"Plus I find the Bay Area congested, racist, incestuous, and overpriced."
I like this guy.
I like this guy.
The Seattle/Kirkland offices have over 1,000 employees and are growing. They have people at all different levels including directors and principal engineers and lots of important projects going on. These aren't minor little operations.
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Places like the Seattle office exist mainly to get people in the company, then to drag the ones they like further south. Many of the rest will effectively be being paid to not work at MS or Amazon.
There's a good reason I described MV as a world apart.
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2020543320_g...
Seattle is provincial, passive-aggressive, unfriendly to outsiders, and segregated. A hick town with skyscrapers as I've often called it. Californians who've moved there almost unanimously agree with my first sentence, and crack up at the latter.
(Sadly, I lived in Seattle for 17 years. The Bay Area before that, and New York now.)
That's not very nice.
> Seattle is provincial, passive-aggressive, unfriendly to outsiders, and segregated. A hick town with skyscrapers as I've often called it.
Sorry you didn't enjoy it here. Every city has its ups and downs, but a lot of people (myself included) love it. It's beautiful, we are surrounded by nature, we have the best summers of anywhere I've ever been, I find the people friendly (if a bit passive), there's a great classical music scene (this is how I spend my time), a great university in the middle of the city, lots of tech employment opportunities, a housing market that isn't insane.
I like SF and New York (and Vancouver!) a lot, but they have their own problems too.
Just kidding. But I understand your sentiment. The grey skies wouldn't bother me at all, but my wife would not be able to stand it. We live in a sunny climate, and every day that is overcast she tells me how depressed it makes her feel... Some people just need sunshine!
New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city. – Patti Smith on whether New York is still good for artists.
Also I did say that I find the people friendly, which is the opposite of unfriendly. Yes Seattle people tend to be passive, but that is not the same as unfriendly.
Given how itinerant Seattle's population is, it seems strange to think that the people here are massively different in behavior cities of similar size.
People always complain about the "freeze" but I call bullshit. Seattle is the perfect place for people who enjoy a small social circle (Larry David style - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_M73MoxJE)
The one thing I always tell outsiders when they ask about finding friends when they move here is to pick an interest and go from there. For example, I love hiking/climbing. I joined a climbing gym and found a few great friends with that in common.
People here aren't outwardly friendly to strangers, but find a commonality and go from there, it's super effective.
I think this is absolutely spot on. I'm pretty surprised about this line criticism from this forum. Nerds (or "hackers" in this case) are a generally introverted crowd, no?
It's not a good city if you're a brogrammer who wants to party like a rock star every night. That's totally fine by me. :)
First, some humor: http://lifeexplained.thecomicseries.com/comics/62/
Now, some serious (as it was while I lived there, but funny now that I've escaped), all from Seattle newspapers:
But the dichotomy most fundamental to our collective civic character is this: Polite but distant. Have a nice day. Somewhere else. [1]
Your city is a lovely one, and people here are nice enough when you come into contact with them in such circumstances as a retail transaction or participation in a mutually held-interest group. However, there is an unmistakable coolness exuded by many inhabitants of this city toward people they don't know; it exceeds what I would consider "normal." [2]
Seattle public radio: while people here are “open” to new ideas, we’re just near the bottom of the states for being extroverted. Sociologist Jodi O’Brien at Seattle University added that this group relies heavily on digital devices to communicate which means they are losing the ability to simply hang out and talk. “If you email something I don’t like, I can scream at the computer, but I don’t have to interact with you. The more we can do that, the less inclined we are to engage in the messy social world.” [3]
Seattle Freeze: Can we blame it on the Norwegians? ...and there is even a meet-up group working to defeat it, the Seattle Anti-Freeze. [4]
Turns out that while Seattle has lots of romantic settings and events – the people themselves aren’t thought to be very romantic.[5] In a poll on that same Seattle newspaper blog, 80% of the readers say that the Seattle Freeze is very real and/or awesome. A slideshow of ways of dealing with the freeze agrees more or less with your advice to pick an interest and go from there.
[1] http://seattletimes.com/pacificnw/2005/0213/cover.html
[2] http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/northwestvoices/2009/0...
[3] http://www.kpluwonders.org/content/why-seattle-freeze-so-har...
[4] http://blogs.seattletimes.com/fyi-guy/2012/12/04/seattle-fre...
