All of the current political ads are pretty nauseating. Regardless of where you stand on the issue of managing immigration (and IMO there are lots of fair points on both sides that I think unfortunately get drowned out by extremists), the tone of the current set of ads is clearly "Evil brown gang members are coming to sell your kids drugs and murder your family." Makes Willy Horton look quaint.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/us/politics/georgia-gover...
Most of the other local Catholic families, if they could afford it, moved their children to private school to escape.
The schools had corporal punishment, and demanded that we call our teachers sir or ma'am, a custom that I was not used to and have encountered nowhere else. Failing to do so landed me in detention within the first month or so.
I was there for the original Roy Moore saga.
This was 15+ years ago and in a rural community with dirt roads, so I'm sure things have changed a bit and do not apply to the whole state, but checking the school website corporal punishment is still alive and well and Alabama nearly elected Roy Moore yet again.
I would never live there so long as the current toxic blend of religion and politics dominates the Southern political scene.
2. The politics are still overtly racist: https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280
3. The HB2 saga demonstrates how strong the Christian right is in the state. As does a candidate in a race too close to call insisting there will never be peace in Jerusalem until Jews acknowledge the divinity of Christ: https://forward.com/fast-forward/413488/gop-candidate-no-pea...
4. gun laws are relatively permissive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_North_Carolina
5. MJ legalization is behind west coast states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_North_Carolina
I’ll address 1,4, and 5 out of order and point out I don’t see their relevance to moving.
If NC had particularly egregious holes in its gun laws or something, I’d understand 4, but it doesn’t. It just doesn’t have notably strong gun laws, which puts it in the majority of states.
The other two are pretty inconsequential if you’re talking about the average person considering upending their entire existence to move somewhere, not a weekend romp
Now the other two...
That tweet was so egregious I had to look for context. It’s not a good context but it’s more of the gerrymandering conversations that have gone on around the country and it’s a technicality that they had to use that language.
Now if you think attempts to exclude blacks from politics is a southern problem, you must be out of touch with the rest of the US...
But of course it hurts to admit this is such a systemic issue that it’s not unsurprising to see a state grappling with it.
On the other hand, it’s also not going to fix itself by avoiding the many states it happens in.
I don’t believe in just sitting on my hands and waiting for change. I gladly moved to NC knowing of it’s troubled politics because they’ve been moving in the right direction.
It feels like what you’re saying is “NC is not SoCal” and in a way you’re implying “why would an average tech worker want to move to somewhere that isn’t a spitting image of California and SV culture?” (bringing up MJ legalization is a dead giveaway...)
The reality is places won’t change until people of other cultures join them.
My criteria for moving to NC wasn’t “will there be fewer religion nuts per square mile”, it was “is this a place where I can feel accepted without bending over backwards and changing who I am”.
And so far it has. I have gone on weekend trips to “the middle of nowhere” and wondered if I was getting looks because of the small black sports car in tractor-and-pickup-land, or because of the black person inside, but immediately felt ashamed when I entered a gas station or a store and had nothing but hospitality shown to me. (A friendly reminder, you can be woefully out of touch with Israel and Judaism, obsessed with religion [by our outsider standards] and still not be a fundamentally bad person)
Expecting other places to coddle your tastes and expectations to the point you’re complaining you have to buy certain types of liquor in a special store when bringing up blockers for people living somewhere... it doesn’t scream awareness of how the world at large works.
I mean, this was the topic at hand. I recognize it hurts to hear one's chosen home disparaged, but when you're trying to recruit candidates into a location, you can't exactly demand they put up or shut up. You're not just competing with LA, you're also competing with SF, Portland, and Seattle, as well as Denver and other cities in Colorado. The 'blue bastion in a red state' pitch for specific cities basically relies on the supreme court to protect blue cities from their state governments, and well, we probably need to see a term or two of today's Supreme Court before we understand the full ramifications of recent appointments.
On the other hand, Amazon's HQ2 strategy seems to be 'let's find a lower CoL city to house all the accountants and HR specialists', so nationwide recruiting may not be an actual concern.
If anything you’re whining that the US isn’t a white SV techie monoculture, and it’s music to my ears...
