Hacker News Reader

Moving to the Bay Area was the best thing I've ever done for myself financially. The network of companies, developers, and investors/advisers (in good times) is unparalleled and enough to make you a career if you can hack it, and give you the exposure to people to mentor you and teach you how to hack it.

Moving away from the Bay Area was the second best thing I've ever done for myself financially, because once you have the skills and network there's not much gains to be had by staying in that dystopian hellhole where the only positive quality of life is the weather.

“ that dystopian hellhole where the only positive quality of life is the weather.”

Eesh that’s laying in on thick. SF is clearly not your cup of tea but no need for this type of hyperbole. I happen to enjoy the Bay Area, and S.F. in particular. People have different things they are interested in.

You wouldn’t want me to hyperbolically rant on about how many other areas of the country are concrete mcdonaldified wastelands. Or whatever place you moved to, some people would rant about how bad it is.

I mean the point was to be hyperbolic, but "concrete mcdonaldified" is just a notch below the SFBA. There's a kind of northern Californian exceptionalism that reeks of people who have never traveled to the other 49 states. Or even within California.

I've lived in a number of different places in the country and the Bay Area is hands down the worst, and it always baffled me how many people that lived there thought it was the peak of American living. I'm sorry that most places you don't need to worry about stepping over needles and human excrement in the streets. But there are some pretty mountains that catch on fire only every couple of years, so I guess it's alright?

Did you know the Bay Area isn’t just SF?

“ There's a kind of northern Californian exceptionalism that reeks of people who have never traveled to the other 49 states. Or even within California”

This statement seems snidely directed and presumptuously inaccurate. And almost intentionally so as the viewership is biased towards tech salaries I.e. plenty of ability to travel.

I’d say it’s strange that it needs mentioning that there are places that exist outside the financial district/soma in SF and the bay, but it’s not actually strange if the only thing one thinks about said areas and neighborhoods outside the financial district is that they are the undesirable wildfire zone.

grass is always greener on the other side, and its Going to be a rude awakening if fire in distant hills is one’s notion of bad weather events.

Also fire isn’t just a CA thing anymore. A neighborhood in CO was wiped out, NY was blanketed in smoke. Hurricanes are making the Florida home instance market collapses. That’s just scratching the surface.

> I'm sorry that most places you don't need to worry about stepping over needles and human excrement in the streets.

SF isn't the Bay Area. Traditionally SF wasn't considered part of Silicon Valley at all (these days depends who you talk to and when and where they got immersed here).

> I've lived in a number of different places in the country and the Bay Area is hands down the worst

I somewhat don't actually like the Bay Area TBH. Every few years I look into leaving. I go through all possible options and their pros and cons and, depressingly, every time I find that Silicon Valley is still the best place in the US.

It's not any one thing, but I have not found any place that is either ok or reasonably good about everything without having any terrible deal-breakers.

I'm a Bay Area native. Grew up in San Jose and took my first paid tech job in 1999. I left CA after 30 years and with the exception of Tahoe and a few people, I can't find anything to miss.

Care to share what you consider "deal-breakers" because I've found parity for less money, pretty much everywhere I looked.

> Care to share what you consider "deal-breakers" because I've found parity for less money, pretty much everywhere I looked.

Well that's going to be very personal preference so not sure if my criteria is useful to anyone else. But for me I must be within ~2hr drive of the ocean, which limits me to coastal areas. And I won't tolerate any below freezing weather nor days above 100F. And I need the area to have sufficient concentration of tech work that changing jobs (for both me & partner) without having to move houses is pretty easy.

While this also feels hyperbolic, I noticed this attitude while living in Northern California myself. But I saw that exceptionalism state-wide, and most especially with young people. The first time I saw a notable break from that attitude was during 2020 pandemic when moving to Austin, TX became de jour (even though many returned).

The irony that people would leave a large, wealthy state full of exceptionalist attitudes for a similarly large, wealthy, exceptionalist state was not lost on me!

