.

I can confirm that the culture here is very 9-5. We don't have the ambition-centric culture that SF has, and that works for me because I'm honestly not an ambitious person. You're probably not going to find many people here who are trying to grow their own business on the side or who go to a bar still trying to work through problems they're stuck on at work. I go to the bar when my job is stressing me out so I can forget about the stress by drinking tasty alcoholic treats until I can no longer concentrate on anything.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468986

I am probably an exception, but I actually love this monoculture. I don't have to explain to anyone that I work at Houzz and get blank stares. The monoculture also has advantages of adopting things quickly. Like Tesla cars were on the road here earlier than anywhere else. Or adoption of Uber / Lyft etc. It almost like a glimpse into the future. And as someone pointed out, many of these companies are not "tech" strictly. Something like Mozilla is a tech company. Tesla is an automative company that takes advantage of technology. So it is not like this monoculture only talks about React native.

This is why I, and others like Peter Thiel, prefer LA over SF. LA is far less of a political, social, and cultural monoculture. And it has way better normal people/ethnic food, rather than an abundance of coconut oil roasted kale.

Shouldn’t be hard to step out of the bubble. Im in the Bay Area and leave technology at work—it almost never comes up in normal day to day interactions. Try expanding your set of friends or getting a non tech hobby. Good luck!

> Shouldn’t be hard to step out of the bubble

It really was.

It's been substantially easier to step out of the bubble in NYC. So easy that I didn't even have to intentionally do it.

This may be a streetlight bias, but it seems (from a distance) that big US cities have more industrial specialization these days, with a big cultural weight.

SF/SV for tech. LA for media. Houston for oil....

Is it as prominent as it seems?

This is a long standing historical pattern. Human Capital is very powerful, and urban concentrations of them create powerful synergies. The concentration of Cherry tree agriculture east of the Bay Area is another example. It's not just the soil there.

It depends on the city.

You mentioned Houston as an example. Well, Houston has a rivalry with Dallas, where I live. One thing that came up when gas prices dropped like a rock a few years ago was that Houston's economy also dropped like a rock because of how dependent the whole city is on oil, but Dallas was totally unfazed by the whole thing because of how diverse our economy is, causing some of my more crass fellow Dallasites to lord it over Houston about how much better we're doing economically and making fun of Houston for putting all their eggs in one basket (IMO, that was going too far: as much as I like to joke about how much Houston sucks, it's always just joking, and I'm not going to take pleasure in their unemployment).

I thought this way for a long, long time. I missed NYC where every day I could go interact with a different industry at a Meetup. Then we moved South to San Mateo and we started finding more people who weren't in tech. It's nice. Not NYC-nice, but it's enough that I'm not pulling out my hair anymore.

Reminds me of one of my favorite lines in The Big Short:

"I told you we'd meet again. Unfortunately it's a place like this I would never be in... I had fashion friends."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enxLiMNGpkA

Aside from the pleasant aspects of not drowning in a monoculture, it also helps with keeping a better sense of how people think outside of tech. A balanced perspective is definitely better than just a novelty in my opinion.

In Silicon Valley everything is just framed in the context of technology because that is what we do.

The diversity of startups is huge: marketing, software for construction project management, dog walking apps, you get the idea.

To say there is no diversity in the Bay Area might just mean people aren't looking hard enough.

Hell, you can go work for Tesla, in the automotive industry.

The fact that they are all tech companies is just the process we're going through in general at the moment as software continues to fill gaps where things are done manually or otherwise inefficiently.

> The diversity of startups is huge: marketing, software for construction project management, dog walking apps, you get the idea.

Sure, but they're software startups first and foremost. Conversations felt like they inevitably drifted to very stereotypical discussions ("What's your stack?" or "Who's funding you?") because that's most people's day-to-day.

It's a bit like speaking to a group of executives (who also might come from diverse sectors) vs. speaking to a group of teachers, artists, dog walkers, and construction workers.

That's right - and I alluded to that in my comment.

My point is that startups hire SME in all of those areas - people are actually dog walkers, teachers, artists, etc.

It may not be the focus - but the people and jobs are there even if not the primary focus.

The fact that you have to look for it in the first place is the problem. You have to actively seek this out. In NYC, the reverse is true. If you want to be in a monoculture, you must actively avoid others.

This is not accurate.

I spent a lot of time in NYC after college and you have to go out of your way to mingle between groups.

Finance people hang out with finance people, entertainment people with entertainment people etc.

I don't think either place is ideal, but they both offer something is all I'm saying, if NYC has an edge here.

I currently live in NY and have for the past few years - I have never experienced having to go out of my way to mingle with different groups. I also lived in San Francisco for years, prior to moving here. While there, I definitely had to go out of my way and really out of the city sometimes to meet different people doing things unrelated to tech or healthcare.

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