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Comment by Dobbs | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the Orem Provo area isnt the jobs but the fact that you then have to live there.

The food choices are sparse and honestly compared to places like Seattle, Chicago, and SF down right terrible.

Shopping is mostly limited to big box shops like Target, Macy's and the like.

To be completely frank the biggest issue is the monoculture. If you aren't white and Mormon you don't fit in and it is very obvious.

Granted there are upsides like the mountain sides for camping and skiing. Also Harmon's is an extremely nice grocery store.

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I lived in Provo and Orem for a number of years while I was attending University, and I feel you've nailed some of the major issues. Life was drastically different there compared to where I grew up (and now live) in the Bay Area.

One on-topic aspect I appreciated about Utah was the quality of the Computer Science program at Utah Valley University. The chance to learn from experts like Chuck Allison [1] and David Heldenbrand truly expanded my mind and was an incredible opportunity. Really, all the CS faculty was excellent and commendably eager to do the teaching themselves rather than offloading the most critical parts to TA's. Given the high ratio of religious fanatics in the surrounding region, the school is a remarkably open and progressive institution.

As soon as I finished school I moved back to Palo Alto and would never consider returning to Utah other than to visit friends, go skiing/snowboarding, or go to hike at Moab or Zion National Park.

I definitely wouldn't recommend going to Provo or Orem to start a tech company.

To put things in perspective: Provo is 29 short highway miles from Eagle Mountain, which is primarily composed of polygamist compounds. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with being a polygamist; it was just a surprise to find out about it only after several years of living in Provo.

There is a reason that Provo and Orem often referred to as the "Utah Valley Bubble". It is an isolated community and if you aren't Mormon you will likely pretty strange when you discover how poorly you fit in with the homogeneous culture.

With that being said, there are some upsides to operating a business in Utah Valley:

You can hire high-quality engineers for pennies (or perhaps a quarter) on the dollar compared to other places. At one point I interviewed at Omniture, and they scoffed at the salary I asked for.

People who live in Utah Valley are also less likely to move away as much compared to other places, because their immediate and extended families tend to live nearby. This means that it is possible to expect to retain employees for much longer period of times than in a place such as Silicon Valley.

Finally: If you are into discriminating against people for their sexual orientation, it is completely legal to do so in Utah. There is no legal protection from sexual orientation discrimination in Utah.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=chuck+allison

Mind if I rearrange your enlightened comment?

If you are into discriminating against people for their sexual orientation, that is actually completely within the bounds of the law in Utah (if that's what you're into).

I definitely wouldn't recommend going to Provo or Orem... where there are many polygamists.

Keep in mind that, until relatively recently, homosexuality was as socially taboo, if not more so, than polygamy. Now, I won't weigh in on whether it's fair to group the two; perhaps it's not. But before you publicly castigate a community for their views on a particular sexual orientation, you should refrain from committing the same offense.

Mind if we ask you to rearrange your own comment, or at least clarify any differences, if any, you may happen to see between....oh...innate sexual orientation... and the historic and recent practice of polygamy in Utah. Maybe you'd comment on anything you know about the leaders of recent polygamist "churches" and their treatment of women and their attitude toward and/or behavior around sex with children.

You know. Since, yeah, you not-so-disingenuously went ahead and grouped polygamy with homosexuality as both somehow innate "sexual orientations", as you groped toward analogy.

Polygamy is very damaging to the community. The boys they have to kick out to support the high female/make ratios become wards of the state, have little education, and it's just a sad state of affairs. This and the pervasive child rape going on, there are good reasons for the UT AG to be harsh on this.

I once studied in University of Utah Salt Lake City. I was from NJ, near NY. So were other students mostly, as it was a summer program. The nature was fantastic, but people laughably bad in the way you could imagine. It is called the Mormon bubble, and one of our closest friends, an out-of-faith Mormon guy, was a favorite cultural expert to explain how often we were treated so oddly and rudely.

It was fun, but not for long.

The populations of Chicago, SF and Seattle are 2.7 million, 800,000 and 620,000 respectively. Provo's is 115,000 while Orem's is 95,000. It seems weird to compare the shopping and food options of some of the larger cities in the United States with Provo. Size-wise, it makes more sense to compare to something like Boulder.

Comparing the size of the city doesn't fix the issue that food, shopping and cultural events (art, theater etc) are dismal compared to other cities.

The fact that Orem/Provo is better or worse than your average city in the same class doesn't make the food choices any better.

Now, since Ann Arbor Michigan which is on par with your listed population size for Provo actually has good food some decent shopping and a fairly large number of cultural events your argument comes up strongly lacking.

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