The author notes most of the reasons why 'Move to SF' isn't great advice, but then totally disregards them.<p>Maybe having to worry about stepping on a syringe isn't a way that someone wants to live! Maybe it's healthy to meet and associate with people who aren't in tech! Maybe you can get a great job working for one of those world class companies and still get 5 job offers a week - they're all from recruiting agencies, anyhow - and live somewhere far more livable (Austin, Boston or Raleigh come to mind quickly).<p>Can't argue with the weather, though. Damn, Northern California has amazing weather.
"If you’re good, it’s not uncommon to see software engineers with 5-6 years of experience make $300k-$400k per year in total compensation (which includes your base salary, yearly bonus and stocks)."<p>So I've heard this before, but it never matches up with data that sites like Glassdoor provide. Like, right now, the listings for "senior software engineer" with 10-14 years of experience in SF seem to top out around $200k in salary + bonuses, and that's the extreme upper end. The average is under $160k<p>Is the Glassdoor data bad, or is this a case of the author's information merely being anecdotal? Or are we comparing apples to oranges - do such people get 1/3 to 1/2 of their total compensation in stock?
I do think that you can get the same software experience in NYC, Boston, Seattle, and probably Austin too. I always tell people to start their careers in a big city or SV, but it really is an atrocious area to raise a family. California is nice and SF is a cool enough city, but SV is just sprawl, sprawl, sprawl. You’d expect more give the COL.<p>Anyways. I think this author has some serious rose colored glasses on, but I think the basic advice still stands. The earning power you can command for the rest of your career will be monumentally different if you start your career in a city.<p>I started a career on the West coast and made enough of a name for myself that I work remotely in the MidWest with an SV salary. There’s no way I could be doing what I’m doing now if I hadn’t started in a city.
Are there any other cities that have survived as desirable places to live after they've lost everyone outside of the monoculture?<p>To someone like me who has interests both in- and outside of software, there's no question that San Francisco is the top place in the world for software today, but that doesn't mean I'd want to live there -- any more than I'd want to live in an highly productive industrial district.<p>> Beyond the opportunities you’ll receive personally, tech is currently reshaping the whole world — and San Francisco is at the center of it. I feel lucky every day, getting to witness what’s happening here. It’s often compared to the renaissance in Florence during the 15th century.<p>Except Florence was <i>all about</i> art, and earlier in this blog post you observed that San Francisco "chased away" all the artists. Those sound like completely different environments. Life is not just about living at an economic inflection point. Oil reshaped the world, too, but that doesn't mean I'd want to have lived at a refinery in the 1950's.<p>> Some people get super annoyed when you say this.<p>I'm not surprised. If the only thing you take from the history of Florence is that it was economically successful, I think you're missing the point. Quick, name anything at all memorable from 15th century Florence that is <i>not</i> about art.<p>Even Florence couldn't survive without art. There were just as many merchants living there after the Counter-Reformation began, but it couldn't save them from the fall.
"3 years in SF will not only have been an amazing experience you’ll always remember; they’ll pay dividends for your whole life."<p>I lived in Mountain View in the 1980's, and I have found this to be true. My wife and I left the area to be closer to our relatives when we started our family, but every job I've had since that time was easier to get due to that experience.
But I love Colorado. The weather is great year round (IMO), tons of sun, even in the winter, which keeps it comfortable and melts the snow quickly. Boulder is also more feasible for commuting than the bay area, allowing you to be removed from Boulder housing prices (which are still not at bay area levels).<p>You also get a better variety of different people with different attitudes (more so in Denver and CoSp), as compared to the ironically homogeneous bay area tribe. I take an active interest in encompassing as many different things and ideas as possible, and like having people around me that fuel that.
From my perspective, SV isn't an option for two reasons: I don't want to raise a family there, and the politics of the Valley aren't compatible with my own.<p>I rarely see the latter mentioned, but it's increasingly a driving concern for many Americans.
<i>personal anecdote on monoculture</i><p>It's a big deal, and hard to mitigate. I love tech, I get paid to know and care about new technologies. However, when I'm not working I want to hear about it less and less. My current roommate has very little personality traits other than "hey I'm good at tech", he's also a self proclaimed "rationalist". Other than that, we've got zero in common, he doesn't listen to music, doesn't watch movies, only reads technical books.<p>I've met numerous people in the valley that have zero other redeeming personality traits. Including myself (when I first moved here), I find talking about climbing or hiking or biking or history is MUCH more interesting than talking shop about various machine learning techniques.
