Ask HN: Just moved to SF. How can I leverage my new location to skill up in dev?

I think another comment mentioning look into meetups is the most solid advice in this thread.

To be honest, your post is a bit of a mess in both what you are doing (and have done) and what you are seeking. You clearly have some skills since you are getting paid to be remote and work on technical projects. I would consider taking a step back and figuring out a way to package that.

Next, what sort of external engagement do you want? I think Meetups are great. I'd also look things like Super Happy Dev House and similar events to meet with other people across a mix of interests / skillsets.

Most importantly - what do you want to do / achieve? You have a job paying you, where you feel like you need to grow, but they are letting you be remote. Keep that until you grow more. Those saying join a startup are bat shit stupid. Startups are a walled cage to deliver on the goal of the company and investors. They are great for learning and opportunities for growth, but you need to first narrow down what you want to work on. And most importantly, do not give up that remote option you currently have.

And, honestly, do not idolize the "brain power of the country". There are many in Silicon Valley that will push others under the bus to maximize total comp/etc. Look for those wanting to build and discuss ideas not just push a particular thing.

Good luck. But also, I don't know your age, it sounds like you are in your early 20s, make sure to allow time for you and your GF in addition to your working hours.

If you see a startup saying "we work hard, we play hard, we are a family" RUN THE FUCK AWAY. They just want cheap labor and all your time. I've been to multiple YC "work for a startup" days where companies say this and ... people there were not happy unless they had no GF/other life.

Edit: Also consider looking up Hacker Dojo in Mountain View and events there.

Re: YC work at a startup days... years back Justin of Justin TV was there and he admitted he was looking for people to help in a chaotic and heavy hour environment and I always have appreciated the candor. Sadly the work hard, play hard, we are a family appeals to those (I was sucked in years ago) without warning.

Also - I'm only in the bay area as I need to be, but reach out. Happy to answer questions, figure a time to meet up, etc. I have no knowledge where to hang out..Coupa Cafe isn't what it was, Red House in Mountain View isn't what it was.

Hey thanks a lot for your detailed reply. As I was writing my post more things I wanted to express kept coming out. My mind and interests are kind of a mess, I wish I had two realities in parallel so I could be a mech eng in one and a software eng in the other.

I’m actually in my early 30s, I followed an unconventional path with a country change in my early 20s thanks to motorsports and luck, but postponed school.

My goal is to be proud enough of my knowledge to call myself a developer, not much tbh. I think I don’t do that right now because I don’t know at what level other devs are in their day to day, and my only point of reference is HN where everyone seems to have a postdoc. I also think I’m too humble for this space and location. I went to a VC party last Friday and I noticed everyone seemed to be lying up in what they did, but once I peeled the outer layer, we were all trying to figure it out.

I do have a very stable job with great benefits (and pension!) so I’m not planning on leaving that right now, but I have free time I want to use wisely.

Some "side quests" you might enjoy:

San Francisco Public Library (Main Branch) has a pretty great collection of CS books. Fourth floor (or fifth... can't remember), 000 on Dewey Decimel System. You can place a hold on any book in the SFPL system and have it delivered to whatever branch is most convenient for you.

Definitely make a pilgrimage down to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. And walk around the Google campus since you'll be right there anyways.

I also find it inspiring to read up on all the stuff that was created at Stanford and Cal and then walk around those campuses. There are a lot of physical locations around the Bay Area that were the physical birthplaces of important developments in the computer industry.

Last and most importantly... welcome!

The Bay Area has really top-notch tech Meetups. They're sometimes even hosted at top tech companies like Pandora or (top recruiting firm) Robert Half. Not only will you learn a bunch, you'll be able to talk to people actually working with the same tech you are. Which besides being educational, is also a great networking opportunity.

If your goal is to get a tech job, you're in the right city -- and it'll be easier for you to go on job interviews (than someone who's not actually living here). For what it's worth, you'll probably also have an easier time attending some Bay Area tech conferences. They're expensive, but they're also good ways to network with people in your industry and potential employers.

Last piece of advice: upload code to GitHub. They're ultimately samples of your work, which tech employers will want to see. So it's good to have a lot, and to have it spread out over time (so start now). If there's not enough, you might consider volunteering for an open source project. (Maybe even one that meets in-person from time to time here in the Bay Area.)

If this is really what you want to do -- you're in the perfect city. Just put yourself out there, and have faith that things will eventually start to happen.

Where can you find these meetups normally? Just by googling?

When you make your Meetup.com account, they'll ask for your interests. You can specify programming, and even specific languages/areas/etc.

Then talk to the people there, and you'll hear about other events...

There are not really meetups anymore post-CovID, but'd be good to start some again. Maybe that's a good startup idea to make a meetup planner that is not owned by WeWork.

the good meetups aren't on Meetup.com anymore since it went to shit after selling out

https://sf.tinkerer.ai/

and we run some events from our discord https://www.latent.space/i/115665083/events

Get a job that pays well and has high learning prospects.

Deal with the start up business after getting money and a fall back. You'll learn more all round stuff at a start up, but that's not what matters atm, only pure dev does.

Tech meetups are cool.