[5] http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2013/02/12/‘seattle-fre...
As far as "hick town"... Seattle is literally the most educated city in the US. It legalized gay marriage and pot before almost anyone else. I don't understand what you mean by "hick"... I guess we do have a lot of plaid.
At work for example, it took me a rather long time to understand the real meanings of "I'm not sure" which means 'no' or "interesting" which means more or less that what you said is stupid. Not to mention being asked 200-times a day how I am doing or whether I found everything I was looking for at wholefood.
Yep, people in this region have an imperial need to "be nice", at least on the surface and it can feel Orwellian at times if you are not used to it, especially on those days of bad mood. I think in Thailand they call that "sweet mouth, salty butt". But hey, that's also a huge plus, since it prevents a lot of bad vibes and unneeded frictions. I believe it's just a societal organization.
Sometimes I go back to my country for work, and over there people's number one characteristic is distrust and indifference, and I can guarantee you that I feel like a foreigner over there now - well, on normal days, because if I happen to be in a bad mood, I'm kind of showing signs of Tourette syndrome and want to punch everybody.
Overall, I think I'm mixing well in the Bay Area. And more importantly, most of my friends and relatives who share those character traits do tolerate that some foreigners like me don't necessarily think and act the same way. And frankly, wouldn't the world be boring if people were the same everywhere ?
I live in London, where we don't speak to our neighbours or make eye contact on the tube; would i actually be more comfortable in Seattle than San Francisco? Or would it be over the top, like being in Sweden or something? Or is the variation along a completely different axis?
I live in San Diego and it is very different here than in LA or the SF Bay Area (with each of those also being very distinct from each other).
"Looking to be metropolitan" I guess is how I would phrase it. Wasn't really what I was looking for, but it was an interesting stay for a while.
I don't know what is more real about Vancouver, other than the newer part of downtown, I found it to be a sprawling mess just like your average US big city. Richmond was heavily Asian, Surrey seemed to have the heavier crime, and Burnaby was more suburban.
The weather in California is certainly better on average, though, I'll say that. Except for the cost of living, I'd almost assuredly go there, myself.
Oh, it struck this Midwestern white boy almost as soon as he got off the plane. I mean, I'd heard the phrase "white bread neighborhood" and always took it to mean there's only a few non-white people living there. No, in Seattle (and Redmond, where I live) entire neighborhoods can be comprised of nothing but white folk.
I notice because I grew up in and around Indianapolis (with brief stints in Detroit). 20% black population in Indy (I could be off by a bit) means 1 out of 5 people I work with, buy groceries from, pass on the street, whatever, are black (ratio of friends was a bit lower than 20%). Now drop me in Redmond/Seattle where I rarely see a black person, and it's just...weird. I mentioned this to natives, and they acted like it was the most racist thing they'd ever heard. What, you thought I wouldn't notice that Bellevue's black population is 0.9%?
Redmond: 20% nonwhite (http://redmond.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm)
Blacks are certainly underrepresented, I'll give you that, but everybody's talking as if African Americans are the only minority that counts... because it is a convenient strawman for propping up their arguments about the "whiteness", I suppose.
"Of the people living Seattle itself, only 37% were born in WA, 44% another state, and 19% another country according to the 2006 census." http://www.city-data.com/forum/seattle-area/281766-transplan...
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/NPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=1...
All those demographics are on wiki: Vancouver is 40 % asian (and like 25% Chinese) which we all know, San Francisco is 33% asian but only 6% black (not counting Oakland I guess, but we aren't counting Tacoma for Seattle either). New York is New York.
I have no idea where you get saying they are segregated, at least when it comes to asian. Black is more urban, but that's hardly surprising (unless we want to start talking about seatac and Tacoma, which are different cities).
Something tells me that you've never met "hick".
These sound like really good coworkers actually.
Personally I preferred the driver's mentality of the northwest and once I had been there a few days I drove much more like them since it was so refreshing to not have to not be in the take and defend mindset. Plus when you want to speed they get out of the way well in advance which is awesome when you're in a hurry.
Amazon? In Vancouver now. Microsoft? In Vancouver now. Facebook? In Vancouver now. Startups? Vancouver has our share.
Personally, if I were going to leave the country for a better tech industry, I'd fly right past Seattle and head further south. Sorry, but Seattle just doesn't make sense if you're not already there.
