Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmaus | Hacker News Reader

How exactly do you escape the tech world when you want? Just visiting SV for a couple days was borderline oppressive to me! Everyone has an idea for an app, nearly every bar or restaurant patron was discussing something technical. How do you overcome the lack of professional diversity, or am I just hypersensitive to it? Chicago is admittedly not all that diverse (we have lawyers, accountants, consultants, or tech) but the jump from ~1 profession to >1 profession results in a wildly different experience for me.

View on HN

I find professional diversity in interest groups. I swim (not very well), and my masters swim team is comprised of doctors, nurses, stay at home dads, accountants, Olympians, bankers, etc. There's obviously tech people, but we don't even talk shop.

I belong to a service organization and most of us are lawyers, real estate agents, city officials, professors, university administrators, and s small smattering of tech people. Again we rarely talk shop.

> How exactly do you escape the tech world when you want?

Go hiking I guess. The hills have lots of awesome trails.

Not to be flip, but you don't. You just finally get sick of it, and you move away. Even niche interest groups in the bay area are dominated by people who work in tech.

The problem of diversity in the tech industry will not be solved until the industry is forced by its employees to relocate.

I moved out of the state to escape it.

> Even niche interest groups in the bay area are dominated by people who work in tech.

I don't think this is true. In San Francisco 12% of the population is tech workers, while the valley is closer to just 30%. I live in Oakland and outside of work encounter almost no one that works in tech.

I also agree, living in the east bay. In cities like Hayward, Union City, San Leandro, Castro Valley, you will most likely find that most people you meet locally don't work in tech. I can see the same for San Francisco, but chances are people on HN tend to hang out in neighborhoods like SOMA where it's a lot more tech, than neighborhoods like Sunset where it's not.

While I agree that there are better and worse places in the bay area, they mostly self-partition based on the pain of transportation to tech centers. Sure, you can always choose a more painful commute to escape tech, but that's implicit. You can commute from Fresno or Marin, too.

East bay neighborhoods that have "easy" access to SF/Facebook/Google are just as clogged with tech people as anywhere else, modulo the pain of a daily BART commute.

(Also, arguing about exact percentages isn't relevant. It doesn't matter if it's 12% or 30%, if the group overlaps substantially in lifestyle and interests. If I have to change my entire lifestyle to avoid being surrounded by tech bros, I'd rather just move somewhere where I can go out and not be surrounded.)

When I lived in the bay area, my favorite way was to take a hike – https://bahiker.com/

I live in SV but grew up in Chicago. It's one of the best things going for that city.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com