The black snot always comes back for me if I spend a day in the centre, after 13 years here now, but I haven't lived in the centre for 10 years so maybe it's improved somewhat... Who knows..
The key living-wise is to get to know the suburbs. There's a huge degree of variability in ease of commuting. I live in Croydon, which is about as far South as you can be and still be in London. It has a largely undeserved bad reputation (mostly because the centre was rebuilt extremely unsympathetically after the war), but is green and leafy, extremely cheap for London, and most importantly is extremely well connected - I moved here from Barnes in zone 3, and I can get in to the centre about twice as fast now despite living substantially further away.
Work wise, for technology jobs, there's quite a bit both East and West of the centre, and it's worth considering that a lot of larger tech companies actually have large offices outside of London, particularly Slough, Reading and surrounding areas. (e.g. you'll find Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon and many others in that corridor)
I work in Chelsea now, and so can easily bypass the centre entirely (I go in to Clapham Junction in South London, which takes 10 minutes, and have one stop from there to work - another 5 minutes train)