Number 2, the weather.
I liked Arlington when I lived there: Short bus ride to Cambridge, walk to the Red Line in good weather, bike path, wide streets, walkable, not too urban, not too suburban, not too expensive...
But Palo Alto has most of that plus startups and sun, so it certainly makes sense.
Perhaps not so crazy. Last year I discovered two other Ruby programmers (one at another startup, one at a more established firm) among the parents in my son's kindergarten class.
And this was a reasonably sized class of ~20 kids.
Is time for an Arlington YC meetup?
We had a good crowd last night. I need to buy more chairs.
I work in Arlington, and live just one town over. Yup, Ruby. An Arlington meetup might be fun, I never seem to be able to make the Boston Ruby events in Cambridge.
no answer to the weather issue, however.
Does everyone get soft when they spend time out west? I've lost half my family to that coast and they all complain about the sort of weather that is optimal for sledding.
Doesn't anyone else miss having seasons?
Here are historical records for downtown SF:
http://ggweather.com/sf/daily.html
(2005-2006 was especially rainy; was that when you set your 'norm'?)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/31/...
You say that like it's a bad thing.
-Daniel Tosh
Yes. I'll probably never be able to live in the UK again, to be honest.
In all seriousness, there is seasonal variation both in temperature (which the East coast also has) and in precipitation (which the East coast doesn't have), but they tend not to vary so severely, and there also tends to be less intra-seasonal variance, either. You won't find Seattle going from 80 degrees and muggy to 30 degrees and snowing over the course of 12 hours -- this happened while I was in Boston in April of a year that hopefully someone else here can fill in.
It might be a bit soft, but I think of it as removing weather from the list of things that distract you from more important work.
Then again, my earliest memories are from here: http://tinyurl.com/cbp4lf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_climate
When I moved out east this year I was shocked that nobody here seems to know what the weather's like on the west coast. I suppose that's because it's never covered in the national news.
If you want snow, the Sierras, which are two hours away from the SF Bay Area, get 20-40 FEET a year, with a 10+ foot snow pack. http://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/donner.html isn't even the place that gets the most snow.
But once you learn to see changes in subtle things such as the color tone of Diamond Head (it's greener in winter), and also not to forget checking calenders, you can even work here.
Of course, I didn't have the budget (or the correct commute) to live in Palo Alto when I was in CA. Palo Alto is a fine place, no question.
From someone who has never lived below the mason-dixon, no.
The food sucks in suburban Massachusetts though. There're like no decent restaurants in any of those town centers, and you've got a point about them being dull. Some decent places in Cambridge, but then you're back to being too urban.
The one thing I really like about the Boston suburbs is the abundance of greenery. A lot of houses are built on an acre or more, with buffer forests because the streets never run straight in Massachusetts. AFAICT these just don't exist in Silicon Valley until you get out to the foothills, and those communities don't really have downtown areas at all.