I don’t want NC to put for or put up with SV yuppies, I want NC to grow it’s own culture that is different than its current culture, but also different from what a coddled liberal wants apparently.
There’s a difference.
This thread wasn’t “where in the South can SV run it’s Xerox machine and make San Francisco 2”.
It’s where the would an average tech worker, who FYI is not a stereotypical FAANG employee, want to settle down.
There’s plenty appealing about NC, and plenty of other places that don’t fit your narrow minded, and frankly conceited view of how the world works.
Heh, I actually did live briefly in NC as a child. And Texas, and Georgia, and Kansas, because my father was a contract software consultant. And I've spent my career in three different states. When I chat with my former colleagues from Kansas City about recruiting, there is always a tone of defensiveness about why none of my student employees consider their companies.
> If anything you’re whining that the US isn’t a white SV techie monoculture, and it’s music to my ears...It’s where the would an average tech worker, who FYI is not a stereotypical FAANG employee, want to settle down.
Eh, it's just the uphill battle you face in recruiting. And we haven't even really touched the subject of recruiting foreign nationals. I don't particularly care much about most of the items I posted, I just wanted to offer perspective to the 'we don't need to change to recruit, the recruits need to change' crowd seen here and elsewhere.
If you want my personal justification for not moving to NC or further south, it's pretty easy: Fire Ants.
I say that because you’re just doubling down on my point. Why do FAANG employees come into recruiting an average tech worker? In a sentence... “who needs them?”.
You seem to be in this, again, somewhat conceited, line of thought that the rest of the US combined does so little that the SV microcosm is the average of US tech and to change that you need to include the whole world (foreign nationals).
It screams this “oh what they do doesn’t count” or “you need that stereotypical FAANG guy” mentality that I see so much in trendy tech.
The average recruits don’t have to change to come to places like NC, or really places that aren’t don’t have Sillicon in their name (Sillicon Alley, Sillicon Mountsin, etc. included). All they need is an open mind.
Not the “Open to everyone in my hive mind, everyone else is not even worth communicating with” mind that I’ve seen grow strong in “trendy tech”
The recruits who think they’re being asked to change only think so because of closed minded thoughts almost all of the time.
They become so attached to this idea of an “open monoculture” that anything that isn’t their existing culture is an attack on it instead.
“How dare you try and make it change which monoculture I follow”.
NC would be a terrible place if it worked like SV because everyone would be the people who support the guy want Jews to accept Christ and repel anyone who felt differently and try and change you for not agreeing. That would be a close race, it’d be a won race.
And people who are in that “open monoculture” mindset immediately try and apply their lens to NC and see that.
At the end of the day people are coming to NC, and NC has accepted them. It’s not the place these people would project it as
(Replace NC with literally any “off the beaten path but somewhat up and coming locale that’s not a traditional ultraliberal playground)
1. Yes, the fact that this is uniformly a control state, that is a problem. (Given how they are, I wish they had some special exclusion areas) However, a lot of the east coast operates in the same manner. The early hour for last call is bad as well.
2. Politics that you're talking about have very little to do with the tech sector. Despite what silicon valley would have you believe, you can be a conservative and be a productive member of the industry.
3. This sounds like you're pushing a political agenda here. I think a more succinct way to put this would be: Given the demographic that the tech industry attracts, the bible belt would not be favourable to their lifestyle.
4. (Also see #3)
There are reasons for doing tech in NC and it does have a small tech sector.
NC has some potential to improve its standing, but so far the gerrymandering has proven insurmountable as even when the courts rule the districts to be illegal, they allow them to continue to be used because the next election is always "too soon".
I realize how pretentious this probably sounds. Take is as a single anecdote, based off my own personal experience.
I would love to be proven wrong, and will gladly eat my words for dinner.
The Bay has a kind of a specific moral view, which is sometimes applied in a fairly authoritarian manner.
It's not very Liberal, and arguably not hugely tolerant either.
For example, all sorts of activities which are common and normal in the rest of America and the world are either frowned upon, or considered fully uncool in the Bay. Things like fishing. Hunting. Most sports. Talking about sports. Twangy accents. Country music. This is a long list.