And while Vancouver's tech scene is rising, you should really stop by Seattle some time and see how wide the gap really is, and how far Vancouver has to go to even be within the same league as Seattle when it comes to tech employment.
> "Amazon? In Vancouver now. Microsoft? In Vancouver now. Facebook? In Vancouver now."
Amazon is the only real dev office out of those. Microsoft and Facebook are waiting rooms for Canadian citizenship to permit easier access to the US. It's funny how often these exact companies are trotted out in defense of Vancouver's tech industry when considering why these offices exist in the first place (tip: it's not to access Vancouver's existing tech talent).
> "Sorry, but Seattle just doesn't make sense if you're not already there."
I don't like the city much at all, but where else can a fresh CS undergrad fetch a $100K+ offer without paying $2K a month for a dingy studio apartment? Vancouver's rental market just as expensive as Seattle, and salaries far, far lower.
The tech industry gets better the further south you go along the west coast. Vancouver is not an exception to this rule.
To a point.
I also found the people of Seattle pretty much identical to people in Vancouver. If you switched out a few street signs you wouldn't be able to tell much of a difference between the places.
As for SF, I think Seattle has its own perks as well. Slightly lower sales tax, lower cost of living in rent and other goods, 0 state income tax in Washington, amazing mountains and interesting beaches. Raw number in your paycheck wise, Seattle is probably lower than SF, but in SF, you pay shitload more on rent and tax.
Vancouver isn't?
I liked the snowboarding, and I liked working at MS for less than half the time I spent there, but I'm definitely looking into relocating at this point. (For reference, I'm from Boston, where I assert that people generally say what they mean or what's at the front of their mind, instead of what's faultlessly polite or strategically advantageous.)
P.S. - I have lived in Seattle and would move back in a heartbeat if I had the same professional opportunities as I have here.
It also occurs to me that it's maybe a sort of social tragedy of the commons. There's nothing wrong with being a locksmith, but an entire society of locksmiths would probably run into problems. Likewise, it's not a sin to be introverted, but a party (or a city) where everyone is introverted is going to be missing something, and become very dependent on the presence of Guitar Hero or Settlers of Catan stations for fun.
FWIW, I've lived in Boston and Silicon Valley and have a number of family in NYC. I can't stand NYC - it's too busy, no greenery (Central Park doesn't count, it's all man-made), and generally feels like I'm living in a concrete cinderblock. I really liked Boston, but the culture is just a little bit too conservative, and I didn't feel like there were any professional opportunities that didn't involve paying my dues for 30 years while the world moved on around me. Silicon Valley has a wonderful openness to new ideas and a nice "seize the day" mentality, but everybody seems just slightly insecure about how their next-door neighbor just sold a company for $100M, and there's a big unhealthy competitive dynamic behind the surface. SF (& Berkeley) is charming but also has a slightly ridiculous lack of self-awareness - there is a huge population here who really values their quality of life but doesn't realize that their actions are the cause of all the things they complain about. (Witness all the folks who love their iPhones and Uber but hate the techies who make them, who protest rent increases but won't allow new housing construction, who prevent the state from raising taxes and then wonder why California is in perpetual budget crisis, and who hate the Comcast monopoly but won't allow any new fiber lines to be laid.)
On the whole I think Silicon Valley is probably the right place for me, but I still wish I could find a place with the openness to new ideas of Silicon Valley but without the competitiveness and greed.
That said, Seattle is a lot more economical - salaries are a tad lower than SF or NYC but more than made up for by lower cost of living (though this is changing).
I love Seattle, and do not find people here passive or unfriendly.
I checked out the area through the lens of possibly living there when I went down for my interview. Seattle and Kirkland are not comparable to Vancouver in the slightest. Mostly the ghettos and rampant poverty, combined with the fundamental social differences between the countries. Didn't help that the one restaurant I ate at in the suburb of Kirkland had a fresh bullet hole in one of the windows. No thanks.
I found areas of New York (Williamsburg and Dumbo to be specific) that felt more like Vancouver to me than anywhere in the Seattle area.
My calls with Google are now pretty short. "Is there a Google office in Vancouver yet? No? Not interested, thanks."
The word I should be using is poverty. It's rampant and seems to be everywhere. You can mostly avoid it if you stick to the very central downtown core which I always did as a tourist.
