Ask HN: Tell me about Boston/Cambridge
There's a lot of press about our "startup bubble" but, in my experience, most of these VC darlings are run by fired bankers playing startup and who still have that MBA/dinosaur culture. The ethics in a lot of these marquee ad-banking startups are also terrible-- a lot worse than in finance.
The ethics issue is becoming important as I get older and more interested in, at the least, technical leadership in the jobs I take. I don't think everyday people in New York are worse than anywhere else, but it seems like the people who get ahead here are the slimy ones.
Boston appeals to me for a lot of reasons-- more outdoor activities, better quality of life, cooler summers. It's also close enough to New York that I'd be able to visit my friends and use NYC's amenities as often as I do now.
I also get the sense that there's more real work (i.e. not social-media idiocy) in Boston. I'm sure New York has a ton of real work going on as well, but the signal:noise ratio's low.
If it's relevant, I'm also interested primarily in functional programming: Scala, Clojure, Ocaml, Haskell. Ruby and Python are fine at the right shop, but Java shops are out. I don't know if the signal:noise ratio in language selection is any different there, but I thought I'd bring that up if it's relevant at all.
So, people in Boston... tell me about it. Does it sound like a good place for someone like me to move?