For example, promoting vegetarianism, and frowning upon those who are not (or forbidding it) as is now the case at 'We Work' - isn't remotely liberal. (Can you imagine if Texas Oil required their employees to be meat eaters?)
Though most of that won't get you in trouble in the Bay, it puts you in the 'out club' in much the same way that being a little bit to colourful or effete might put you in the 'out club' in Texas.
FYI - Having lived both in Texas and The Bay, I'm confident in saying that in the vast, vast majority of Texas you have nothing to worry about if you don't fit the Texas profile though in some legal cases it might be tricky. You just won't be 'cool' in their sense. There are tons of out gay people in Texas, working in all sorts of industries. It's not as good as the Bay, surely, but it's not hell on earth.
When I was in Texas, the ladies in the office would not have it that a young single man would be alone for Thanksgiving. They put myself and the other ex-pats into homes for the holiday dinner.
In Cali, nobody really cared about Thanksgiving, and certainly did not think to care that some people might be alone during this festive time.
Both areas have a general view of how things ought to be, and that view is applied sometimes in an authoritarian manner, and neither of them are hugely tolerant or Liberal. They have 'their ways'.
...
For example, all sorts of activities which are common and normal in the rest of America and the world are either frowned upon, or considered fully uncool in the Bay. Things like fishing. Hunting. Most sports. Talking about sports. Twangy accents. Country music. This is a long list.
So true.
Personally, I’d rather actually connect with someone (or not) than use such mindlessness as a social crutch. I don’t find the extremely common phenomenon of people who don’t like sports forcing themselves to pretend they do for career-related reasons to be particularly healthy, either.
Ha ha ha - this is so funny.
If this comment is not satire, then I think I just made my point!
I hope that readers here realize how fairly uncommon (and elitist, i.e. everyone is obviously wasting their time) this kind of statement is. Surely, a lot of people don't like pro-sports, but most are not so antagonist about it.
My gosh, if you want to connect with people from anywhere, the first thing you can do is talk about sports!
I only wish I cared about sports, it would be so much easier on sales calls and hanging out with regular people!
Exactly the social crutch I was lamenting. This phenomenon is indeed real, and it’s pathological.
They most certainly do, at least games anyways. Clans for example have a fairly tribal sounding name.
“https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/cultivated-disinterest-in-prof...
All that said, pro sports culture is basically a social cancer for various reasons, including some that are illuminated directly in that article. The “but how will you relate to the working class” argument is weak, and gives the reader permission to use social crutches rather than useful, generalizable social tools. Indeed, the idea of “becoming” a pro sports fan to be able to socialize with a certain class of people is rather condescending.
So true. The west coast in general seems it would rather spend a holiday alone with the internet rather than with other people.
Being west coaster, I almost didn’t know what to do when strangers would start a random conversation with me. I’m only used to homeless people doing that here.
For example, all sorts of activities which are common and normal in the rest of America and the world are either frowned upon, or considered fully uncool in the Bay. Things like fishing. Hunting. Most sports. Talking about sports. Twangy accents. Country music. This is a long list."""
Sorry, this isn't the kind of tolerance I was talking about. You're missing my point if you thought that I meant the Bay Area is a bunch an unopinionated amoeba. The Bay Area is just as entitled to not prefer country music as the South is to prefer it. I don't think liking country music in the Bay Area will cause any sane, reasonable person to treat you differently or not be your friend.
(also, the statement "the Bay Area is not very liberal" may be changing slowly from an attitudinal perspective, but certainly that statement does not bear out in the polls)
Your point is well taken though. You're right that both areas have general views about how things ought to be. The main difference that I think most Californians/PNWs really care about are the differences in views relating to social issues, human rights, and tolerance from a governmental and legal perspective. Thinking that fishing is not cool is a little different than your government trying to ban same sex marriage, for example. And thinking hunting is not cool is different than living somewhere that witch hunts immigrants.
It absolutely will.
If you hunt, or own a gun or into 'gun sports' it will 100% affect who your friends are. Did you hear about the employee outrage when Zuck killed is own lamb for passover (or whichever festival it was, I'm not knowledgable). Do you really think that being a 'hunter' won't affect your status at 'WeWork' - a company that enforces vegetarianism? Among a whole bunch of other values?