To expand, it's better to get a well-paying job before going to a startup because it will give you more time to grow your money over the length of your career and the brand-name company will open doors that startup experience will not, in terms of signaling value and the network you can build at larger companies.

To throw my 2 cents in - big companies suck. Startups are fun and you'll still be paid pretty well.

Generalizations suck, too. Big companies are made of small teams. Some are nice, some aren’t. A lot comes down to the immediate manager.

And those small teams merge / move resources 'people' at various times. On a startup you start small and expand under un/under qualified leadership where getting a home run will erase early mistakes. You can get nice for both places but one has a full hr with paperwork for you to fill out while the other will probably screw up your taxes in some way.

Startups can be great "the owner pays for lunch" or bad "the owner orders food and constantly skips out when the bill comes". Either way you get a chance to eat with senior management when the company is under 10 and see how the sausage is made

Nice thing is you’ll get to interview with almost every employee if it’s small enough. Should be easy to sus out whether it’s one of the good or bad places.

Welcome to SF!

Big +1 to the meetup, hackathon and conference scene.

There is no city with as many events as SF. Follow this other local with a pulse on the local meetup scene:

https://twitter.com/michelleefang/status/1675997093989842944

+1 to building up a GitHub profile. Find something interesting at a meet up or hackathon to explore in your free time and do it out in the open on GitHub. Learn by doing. And a good GH profile with good code samples helps tremendously when applying for jobs.

+1 to eventually finding an in-person job. Remote has huge advantages as you know, but being in an office with a few people you really gel with has massive advantages for learning, getting things done, and building life long personal connections. I’m fully remote now but consider my SF office days the glory days of career growth and fun.

My advice on this is to look for the right people to work with… A manager that is a good mentor and peers that are fun to work with. Id work at a boring company with a great boss and colleagues over the most exciting startup pitch or growth any day.

Since you’re gainfully employed and have some free time, take your time with all of the above!_

I truly believe all of the above is easier to find in SF than most places by getting out and about in the city.

Scandinavian here. Had a very brief attempt at Silicon Valley and SFO, 2012. It seemed like a Disneyland of tech. In the end all I got was some very great parties, friendly and inviting people whom I didnt realize were just shmoozing me. Most of that was outright lying. 0% of the connections and the "leads" got anywhere I threw a bunch of sand in the air and it came crashing down to the ground fast.

I would have loved to stay and lived the millionaire tech dream I thought was achievable.

Loved the scenery, Marina to Sausalito was a great run.

It's been years (still connected with a few) but working for multiple Norden companies and living in Finland for a time. I found technical discussions and connections initiated there were generally quite genuine and consider a few Finns and Swedes friends and we take semiregularly.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, for honest and useful tech discussions, especially early in career, maker spaces, super happy dev house, and some other events (I won't mention since I'm not sure they still go on) were better than YC meetups, etc. in terms of what you mention - honesty, etc.

Seemed a cultural mismatch between Sweden and California.

I think many Germans working in Switzerland would also call the Swiss "outright lying", but that's because the Swiss are consensus-oriented. Perhaps you were like a German in Switzerland (thumbs up).

I was in Bay Area from 2015-2018 and because of the connections I build there I occasionally get to work on projects that pay 10x higher than what I get paid for in my home country.

To OP, I recommend to network with open mind and enjoy the tech savvy diversity.

In addition to meetup I recommend cold emailing companies and asking founders in your area of interest directly for picking up a brain. The ecosystem is very welcoming.

Join a startup. You can get experience and after a couple years anyone that liked you is in another job and you can join them there. I’ve loved my time at startups and made some of the best connections and friends.

Isn't that way too many ideas and options already? By this I mean, keep looking for great options sure, but also focus. Perhaps it's simply the tools involved in your current job (getting better at them - which your employer may pay for). It's not specific to the area but it's still right there.

"Someone to work with", yes that is a local strength - but it's also not very accessible. Not quickly. Noisebridge is a small crowd for example - but yes, it's right there in SF and very easy to visit.

Several of these tools you work with may have local developer groups or conferences. That might work.That might be the right intersection between these things.And both googling and Noisebridge might be ways to find them.

In addition to the meetups and finding some projects/work.

Search linkedin for people doing work you are interested in and say you'd like to learn about what they do. Offer to buy them coffee or a drink. But be very clear you are not recruiting or trying to sell anything. Expect maybe 1 in 10 to actually respond. But you will meet some interesting people and get to know some good coffee places (or bars). People are generally happy to talk about themselves as long as they feel like there isn't a catch.

I am not directly in development but I do work in Biotech software in SF. I am happy to chat, probably not directly relevant to your goals but maybe a starting point.

Go work at a startup. Do literally everything. If you don't "know X", learn X.

If you know nothing about software development, it will help to go to a bootcamp.

Good luck.

Whatever you do, do not join a startup, unless you really, really know what you want to do and the startup has work in that area and you get a sense they'd have really good mentors in the company.

The reason I'm saying this is that, if you are only going to be around until January, that's not long enough to upskill on anything meaningful. Sure, you could get some good keywords on your resume, and if that's what you want, that's fine. But if your goal is to improve in a meaningful way, that's not going to cut it, unless the startup is truly exceptional with amazing people. Most startups aren't like that.

