Comment by ngriffin731 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ngriffin731 | Hacker News Reader

Current Reno resident who has also lived in Silicon Valley and San Fransisco reporting in. Born and raised in Reno. Also have spent a significant amount of time in Austin.

Out of all 4 of those places, Reno is by far the most fun. Between the skiing, hiking and awesome bars the quality of life in Reno is unparalleled. We have a ton of amazing local bands. A burning man party is one of the craziest parties you will ever attend. The weather can be harsh compared to California, but I personally love it. It's hard for me to imagine living anywhere else.

Austin is fun, but is a swamp and overcrowded. San Francisco is also fun, but is incredibly overcrowded and expensive. SV is kind of boring, and too family-oriented for a young person.

The only problem in Reno is the job market. I know a lot of talented IT pros who have trouble finding a good job. Reno's economy is dominated by Casinos and Finance. Almost all of the talented programmer I know from Reno have wound up in SV or San Francisco. UNR isn't producing enough people trained in IT fields. The tech job market is anemic. Nepotism and the "Good Old Boys Club" run deep in the Reno economy. Nevada is much more corrupt than most states.

Reno will never be the next Silicon Valley or even the next Austin. We simply don't have an educational system to support it. The Bay-Area and Los Angeles are a huge brain drain on the Reno area. I think Bloomberg hit the nail on the head with deeming it "Silicon Valley's Back Office". Reno's place is a great place to do manufacturing and run data centers because of it's location and lower cost of doing business.

I will probably be moving to another city soon because I simply can't find a good job or enough work freelancing in my field (Front-End Web Development). Reno is my favorite place to live, but it's hard to take a ~50% pay cut to live here.

Another person lives in Reno also checking in. I grew up in the Silicon Valley though and recently moved here about 6 months ago. It indeed is really fun. Lot's of outdoorsy stuff to do (tons of unowned land where you can shoot guns and drive ATVs and stuff). The night life is crazy good too.

But yeah... it's fun in a kind of depressing way. There's a huge unemployment/underemployment problem here. My dad who was a crazy good broker in the valley is unemployed still after 3 years of living here. My mom who was a courier in the valley is now organizing greeting cards at grocery stores making minimum wage. They'd basically be screwed if they didn't have any savings and if I wasn't able to do remote work. There's also a TON of people who just fell off the face of the earth that moved here. I've never met so many meth heads, heroin addicts and general burnouts in a higher concentration anywhere else. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places though.

Reno is definitely is an cool place to live. But I don't think I would want to be here for longer than a year... that's just me though. I'm another one of those "California refugees", I guess. So maybe I shouldn't be talking.

My sense is Reno would need the equivalent of "a second UNR" to step up the quality of its job market. Perhaps a regional focus on alternative, post-K12 professional education would make sense? (It could become a center for in-person workshops, testing, etc to complement remote-learning MOOCs – it has the space and transport links.)

Proximity to the Bay Area is a double-edged sword: cultural affinity and talent interchange but also brain-drain.

As long as the skyline is dominated by casinos – while eye-catching in its own way – Reno's external image will suffer from that association. Reno can't compete with Vegas in scale, nor with the spread of state-by-state gambling in convenience, and yet is still hit by the stigma of gambling-as-an-economic-pillar.

Some of the downtown conversions of defunct casino-towers to other uses (like condos) are encouraging. If I were a local civic planner, I'd be tempted to offer a subsidy for any skyline-altering night signage that's not gambling-related. (Tesla! UNR! Aviation! Anything! There's still some risk people would see bright lights and think, "tacky gambling", no matter the actual messages.)

Have you looked into remote work? I love Reno and have been remote working here at several different companies for many years. Right now, it's fairly easy to get a good front-end web dev gig remotely that pays much closer to SV salaries than Reno ones.

Reno has really blossomed even in the last few years, but the jobs market, especially for skilled people, is abysmal. There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem as well since many people with enough talent realize that Reno's salaries are laughable and end up leaving. Right now there's not enough decent paying work to attract people to the city, but if you where to bring a company here that paid sane wages you'd have a hard time finding talent. I've known enough amazing UNR grads that migrate to the Bay to know that this city does have the potential. It's just a matter of that right window of a reasonable paying company being here and snatching up enough bright people before they move to the Bay.

But for remote work it's hard to think of a better place. Cost of living is very low, there's no state income tax, and SF is an easy 3 1/2 hour drive when you miss parts of the big city experience. Every other major West Coast city is a cheap and quick flight. And there are some really amazing people in this city. If you don't go already, head to Hack Night at the Reno collective some time, it's a great group.

Wow. Austin "overcrowded". It has less that 2500people/sq mi. I've heard it all now.

I think overcrowding really means congestion to most people. Any quick population spike will cause congestion as infrastructure takes time to scale.

Some forms of congestion:

1. Traffic

2. Reduced parking

3. Waiting at restaurants longer

4. Housing and living costs becoming quickly unaffordable

5. Longer commutes and travel times.

6. More noise

If it had higher density, it would probably be less congested since people wouldn't need to drive to get to the corner store.

Needing a car to survive is the reason I left Austin

Probably referring to the denser portions, you know, where the enormous university and Texas government are?

Could you elaborate on Reno's weather? I read the climate section on Reno's Wikipedia page but it's hard to get a good sense of the actual weather.

High desert next in rain shadow of Sierras, so very dry, very little rain, sometimes snows significantly, but never that cold or hot. Big temperature swing between day and night. Often windy, sometimes ridiculously so. Not exactly climate, but sometimes there's smoke from forest or brush fires (and brush fires are a big problem in summer).

Source: grew up in Reno

It doesn't rain often, maybe four days a month. The sky is usually pretty clear. Summers are in the upper 80s. Winters are in the 30s. The growing season is from late May to late September because there are random cold snaps during the spring and fall. It's really dry, so you might get nosebleeds on visiting, but you can get used to it in a few days. The winds can be crazy: it can get up to 70 MPH every couple years, but 30 MPH happens relatively often. We haven't had a good snow in a few years, because of the drought in California.

I would be interested in working with remote front end web developer. Can you share your email?

Add gmail to my username

Reply on news.ycombinator.com