robbyking

It's interesting, I had the opposite experience. When I lived in SF in my 20's, I knew all of my neighbors: some I'd party with, some I'd walk my dogs with, and later, when I was older, we had a nanny share with the family who lived next door. I knew the brothers that ran the corner store and I knew the family that ran the coffee shop next door.

When I lived in smaller town, I didn't know any of my neighbors. People walked from their side door to their cars and would only say hello if they happened to make eye contact. My wife and I prioritized walkabilty and bikability when we chose our house, but even then it was a struggle.

There are exceptions, but now that I'm back in a city I once again know all of my neighbors. I regularly have lunch with another dev who works from home down the street, and we hang out with the family across the street a few times a week. Our neighborhood isn't the "NYC in the 70's" image of an urban area that some people from small towns think of when they think of big cities, it's cute tree lined block with 2k sqft houses.

Strawman City

The truth of the matter is the Bay Area is a great place for tech companies because of the sheer volume of engineers. The reason so many engineers live in the Bay Area (and a handful of other cities) is (and I say this from experience) it's terrifying being an engineer in a city with only one or two tech companies.

I moved from SF to a smallish city in my late 20's, and I was only able to find one tech job to apply to, and it wasn't even for a technology I already knew. I was offered the position, and spent the next 6 years treading water at a mediocre job because there just weren't any other options: I could either stay at that job, or leave a town I loved.

When my wife and I decided it was time to move (she had just completed her Master's), job opportunity weighed heavily in our decision making process. We had a lot of other considerations (we wouldn't live someplace we didn't like just because it was good for our careers), but we wanted to make sure we at least had multiple options when it came to work, and that is absolutely something the Bay Area provides.

The first time I heard of Shazam was on a road trip with a friend of mine who had minimal tech skills at best. I was already 10 years into my career as an engineer, and when he told me about it, I honestly didn't believe him; I was positive he was mistaken, and speculated it was a service similar to Aardvark[1], which was a peer-to-peer information engine.

I was wrong, of course, Shazam really did live up to its hype. I think it's interesting that the someone knows about how a technology works the more sceptical they are of what it is capable of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)

This used to happen to me a lot, and after seeing a therapist for something I thought was completely unrelated it turns out I have adult ADHD.

I have a friend who was an engineer at Amazon, and it sounds like tech jobs at Amazon are a nightmare, too.

You're being downvoted, but the reality is for a lot of workers the time that's passed since the pandemic started hasn't felt like working from home, it's felt like living at work, and this is especially true for workers who live in towns that don't have a lot of tech companies. It's hard to stand your ground when there's only one tech company in town, or you're a young engineer who doesn't want their resume to show they left their first job out of college less than a year after they were hired.

I love how these small online communities have managed to survive over the years!

Thank you!

Off topic, but where did the "underwater basketweaving" meme (in the traditional sense) come from? My dad used to say that all the time in reference to what he considered frivolous academic pursuits.

When I was in my late teens I lived with an older friend who worked as a web developer at the beginning of the dot com boom. He would come home stressed from work and I'd think how can be stressed? He gets to work on a computer all day!

What's funny is I didn't remember it coming bundled, but it was on the linked site so I figured I just forgot.

I'm not sure how many people will remember this, but macOS 8 came with a program called Hotline, who's main activity was "publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software."

Most people I knew used it to pirate software and MP3s.

The way most of us used it was we'd find a server that had something we wanted (software, a crack, or music), and the login would be password protected. There would be a public readme file with instructions on how to find the password, which was typically behind a banner ad you had to click to generate revenue for the file host.

I was working as a web developer at the time, and the start-up where I worked literally had a dedicated server just for downloading music on Hotline, but Napster came along and we mostly forgot about Hotline.

It would be interesting to break this down by genre. Jazz likes to "borrow" notes to construct chords that aren't diatonic, and metal likes to add the flat II and V almost as a rule.

That's fair, but the comment I replied to said "my peers [...] have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back," and that hasn't been my experience; my teammates and I seem to to get about the same number of recruiter calls/emails a day, very often from the same companies.

Besides, the vast, vast majority of job listings say "CS degree or comparable experience."

How many years of experience do you have? I don't have a degree but it's literally never come up, and I've been working as a software engineer for two decades.

> How many times have you had to replace a phone in the past 10 years? Twice.

Me too! And I'm a mobile engineer! My partner only recently updated their iPhone 6s, and I upgrade when the need arises, not when there's something new and shinny on the market.

The woman who hit me got out of her car and said "I'm so sorry! I saw you but I just didn't stop in time!"

I've been cycling in urban environments for 20+ years, and the only time I've been hit by a car was when I was rear ended at a stop sign. There's also been a half dozen or so other times where I've heard cars come to a quick stop behind me, or that I've pulled into the crosswalk to avoid being hit.

No, it's comments only.

That's a sweeping generalization for a company with over 5,000 employees.

I don't think "wokeism" has gone too far, I think accusations of it have. There are plenty of high profile sex offenders and homophobic/transphobic celebrities who continue to get work.

Instead what I see is misrepresentation of what "wokeness" is; I often hear conservatives say they're "not allowed" to discuss race/sexuality/etc., when in actuality what has happened is most of American has just moved on from finding homophobia and racism entertaining.

I didn't know about it! I primary use a corporate hosted instance GitHub (so we often opt in to new features late), and I don't follow a lot of tech news on social media.

> The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit

Are you a fan of r/mtb or r/mountainbiking?

What percentage of US workers work in FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies?

On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive.

Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.

That version of Garamond is gorgeous! My favorite, hands down.

A few years ago I had to use my mom's laptop to order dinner or something, and I couldn't figure out why the page I was on looked so weird. I double checked another site I visit regularly, and that site looked weird, too: huge background images, videos everywhere, weird fonts, etc., etc. At first I thought her machine had a virus, then it dawned on me it was all ads! I installed an ad blocker, and the difference was night and day! The unfiltered pages were basically unreadable.

This is amazing!

I have ADHD so I often find my self taking a non-linear route to following a recipe: Step 1, Step 3, Step 4, oops! Step 2, now where was I? Is that salt or baking powder in the bowl?

> I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system.

In my experience that may be true for the small number of people who leave the city for Marin, Contra Costa or San Mateo counties, but members of the creative communities that gave the city the reputation it had before the tech booms typically don't have children. I can think of countless coworkers with children, but I only know two couples who decided to have children after moving to San Francisco.