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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

I lived there for 7 years.

New York is a great place in general, but I wouldn't recommend its tech scene. The Meetups are of high quality (in general) because there are so many people, but most of the people at <Cool Technology X> meetups don't get to use X in their day jobs.

The VC-funded startups are thick on quantity but dogshit (on average) for quality. Most of the talented people move to finance (or leave NYC) after 30 because the startup scene is so awful: most of the founders are well-connected wankbaskets, not real technologists.

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> The Meetups are of high quality (in general) because there are so many people, but most of the people at <Cool Technology X> meetups don't get to use X in their day jobs.

Clearly you had the misfortune of going to the wrong meetups. I haven't felt that way about any of the Meetups I attend, except for very obscure or emerging technologies (such as Haskell or Go - which I think is true almost everywhere).

> The VC-funded startups are thick on quantity but dogshit (on average) for quality. Most of the talented people move to finance (or leave NYC) after 30 because the startup scene is so awful: most of the founders are well-connected wankbaskets, not real technologists.

I'm sorry you feel that way. That has not been my experience in the slightest. Perhaps you were in NYC at the wrong time? Things have changed dramatically (for the better) since 2009/2010 or so.

I've been in NYC since 1996 and am looking to move to SF for the same reasons. Tech here has always been about financial services and just doesn't gel with the kind of startups you see in SF. I got tired of seeing demos of stuff that had already been done (and better) on the other coast and tired of VCs that just didn't understand software unless it was financial services-oriented.

Or am I missing something? I'd be happy to venture out again and give it a shot.

Like all things in this town, there's the finance side of the fence, and then there's everyone else's side. My experience in NYC is directly opposite to yours - I rarely meet people in finance, but that's probably because I work at a consumer tech startup and my network is mostly consumer web and media.

There are lots of us out here.

Check out NYC Innovative Tech Meetup - it's a different vibe. Small, but growing. Mostly doers, not talkers. And from a wider range of industries and tech sectors: http://www.meetup.com/Innovative-Tech/events/132311232/

> Tech here has always been about financial services and just doesn't gel with the kind of startups you see in SF. I got tired of seeing demos of stuff that had already been done (and better) on the other coast

It sounds like you haven't seen the full extent of what the NYC tech community has to offer, because I that view doesn't resonate with what I see at all. I'll admit that discover-ability is a problem in any community in any city, not just tech and not just in NYC (this is one problem that Meetup[0] aims to solve).

If you're still in NYC, drop me a line (my email is easy to guess from my username), and I'd be happy to get together in person and give you a map of the New York tech community the way that I see it.

> VCs that just didn't understand software unless it was financial services-oriented.

Again, I think you've had the misfortune of meeting the wrong VCs. I'm an engineer, but I used to work for a venture firm until very recently, and of the ~40 companies in our portfolio, only one was financial in nature.

And, ironically, that one company is based on the West Coast!

The only statement that I might say about NYC startups versus west coast ones is that NYC startups often seem to interact with the other industries we have in NYC, instead of being "just" tech companies or B2C consumer products[1]. But that's just a general feeling, with no hard data to back it up. Certainly there's no dearth of either kind of startup[2] on either coast.

(There's also definitely some sampling bias there, because those types of companies happened to be the investment focus of the company I worked for).

[0] which, incidentally, is an NYC startup that has nothing to do with finance! [1] ie, [2] Tumblr and Mongodb are examples of successful "tech" and B2C companies in NYC, for example, and there are plenty of industry-targeted companies in SF too.

Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm giving it another shot with another meetup and a couple more groups. And I dropped an email to what I guessed was yours.

A number of the organizers for the NYC Haskell meetup have businesses whose stacks are full Haskell.

As I typed that, I thought, "I wonder how long it will be before Carter corrects me on the Haskell comment". :)

i've seen you on IRC or IRL before, right? (are you coming to the haskell computer music meetup this wednesday?)

> i've seen you on IRC or IRL before, right?

Yes, at several meetups - Lisp, Haskell.... most recently, you came to my "Go for Statistical Programming" talk to heckle me - though not about generics, as I was expecting. ;)

> (are you coming to the haskell computer music meetup this wednesday?

Damn. That's right up my alley, too. But I can't. :/

Perhaps you were in NYC at the wrong time?

2006-13.

To be fair, my sample size on startup quality is about N = 15, so I'm sure I missed some good ones. And there are a lot of high-quality engineers (and people in general) in NYC. The engineers I met at Google NYC were a great crowd, for one example, and there are a lot of good people in finance.

I think NYC would be a great tech hub if the city could solve the cost-of-living problem, which would expand the pool of possible startups and help real technologists (as opposed to well-connected turds) get more play. Until then, the smart money's on places like Austin for the 2020s.

I don't think the cost of living problem as such is solvable. When I point out that there are places in all five boros that are safe, affordable, and in reasonable commuting distance of the commercial parts of Manhattan I'm told that it is unrealistic to expect techies to want to live in such boring places. But it is very trendiness of e.g. Chelsea that makes it so expensive. The same exact criticism is even more potent when deployed for Austin or Chicago as an alternative.

Positional goods are never going to be cheap, if they were they would no longer be desirable.

> When I point out that there are places in all five boros that are safe, affordable, and in reasonable commuting distance of the commercial parts of Manhattan I'm told that it is unrealistic to expect techies to want to live in such boring places.

Pricing is high everywhere in five boroughs in places which are safe and in reasonable commuting distance, regardless if anyone finds any of them "boring". NY is just a very expensive city when it comes to rent and let alone buying anything.

I think NYC would be a great tech hub if the city could solve the cost-of-living problem

Doesn't Silicon Valley have a similar problem?

Yes, and that's why its first derivative is steeply negative.

However, it's far enough ahead of everywhere else (due to six decades of momentum, developed before that problem existed) to still be #1.

Worked in Manhattan for 5 years, & last week was my 1 year anniversary in the Valley. Difference is night & day. In NYC, yeah we had meetups & cool stuff was demo-ed, but seldom used in day to day work. I do believe that is changing...meetups at Novus demo a lot of Scala that does get pushed to prod. On the whole, SF meetups are much more cutting edge. Like we'll have a meetup on Marathon and we'll probably even push Marathon to prod...scary but that's the plan :) otoh, my friends back in nyc don't even know what Marathon is, much less have any plans to mess with running Storm or Hadoop on Mesos. That said, that's the exact problem with the Valley tech scene - its mostly innovation for innovation sake with no real/profitable use-case. There's really no compelling reason to be running Marathon in prod...but hey, why not ?!...that's the SF attitude. The Valley pays much less, I certainly made more back in nyc...but I did have to wear a suit & dress in formals & polish my shoes & carry a pager & say "Sir! Yes Sir! Ofcourse Sir!"..here I walk to work in sandals & sometimes I don't even shave & people are ok with that. Conversations that enrage & stress people out in NYC almost always revolve around bonus & $$$, here in the Valley people stress out over overloading implicits causing confusion in adhoc polymorphism vs subtype poly...its just very funny & very different :)

You probably just had bad experience or worked in some very formal environment (I guess financial?). Many places in NY don't enforce dress code on engineers. And surely people aren't just discussing bonuses instead of actual technology. Carrying a phone (not a pager of course :) can be a norm anywhere, if you are on call and required to provide support in cases of production emergency. I doubt that's different between NYC and any other place.

And for the record, there is quite an interest in Storm, Hadoop and other distributed computation technologies in the NYC scene.

Where exactly did they make you say "Sir! Yes Sir!"? I have worked in NYC finance and fin tech for years and have never seen anything close to the caricature you're describing. Also, what is Marathon?

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