I live in SF.<p>There is a very clear trend of companies starting to look elsewhere for talent, such that in the long term, I really doubt the tradeoffs of SF will be worth it. The cost of living here is just terrible and I think companies are starting to accept that the government and people just really don't want tech to be here, at all.<p>Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about:<p>New Relic - serious tech company - note how much elsewhere: <a href="https://newrelic.com/about/careers" rel="nofollow">https://newrelic.com/about/careers</a><p>Carbon Robotics - Guadalajara - <a href="http://www.carbon.ai/careers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.carbon.ai/careers/</a><p>Front page of the SF Chronicle: <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/For-San-Francisco-s-fast-growing-tech-13227433.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/For-San-Francis...</a> "Politics, economics and real estate could make jobs boom elsewhere"<p>Absurd cafeteria ban - showcases the general attitude of the city government toward tech, something between a never-ending money fountain to pillage, and a nuisance: <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-proposed-employee-cafeteria-ban-not-to-13121402.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-proposed-em...</a><p>Gecko Robotics, Pittsburgh: <a href="https://www.geckorobotics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.geckorobotics.com/</a><p>Others offhand: Boston Dynamics, wherever Amazon puts HQ2 (I'm guessing Atlanta, DC, or Pittsburg), Sendgrid and Gusto moving people to Boulder, numerous great options in Seattle (Zillow, Microsoft, Amazon), tons of great companies in NYC.<p>I really believe you have to skate to where the puck is going with this stuff, not where it is now. In my view, the future is clearly "the rise of the rest". Salaries have gotten so out of control, the only companies who can afford to be here at the mega-tech giants (monopolies) who can afford the pay numbers people are throwing around. It's not sustainable and I think there will be major growth elsewhere in the next decade, especially as venture funding starts to fan out, traditional industries start to figure out software more (e.g. food processing in Chicago), and people in their 30s with 10+ years experience want to start families and have to take care of parents.
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<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180925150228/https://florentcrivello.com/index.php/2018/09/25/go-west-young-man/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20180925150228/https://florentcr...</a>
I would include more cities on this list. For starters, LA/NY/Boston/Seattle. The software scene in Los Angeles is great right now. I don't have first-hand knowledge of the other cities but they definitely have the reputation of being great for developers.
Solid advice (runs counter to most HN posts). But young people taking this advice will truly benefit for it. I can personally attest to it, as my income went up 8x just moving from Arizona.
I live and work in the Bay Area (close to SF). I was an early stage employee at a startup recently acquired by one of the big tech companies. Didn't make millions, but I did make hundreds. Honestly, I feel I'm living the dream. I make more money than I thought possible and my job is super creative. I'm in AI. The density of opportunity here is amazing. The startup I was at was able to hire locally the depth of talent it needed to succeed. Fundamentally, if you are talent or you want talent, you need to be here.
> If you’re good, it’s not uncommon to see software engineers with 5-6 years of experience make $300k-$400k per year in total compensation (which includes your base salary, yearly bonus and stocks)<p>Can you please point me to one of these companies that pay $400k per year in total compensation?
Having attended Berkeley, and gone through that "honeymoon phase", these kinds of articles capture exactly why I left the Bay Area. Sure there's lots of opportunities, but most are morally bankrupt. There's a reason the greatest teachers have all said, clean your room before you change the world. San Francisco can't even clean after itself. It's not going to make the world a better place if it can't even take care of itself.
I feel this would be a better essay if the author had put more of his personal context into the essay. Like what has happened since he has “gone west”. It is not clear how he became a product manager at Uber.
This is sound advice even if that means only starting your career in SF. Once you have an established career in the Bay Area you can command similar a similar salary in other cities and live where you want.
> 1-3 recruiting emails per week is normal.<p>Same for me, even before I lived in a fancy city. Some work experience with stuff one finds cool is necessary though I guess.<p>(This might be obvious, but when you sign in to Monster.com or so, you get even more, at least if you have some degree from a University or so... ;)
Originally from Bay Area, went to school, but so glad moved to a small city in Texas. Good to explore other opportunities and everywhere people need programmers
In 2018, "move somewhere to do a tech job" should not even be thinkable. Maybe one needs to make a virtual city where VCs find entrepreneurs who hire remote workers to work in a virtual office. Make it a VR space. But you don't need to deal with moving to do all that.
<p><pre><code> I tried hard to convince a couple of friends to come.
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This is Stockholm Syndrome<p><pre><code> You’ll earn more here than you would anywhere else.
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Because the rent is proportionally expensive. If money is your focus work remote in Indonesia for a bay area<p><pre><code> If you decide to move here, it means you probably have more ambition than average. Consider that everybody else you’ll meet in the Bay Area will share that with you.
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I would say there is a greater chance that people share the same ambition when it comes to tech, but you can't say Silicon Valley has more ambitions people on average if most of them are slaving away at FAANG companies.<p><pre><code> California is stunning. It’s sunny year long
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Not San Francisco
young people, please don't take the advice in this article seriously.<p>> My objective in this post is to convince you that you need to move to SF.<p>There are many ways to have an enjoyable life. Anyone telling you that you have to make all of the choices that they made to have an enjoyable life is worth ignoring.
I will say that a lot of this is self-reinforcing: huge SFO/SEA companies offer competitive compensation, so the majority of people who have competitive compensation live where they are offered, and this sends a signal to yet more people that that's where the competitive compensation is at.<p>If you generated that much perceived value in Manchester, NH or Topeka, KS then you could probably manage to have cash flow like that without being in SFO/SEA. Yes, a lot of that value exists only because these people can see eachother in coffee shops and meetups, day in and day out, year round, in the same place; but once you're in, being in SFO or SEA is not why you're worth paying that much.