But I maintain close personal and business ties to CA and my networks there and won’t live long term more than a days drive away. Maybe I’m part of the problem.

came here to write exactly this :-) The best decision in my life was moving to Bay Area in 2010. The second best decision was to move out in 2022.

I've had to move for my wife's job a bunch. I've had a very good career, entirely outside of the Bay Area.

That being said, I essentially have no connections or network in the Bay Area. I've worked for companies where most of my peers are not in the Bay Area. This puts me at a huge disadvantage for continuing to level my career. I'm largely subject to the whims of remote. While COVID dramatically increased the number of remote positions, it also exponentially increased competition for those positions.

I recently left to be a stay-at-home-dad, but I'm dreading the day I attempt to get back into the workforce. I just don't really see it being feasible.

Who else did a doubletake when reading this post

Oh, that last line does read confusingly. Sounds like I’m saying I left the Bay Area.

I just left my job. I don’t look forward to finding another remote one when I start looking again.

I took a handful of years off to be home with the young kid, what a wonderful experience. Getting back to work later wasn't hard.

What I did, and do recommend, is to do a little bit of consulting. I rarely did more than a few hours a week (and on some months nothing). But having a consulting company and a few real customers meant that companies saw me as legitimately self-employed (and I was, even if very low hours) instead of unemployed.

(Did it make a difference? I don't know. But can't hurt.)

No one has ever said that 100% of software engineers need to be in the Bay Area. Yes there are plenty of people living elsewhere who have had fulfilling careers in the industry. Yet it is undeniable that – just like being an actor in LA or an investment banker in New York – your opportunities for job search, networking, career growth etc. are significantly higher by being where the ecosystem is concentrated.

> Yet it is undeniable that – just like being an actor in LA or an investment banker in New York

This is what I object to: the comparison to acting or investment banking tends to exaggerate the centralization of tech jobs.

If you want to be in a film and aren't in LA then you don't really want to be in a film, because a solid majority of the jobs are there. I imagine the same is true for investment banking and New York.

San Jose and San Francisco, on the other hand, represented ~180k of the nation's ~1650k software developers in 2023 [0]. That's ~10% of all US-based software developers and about 0.6% of all software developers in the world [1]. Not a tiny percentage, but nowhere close to Hollywood's dominance in film.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-many-software-developers-...

It might be wrong to think in terms of “where the most jobs are”. Rather think in terms of where the center of gravity is.

So, somewhere in Nebraska or Colorado?

Most programmers are $90k/year code monkeys. The $400k+/year jobs are very heavily concentrated in a small number of tech hubs, and mostly in the bay, and that’s the relevant statistic that should inform your decision making if you want to make that type of money.

> Most programmers are $90k/year code monkeys.

And this is the condescending attitude that makes the 99.4% of us who aren't overpaid Silicon Valley types resent the valley.

According to the BLS stats above the median salary for a software engineer is $130k, which is nearly double the median household income in the USA and more than enough to enjoy a very comfortable lifestyle in most areas of the US.

But sure, feel free to look down on those of us who choose to stop optimizing for wealth after realizing we already are earning in the top 10%.

The problem is there's also alot of competition ... if your'e not in say, the top 5% then the Bay Area can be a real wash ... you really need to be making $150k+ in order for it to be worth it in general, or have some other reason to be there (e.g. family)

> ~180k of the nation's ~1650k software developers in 2023

Software is certainly everywhere in every industry and thus every city, town and village (eating the world as the saying goes). No need to be in SV to work in software.

The kind of jobs used to be very different in SV. Here you didn't just work on software development, you worked in legendary tech companies. HP (back when that was a good word), Sun, SGI, Netscape and many thousands smaller but equally exciting tech shops.

Things have changed though. Now there aren't many actual tech companies in SV. Of all the big names, only Apple is a tech company. The others are either advertising or social nonsense or movies or sales. They use tech but don't sell tech, so they are not tech companies.

> there was always plenty of room for individuals to have a fulfilling tech career outside of the Bay Area

So plainly true it feels weird to read.