But that was definitely just my impression of the city. I'm not damning the city for it, everywhere has problems. I just can't imagine living around that would have a positive long-term effect on anyone's state of mind. It's not where I would chose to be.
http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/wa/seattle/crime/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-cri...
The idea that at any point in time something could happen and I could lose my health plan and I am now at incredible risk scares me.
Unlike the traditional American narrative around race (black vs. white), in this one, the privileged group consists of well-to-do Whites, Asians, South-Asians, and other highly educated recent-immigrants, while the underprivileged group consists of ghettoized African American and Latino communities.
These underprivileged groups are segregated physically from the former (in East Palo Alto, San Francisco's Bayview, and East/West Oakland), and are mired in a multigenerational cycle of poverty, violence, and disenfranchisement. However, they constitute a significant portion of the low-skilled, low-paid service labor force.
They reap comparatively little benefit from the economic boom brought on by the tech industry. Many of the arguments here on HN and elsewhere about gentrification in the Bay Area and it's benefits/costs ignore that the situation is layered over a long history of race-based tensions in the area.
>I like this guy.
yep, he would fit well here in Bay Area.
1) Everyone calls me "Sir", but they don't use that term with others.
2) I have a jacket that sets off store alarms. I never get questioned, but others do.
3) I've seen apartment staff be rude to other residents (and prospective residents), but they're all smiles and sunshine when I walk in.
4) My wife was talking about how she wasn't able to work because of her visa. The other person then said she wouldn't have that problem if she was Mexican (working illegally).
It really is "easy mode". I don't have to argue for anything, and people give me the benefit of the doubt - even when they shouldn't.
And I think the problem is that, just as many Americans don't necessarily recognize the racism that still exists in their society because they live it and it's normal (or because they choose not to see it), I think there are an awful lot of Canadians that don't quite realize: in 50-100 years, we will all be ashamed of the way natives continue to be treated in Canada.
His is comparing the Bay Area to Vancouver (Canada).
What the rest of the US is like is irrelevant.
Toronto might be more congested in parts, but it's much less racist and incestuous, and perhaps equally overpriced.
Halifax might be more incestuous.
Calgary might be more racists.
Montreal might be more elitists, but he didn't mention that.
Whereas, in defense of San Francisco, San Francisco has Oakland. It has Fremont. It has Berkeley. It has Richmond. So when you think about San Francisco, you don't have to think about the congested, racists, incestuous and certainly overpriced part. You can think of the whole. Which is far from that. Especially when compared to Vancouver. A rather depressing, squat, shabby and moist city.
My thoughts when I was in Vancouver were 1. If it wasn't for the border ending right here, there'd be no city here. The city here would be Seattle. 2. Vancouver stopped thinking in the 70s. Everything is just a short 70s convenience store building. 3. Yes, the natural beauty is amazing, which is why the city sucks so much. People would rather leave daily. 4. The natives really got it bad here. Never were they defeated like their eastern and southern counterparts, but still they were simply taken over. You can sense their deep frustration with their lack of autonomy and it's a feeling that I think is completely justified. and finally 5. No wonder Heroin is so popular here. I'd do heroin too if I lived here.
But I guess people love where they live. Even if that place is god awfully moist and moldy like Vancouver.
Most major Canadian cities are close to the US border, for three very important reasons: geography, temperature & economy. Geography: because a good part of the country is covered in Canadian Shield, making it very expensive to excavate land. Temperature: because the nicest temperatures are near the border. Economy: Transit to exporting is cheaper if you're near the border.
Why would Vancouver be around for Seattle? Wouldn't that be the other way around based on population? Also, if we're going to use US exceptionalism as the standard, then you should help explain Detroit vs. Windsor. Because Windsor isn't getting torn down neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/neo-nazis-are-attacking-anti-...
http://metronews.ca/news/calgary/774251/calgary-man-couldnt-...
2. Still, being close to the border, while justification for locating a city there, may not actually make sense in terms of geography. Your point supports mine.
3. Without a border, I suggested that the location for Seattle would be the optimum location for a major metropolis
4. Detroit vs. Windsor has nothing to do with my suggestion. Neither does Toronto vs. Buffalo. Though perhaps without the border, Detroit and Windsor would have merged into one bigger city.
And CA is more racist: based on what?
How people treat you is way more important than what they call you (even if those words are unacceptable), and the way minorities get treated in the bay area is not particularly stellar...
EDIT: This poster said it better than I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7273077