Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 392 posts

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#271

Post by LogicX »

codecamper wrote: post #151

Maybe everyone leaving should just agree to locate somewhere that isn't some major city. We can all go there & start a new tech scene. How about Wyoming? Or Montana? Utah? What I mean is we should go somewhere beautiful. Somewhere we can take walks outdoors in between coding sprints. Why walks? It's been scientifically shown that walking helps you remember things better. Also sitting too long shortens your lifespan.…

Join me in Myrtle Beach, SC! Cost of Living is ridiculously low, right by the ocean, big city amenities, due to the short summer tourist season. Great weather, inexpensive flights to Northeastern Cities. I outline some of this on the (now out of date) http://WhyNotTheBeach.com site.

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#272

Post by LogicX »

Myrtle Beach, SC.

Unlikely place.

Cost of Living is ridiculously low, right by the ocean, big city amenities, due to the short summer tourist season. Great weather, inexpensive flights to Northeastern Cities. I outline some of this on the (now out of date) http://WhyNotTheBeach.com site.

There's no tech scene to speak of. So you have to be a remote worker to get the value. I maintain a list of remote job opportunities: http://LX.tc/positions

Interestingly it's growing organically due to people having their parents retire here. And then either needing to move here to take care of them, or just discovering the city when coming to visit.

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#273

Post by kaishiro »

_kyran wrote: post #254
kaishiro wrote: post #110

I'm from the US, down here in Melbourne, via Shanghai, via Boston, via NY. Had no idea what a vibrant tech scene they had on my way down. Envato, Fastmail, and Atlassian give the city some cachet. I contract primarily with US agencies, and if that's the case you just need to set the tone early on with regard to availability. Neat city though.

Redbubble, 99designs, BugHerd and Flippa are some other international products/companies that come to mind.

Ah, no shit. Had no idea BugHerd was down here too. I use them.

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#274

Post by BurningFrog »

halpme wrote: post #198
BurningFrog wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watch people's reactions change depending on the reputation of your company Does this mean you give different (mostly untrue) answers to this?

No. What I mean to say is, if someone claims to work at Google/Apple/Facebook/Microsoft, or a "cool" start-up like Uber or whatever else is popular these days, then everyone all of a sudden becomes more interested in talking to that person. "Oh wow, that's so cool! What do you do? How's it like working there??". If you work at a boring old enterprise company, most people react with "Oh, I see" and move on a different…

My thought was that to know what the different reactions were first hand, you'd have to try it yourself.

On second thought, you can of course observe how others are treated.

I can confirm that when I worked at Google, people had a lot more interest in talking about my work. That was in part because of the Google Glamour, but I'd guess it's even more because it's a company people have actually heard of and used themselves.

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#275

Post by wdr1 »

sjg007 wrote: post #105
halpme wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually go out and talk to people? The first thing anyone asks is what you do, followed by which company you work for. Watch people's reactions change depending on the reputation of your company. The whole social scene here is centered around networking, not making meaningful relationships. No one cares if you're a chill person with cool hobbies, but if you work at then you become one more inside connection w…

I lived in LA and the first thing you learn there is to not ask what anyone does because everyone's an actor.

Eh, I've lived here & haven't found that to be true. Sure, I do know people who work in the entertainment industry, but by and large they're regular people. Some are assholes, some are kind. I found the same to be true when I lived in Sunnyvale.

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#276

Post by push7joshi »

vonmoltke wrote: post #166
edwhitesell wrote: post #12

My wife and I lived in Dallas for 5 years, then spent 18 months in the Seattle area before deciding to move back to Dallas. Cost of living was _the_ deciding factor. Tech jobs are very easy to come by and the tech scene in Dallas has been steadily growing over the last 7+ years.

The market is indeed heating up here. Unfortunately it is all web/mobile/enterprise work, which I hate. :( I will probably end up leaving soon as a result.

+1 for enterprise. Startup culture is picking up, but most of the existing companies are big enterprises here

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#277

Post by SeaDude »

drblast wrote: post #207
shostack wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you cope with the weather and lack of sun? One big draw for me about the Bay Area is the weather. I realized how important nice weather was for me to be happy, so I consider the sunshine tax a sunk cost for my mental and physical well-being.

Seattle weather is horrible. Traffic is horrible. Housing prices are rising to insane levels. Everyone is depressed. Please don't come here.

\Second that

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#279

Post by awgl »

shostack wrote: post #139
brianwawok wrote: post #5

I am biased but I liked Chicago. You can get a good house for a decent price. If you want to raise a family though, inside the city schools suck - you have to play a lottery or try to test into a good school or pay for private. That said you won't find startup jobs like SF, a lot of the top paying jobs like NYC are in finance.

