I’m bailing on San Francisco
words.steveklabnik.com
words.steveklabnik.com
Edit: apparently work/life balance isn't the issue, as the essay and comments here clarified. Very well.
Steve remains at work, rather than being pulled to other alluring things, because he he finds SF so draining and obnoxious. A change of scenery can definitely help with that sort of problem.
Having talked to Steve over a range of diverse topics I can tell you, Steve has many interests outside of work and in many other contexts has obviously maintained a work/life balance that has allowed him to do many interesting things both professionally and personally.
Maybe I'm self-centered, but I just can't imagine the macro outweighing the "alluring things" to their exclusion. Certainly, though, SF needs to deal with homelessness 3000% better than they have in decades, and options for the mentally ill remain a national shame and failure.
I don’t go home late. I go home at five. It’s not work/life balance that’s the issue. I’m just not psyched for the ‘life’ part.
I mean, I already wrote the post, but what I will say is that I've spent a ton of time in New York, and I know exactly what I'm getting into. For example, the bustling environment will actually _invigorate_, not drain, me, because that's the kind of place I enjoy. I'll also be saving money on rent, get to enjoy the wonderful subway, and a whole host of other things.
There's also quite a lot of value in _being_ in San Francisco. If I was going to start a company, I wouldn't bother with anywhere else. But I'm not starting a company. So it's not for me. This post isn't titled "You should bail on San Francisco."
I resisted a move for many years because of the energy you cite, which I considered my lifeblood, but I've never felt better now that I'm surrounded by trees again. NYC (BK) really sucked the life out of me (and my wallet) and I didn't notice until I made my escape.
BK real estate has become unaffordable and the buying process is atrocious (expect to fall in love with an apt. multiple times only to be outbid by cash offers). BK rents are going through the roof. Despite what my friends who still live there assume, I don't miss it at all.
Sounds excellent. :) And as bad as BK rents are, SF rents are worse. Regardless, I'm glad you've found a place that works for you. I grew up on a beef cattle farm, and I know I need huge cities.
I also could be really bad at looking. I don't have hard numbers, just what I found.
We have a growing tech scene. Some of my friends refer to St. Louis's tech as the "Silicon Ghetto" as it's not quite as expansive as SF. More businesses are moving and starting up here because of Arch Grants and one of the co-founders of Square has a startup accelerator here as well.
Granted, I don't work for a company in St. Louis. I actually work remotely for a company based out of San Fran.
Instead we'll continue to work in tech doing consulting work, but we're going try our hand at being completely nomadic while doing it (starting with Central and South America, though we'll be picking a place and staying there for a few weeks to a month at minimum). We've sold pretty much everything we own and have whittled down our belongings to a large backpack and daypack each. It feels pretty amazing to be this lightweight and mobile, and our current budget has spending about 3x less than we were while living in SF (and still living very well).
This is also primarily a political problem, as I wrote previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7382097 and as Kim-Mai Cutler cogently described here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ .
Seattle has somewhat similar problems (http://www.smartgrowthseattle.org/sally-bagshaw-yesterday-to...), but they're not nearly as bad.
I too felt amazing after quitting my apartment and getting rid of all the stuff. Now everything I own, fits in my backpack. Except my books, which are with my sister:)
If you are thinking of moving someplace different but cannot think of anything specific wrong with the current place, yes that is a classic grass is greener mistake.
But having lived in several places, each one has drastically different positive and negative attributes, as with any relationship. You wouldn't tell someone to stick with a partner who was beligerent when any number of other people could easily fit the bill, but somehow people talk as if a cty is totally interchangeable with another. That may be true with some specific options that share the same negative and positive qualities. It is not generally true.
Don't listen to the naysayers! Good luck and do whatever it takes to get the SF FOMO out of the system.
Edit: I have been in SF for 3 and a half years. It was only suppose to be 2 years to get my career started. I feel the black hole pulling and next thing I know it will be 10 years.
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Also, to be effective at my job, I needed to be there during the 9-5, M-F period. I don't plan on getting myself into another 'real job' soon.
Peninsula is losing out to SF itself for a lot of companies, too.
For a startup, having service providers in an area is important, but investors are more important, and remain reluctant to do anything remote to themselves.
What places do you like?
Within the Bay Area: Santa Clara, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Woodside, Los Altos, Cupertino, and most of San Mateo County overall.
Otherwise: Seattle, Berlin, non-Berlin Germany, Portland (OR), Montreal, sort of Toronto, Amsterdam, .... Probably Texas, but I've never actually been there.
For some period of time 1-4y: Japan, Qatar, China, Indonesia, Las Vegas, Utah, Montana, ND/SD, etc.
In the Northeast, NH or VT.
Most of these don't really have enough diversity of tech companies to be viable for me, or a good enough ecosystem to start companies. (SV excepted; Seattle is borderline. HK/SIN don't do much in the kind of companies I like)
I guess Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, Czech Republic, etc. go on the "potentially good" list, too.
The things I hate about SF are really threefold: 1) I've spent "enough" time here to be bored with it, at least outside work related things. It's genuinely not a world-class city (outside of tech, and food) -- LA, NY, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, etc have it beat)
2) Absurd costs due mostly to demand and somewhat due to government policies -- this has been well covered. It essentially means you must always be working in tech, unless you've had a huge exit, unless you moved here sufficiently long ago or accept a sufficiently low quality of life.
3) Aside from costs, crazy government and social policies. I can get that people disagree on political issues, but SF (and CA as a whole) are just badly governed -- they collect taxes like a high-services-returned socialist state, but provide services like a low-tax state. There are a bunch of structural reasons this is unlikely to change, so it's not really worth investing any effort in CA politics. I'd actually prefer living in a place which is at the current time more fucked (say, TX, TN, KY, Indonesia; whatever), but where there's enough of a desire to fix things that the trend is positive. Or where the people are actually pretty sane and reasonable overall (Seattle; many of the Northern European countries).
I lived in New York for 7 years. It's a really hard place to live. It gives a lot, and the benefits are immense, but the cramped living spaces, crowds, and fast pace are difficult. (For some, the climate's also hard. I got "Building SAD" when I lived downtown, but other than that, the climate wasn't an issue.) Of course, no one can predict how you'll react to it. My guess is that you'll probably find NYC challenging but enjoy what it has to offer (much more than SF; it's a real fucking city, not some colony for East Coast banking/consulting rejects turned VCs and the 25-year-old nerds they boss around). It's worth trying out, for sure. But I wouldn't expect it to be an easy place to live.
I've spent a lot of time in NYC, so I know what I'm getting into. It's fun to watch all these people make assumptions about my opinions and what they're based on.
New England is unbeatable, though, except possibly in comparison to the Pacific Northwest.
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> Every hour I spend in New York, I feel excited, and every hour I spend in San Francisco, I feel drained.
To each his own, and from the looks of the comments here, he seems to be in the minority.
Instead of changing things, you whine then leave. Yeah! That'll change the "SF work culture"!
Personally, I just went outside for the first time in two or three weeks. There are just more interesting things inside than out. I everything I need delivered or transmitted over the internet, including friends.
As a post script: it's also worth noting that this was merely a bulletin that Steve was departing, not a manifesto about work-life balance (which you'll note is not the reason he's citing for leaving SF).