Listening to Country Music and driving a pickup? Not cool in the Bay - unless it's hipster/ironic. If you are 'openly' Christian, it will likely affect who your friends are as well.
These are not so much conscious thoughts people make, or outright judgements (in some cases they are) - but it will lose you a lot of points on the spectrum of social hierarchy.
I interviewed at a FANG once and the interviewer was interested in the band that I played in and asked what kind of music we played. It was a very long time ago ... and I suppose my answers were not hip enough for him because he obviously was not impressed.
Social circles, companies/startups, clubs, interests - these are all very intermixed as sad as it may be, we make judgements on these thing in life and in business.
""the Bay Area is not very liberal" may be changing slowly from an attitudinal perspective, but certainly that statement does not bear out in the polls""
I mean liberal by classical definition. You seem to be referring to the American pop-culture political definition of 'Liberal' - which frankly has very little meaning, or more like 'left wing'.
So yes, of course the Valley and Cali are fairly 'Liberal' in the pop-culture political sense and will be forever, but they are not very 'liberal' in the classical sense (though the valley has a history of being a little libertarian, which is a little more like classical liberalism, but still different).
In Texas, they really don't care who you are overall. But if you are gay, or effete, or a little weird, you might not be in the cool club. If you were the QB on your high school team, you get bonus points. If you 'never miss Church' it might get you a few bonus points in some places.
In Cali, sure, you can do or be as you please, pretty much. If you drive a big truck, speak with a twang, talk about football or fishing a lot ... you're not going to be in the cool club. Being a vegan, or having a really humbling 'rags-to-riches ethnic minority from another country story' ... will give you big empathetic bonus points. If you belong to a 'Social Justice Cause', or 'attend burning man' - it might get you some bonus points.
In both Cali and Texas - people feel a weird need to push those behaviours on others, maybe as a function of virtue signalling, and to also shame a little bit people that don't follow suit, i.e. 'if you don't support my SJW cause/attend Church you must be immoral'.
Everywhere in the world is like this to some extent, but this is slightly more common in America I think than the rest of the world, particularly bolder, more aspirational regions that are a little 'newer' and have a stronger sense of ideological identity - like Texas and Cali!
But it's not really a matter of 'personal experience' - because in general, those are not cool things to be in the Valley - and many people will care.
'Culture fit' is a huge point of exclusion at high tech companies.
WeWork went fully vegan for exactly this reason: they don't want those meat eating types, and the culture that comes along with it.
We are like SF except we still enjoy BBQs, sports, and my friends from Texas get compliment about their accent.
Weather is a bit chillier though.
As far as sports, your average engineer isn’t typically consumed by them, but half the engineers I’ve worked with from the bay seem to be fans of whichever team is doing great at the moment (warriors or giants or often the sharks).
I’ve also done more sport fishing and crabbing here than anywhere else I’ve lived.
I think the huge numbers of foreign residents have a large impact on the overall culture compared to say rural Texas, but it doesn’t seem too far off imho.
One other point is just how many super packed country concerts there are at shoreline.
Tl;dr San Jose/SV is just as country music/sports obsessed /game and fish oriented as the rest of the country (if you don’t surround yourself with non-North American engineers for eg).
Edit: on mobile, autocorrect at word.
I think if you decided to test this theory, with say a picture of yourself with a buck on Facebook or twitter, you’d find it to be untrue.
A lot of SV may not be extreme one way or another, but for employees at large tech companies there’s a definitely and strong bias.
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and a few others were consistently included in all definitions of The South. "Edge" states for the region varied tremendously.
Let’s try Wikipedia instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_United_States
I lived in the City of St. Louis† for 13 years (and in the County for 6 before that) before moving to NYC. What I find is that young folks here who say they're from, say, Cleveland or St. Louis or similar cities in the South and whose experiences since moving have led them to believe that nothing they've found here exists back home, are often from the exurbs of those places and don't actually know what it's like to live in the center of a Midwestern or Southern city.††
I suspect they wouldn't much like the exurbs of New York, either.