SF may not have been the best choice, but I will say welcome to California! I moved here about 6 years ago and I don't intend to ever leave.

Definitely the best choice.

SF has some of the best burritos in the US, they just taste different there.

Definitely a subjective opinion.

Hang out at noisebridge or something.

I don't know what it's like now, but I made come great contacts at Noisebridge like 12 years ago.

I mean yah you can hang out at Noisebridge but my experience was mostly creepy guys on Macintoshes trying to get me to fiddle with padlocks under their camcorders.

I second the recommendation for Noisebridge; some additional practical advice:

- Be aware that NB is perhaps best described as a “501(c)(3) disorganization.” The entire thing is volunteer-run, more or less by whoever happens to be there that day, so it’s pretty chaotic and your experience as a newcomer can vary wildly depending on when you happen to visit.

- You can just show up! Ring the doorbell and hope someone answers (6-8PM is a good bet, though there can be people there at all hours). Once you get a tour, hang out and chat with people. As others have noted it can be a mixed bag who you run into on any given day. The space is open to the public, with all that entails.

- You might also try some of the regularly scheduled events (some combination of https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Category:Events and https://www.meetup.com/noisebridge/events/ should get you a sort-of-mostly-up-to-date view of things); that way you’ll have an organizer and a topic to start with.

- There are also a lot of other hackerspaces/makerspaces in the area! Many of them are more formal than Noisebridge, with all the differences that come with that.

SF is really nice, but I hear a lot of noise about extreme thought policing and other political propaganda-thumping (for lack of a better phrase). In other words, the impression I got was it isn't for people who are not "joiners" and conformists, especially risky if you want to risk it all and start a company there.

But then again I'm mentioning that here because I probably only heard one side of the story there. And also, it's all about who you know, so I guess that sort of a culture makes sense in a discomforting way.

just get a real development job. since our corporate overlords decided we need to be in offices again, sf is a good spot to find work.

there is nothing comparable to working as a professional though

Welcome to California, one thing to checkout is there are a bunch of tech meetups here. I'm a co-organizer of a generative AI meetup in the south bay if you're interested: https://www.meetup.com/gen-ai/

Do whatever it takes to land a better job in a larger tech company. And you will be just going up from there.

The last time I was in SF was a couple of years ago and I tried it all. Ultimately I was searching for a job dishwashing in North Beach and I was told that the servers cleaned the dishes and they were full up on servers. I love it out there, but I washed out back east after that.

Forget tools and experience.

Do all you can to get back into school. Unless you focus exclusively on making that happen, it won't.

The future in tech is for highly-educated specialists who can also generalize: PhD's in statistics et al. And the people that can help those people.

The San Francisco Python meetup has been doing in-person meetups for some time now as well as remote: https://www.meetup.com/sfpython/

Unless you make $400k+, SF is the wrong place to be because you're likely living beyond sustainable means. Move to SJ or Newark, or somewhere cheaper like RTP Virginia.

I don’t think your math is right. I’m living well within means. I don’t have any debt either.

Biotech is big in the Bay Area. Perhaps your GF can identify openings, or neat people to speak with. The kind of skills you speak of remind me of the way that perl infiltrated biotech like WD-40 infiltrates squeaky hinges. It just works.

How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project

https://bioperl.org/articles/How_Perl_saved_human_genome.htm...

Skip down to "I think several factors are responsible:" for the TLDR list.

Now, this is not to say that perl is your ticket: just to say that organizations often have many "glue" chores that require scripting skills.

From experience. Oh, and from experience, you may be able to pick up contract work to build skills and your CV.

There may be a log of people in the industry, but biotech is not "big" in the Bay area. QoL for biotech is low due to cost of living and everyone there in biotech is sad that they aren't making as much as the developers. If you want to work in biotech, San Diego of Boston, or even something like dc, toronto or research triangle is a better choice.

As for getting into tech, in the bay it's rather hard to break in unless you have a cs degree, or graduated from Stanford, or you are seen as cheap labor (South Asian), or possibly if you fill a DEI quota (but it was still hard[0] and not even that one anymore after belt tightening). Used to be easier. Not anymore.

Good luck! You'll need it. Hustle hard.

[0] I used to watch bay area startups harp about DEI and pass on perfectly good boot camp hirees and go for a white male from Stanford (actually never any good), but also all the non-asian diverse people I knew in personal life didn't have a problem getting tech jobs, so I have conflicting data. Watched an Asian male friend churn through 180+ job rejections over 9 months until I picked him up when I got hiring authority, he was perfectly good coder

Follow your interests. If you're passionate and interested in technology the success will follow.

Check out communities like finc, OnDeck, and South Park Commons. Each have in-person offices in SF.

Take a bootcamp - General Assembly, Hack Reactor. CS degrees are’t worth the 4 years if all you want is a job in tech or building products. If you’re looking to go into hardware, r&d, AI/ML then the cs degree is more of a pre req.

Launch School is great if you want more in depth learning compared to a coding bootcaml but not a 4 year degree.

Well, you may be better situated to go to tech conferences.