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 :)