We like to talk about red states vs. blue states, but the reality is that blue cities give way to purple and then red counties pretty quickly, even in liberal strongholds like New York.
Now, look, that's not to say that there are no differences in culture between, say, Atlanta and San Francisco. Obviously there are big ones! But when you dig into what people actually know about living in this or that part of the country, there's often not a lot there. Or, more charitably, individual experiences vary wildly (even within a single metro area).
† Not the South, but I think the point I'm trying to make here still holds.
†† It also seems worth noting that the experience of living in a big, new city in your early 20s (with all the new freedoms that come with that) as compared to wherever you happened to be when you were 14 is -- well, let's just say there are important perception-shifting factors.
I live in and am from North Carolina and find it barely tolerable despite now living in the most "progressive" part of the state (Durham). Every attempt a city makes to move things forward is faced with obstruction and preemption by state representatives from rural areas who resent the progressive population centers. Investment in infrastructure is especially seldom possible, so we have little public transit, few sidewalks, and lots of traffic.
There are things to recommend the south, but it's sure to be a culture shock for anybody who moves from a major metro.
As an aside, I think the transit situation alone makes this sort of area a non starter for somebody like Amazon and indeed I'm glad they did not select this region. This is an area which grows through sprawl and additional roads. The extra traffic combined with an unwillingness to spend money on public transit would have caused major issues.
Sounds similar to NIMBYism in other places.
No matter your views, politics are frustrating in some way in every geographic area, I promise.
If Tim Cook opened a research center or similar in an SEC college town like Auburn, AL, as an example, they could 1) totally dominate the university’s research pipeline relatively free from other corporate competitors, like create a custom departments silicon, materials, sensors, AI, whatever else 2) high quality of life for employees and their families with good public schools and high quality cheap housing, 3) win over the school’s board of trustees via major partnerships and get the university to do a lot to work for you for free, 4) abundant land for cheap office space 5) a high quality transit system 6) 1 hr from Atlanta’s enormous international airport plus a high quality general airport big enough for large private jets.
It just seems like a win-win, yet I don’t see anyone doing it (and maybe there are great reasons why!)
His alma mater as well.
Yes there are many good people there. But the public schools I went to have really changed as most of the white people went to private schools. There aren't many minorities, there's lots of implicit racism. I guess country clubs let black people in now (unlike when I was a kid). It's really a different world.
That’s all I’m trying to point out.
I will grant you that if you have a family it's way cheaper due to availability of real houses in the burbs combined with cheaper daycare/nanny/housekeeping/etc., but a young, successful tech worker is probably better off on the west coast despite the higher cost of living.
1) non bay area tech workers severely underestimate the total comps that bay area workers are earning right now.
2) many renters in the Bay Area may actually have more in their pocket. If you are willing to rent a room (i.e not have a studio or 1BR apartment), you're probably paying 1-1.5k more per month. The salary delta for Bay Area techies is way more than 12months*1.5k/month per year. Have some basic financial responsibility and you can really save a lot out here.
And that's just looking at the difference in rent. The number goes up further if you account for the fact that everything else is also more expensive in the Bay Area, and if you add in the additional money you need to save for a down payment, assuming you want to buy at some point. I wouldn't be surprised if that $40k/year difference ends up in the $60k-$70k range if you factor those in.
I don't doubt that a $60k-$70k difference in total comp is achievable at FANG. At startups, you probably don't get there without counting equity, which is riskier and far less liquid than equity comp at FANG.
My mortgage on a 5 bedroom 3 bath house (3k sqfeet) in the population center of Houston is $1500 a month...
That being said the most I have ever paid for a apartment was $2100 a month for a 2 bedroom in the riches part of town with views of the city skyline and spiraling biking and jogging ways. Awesome food everywhere.
$800 or less and you can still live in a nice area with more food options and awesome public parks and public transpiration.
And if you are on a budget -- you can still get 1 bedroom apartments for $500 to $600 a month --- from my understanding you can't even get near that in the Bay Area, you would break the bake at 1k for a single room.
That’s fine for the first year after graduating, but then when you get married and have children what are you supposed to do then?