Grew up and lived in Chicago most of my life. Moved to the Bay Area in 2013. Key things to note about Chicago: - The weather is all extremes (extreme cold, extreme hot, extreme humidity) barring a few nice weeks during spring and fall - The government is beyond horrible (just check this stat on the conviction/jail rate for our mayors[1]) - From what friends who still live there tell me, the crime has only been gettin…

Hmm, meh, I feel like you can say a lot of pretty similar things about San Francisco and the Bay Area too. Let me defend Chicago with some counterpoints!

- Weather: Sure, SF Bay Area wins here in terms of what you might think of as regularly experienced weather, but it is not without its extremes. Let's recall that most of California, including surrounding SF Bay Area, has been in an extreme drought for the past several years [1], threatening local agriculture and water supply. Also, SF is famous for extremely devastating earthquakes that happen every so often [2] (though, you may not categorize seismic activity as weather, but still a natural occurrence sort of thing).

- Government: SF has its fair share of recent government corruption [3, 4] as well as historical seediness/lawlessness [5], not unlike some of Chicago's history.

- Traffic: Personally, I think the Bay Area has worse traffic than Chicago. The data in this report [6] seems to agree, ranking SF/Oakland as #3 worst in the country and San Jose as #5, whereas Chicago is #8 on the list. And, really, waiting on a few trains to pass for a sports game or special event is not unique to Chicago. Try taking the BART across the bay for a Giants game, Super Bowl 50, Bay to Breakers, Pride Parade, etc. I mean, every city's transportation system hits its limit with big events/gatherings. So what? It's part of living in a city that you learn to accept.

- Wages: Can't debate it. Chicago software engineers, making average of $76k/yr [9], do get paid less than SF, at $110k/yr [10]. But, also consider that income tax in Illinois is a flat 3.75% [11], whereas California's income tax for that bracket is 9.3% [12]. 5.5% more tax in CA is not small. (Federal income tax will also be lower in Chicago with the lower salary, but I haven't looked up those numbers.) And, let's consider cost of living more in general. This handy website [13] says that "A salary of $76,000 in Chicago, Illinois should increase to $178,313 in San Francisco, California", which is mainly due to housing being 428% more expensive in SF than in Chicago. That says a lot! You might interpret that as the $110k/yr average salary in SF actually gets you less quality of living than the $76k/yr in Chicago (according to this website). Or something like that. Don't know, but my housing quality in SF is twice as much for half the space as compared to what I had in Chicago. (What am I doing here?!)

- Crime: According to this (presumably reputable) data [7, 8] Chicago has been steadily improving in terms of crime over the past more than a decade. SF has been kind of steady, and, according to that data, is actually worse per capita than Chicago. I didn't expect that at first. Chicago is a much bigger city and than SF, so that kind of helps to dilute crime among the population, I suppose. Anyway, my anecdotal evidence from friends tell me that it is improving. We must have different kinds of Chicago friends. Or maybe we should trust data instead?

- Schools: SF public schools have a lottery system too [14]. I will grant, though, that CPS does have a lot of ongoing battles with the city and state for funding, like recent closings and strikes. That stuff sucks because it's usually the poorest schools that suffer the most. Ultimately, this is a bigger societal problem than us engineers debating about where the best place for us to live is on a web forum. (Probability of existential crisis increasing...)

Okay. Got that off my chest. I love Chicago. I hope you and others do too still. I may move back soon. Writing this stuff down has, well, made me think twice about wtf I'm doing out here on the West Coast...

1. http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake 3. http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/01/22/3-former-fundraisers-for... 4. http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/I-am-guilty-final-S-F-co... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Coast,_San_Francisco 6. http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/08/28/10-cities-wit... 7. http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Chicago-Illinois.html 8. http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californi... 9. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/chicago-software-engineer... 10. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en... 11. http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-illinois.a... 12. http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-california... 13. http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/chicago-il/san-fran... 14. http://www.sfusd.edu/en/enroll-in-sfusd-schools/how-to-apply...

Re: Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?

#280

Post by Johnnybe »

luckydude wrote: post #181
eclipxe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The atmosphere here is, I dunno, toxic. Too many people here size each other up based on where they work and where they live and people are way too obsessed with advancing their careers and chasing higher salaries, more luxurious cars, nicer apartments, etc. Everyone seems to have some sort of inferiority complex if they don't work for the "Big 4". People in Davis/Sac seemed less superficial and it was a lot easier…

Moved to Mountain View in 1987, then to SF about a year later, then to the Santa Cruz mountains about 10 years ago. My wife and I were in tech that whole time (me: SCO, Sun, SGI, Cobalt, briefly at Google, then BitMover). Neither of us enjoy going to Mountain View any more. It's the worst parts of a big city (crowded, traffic, parking, expensive housing) and the worst part of the suburbs. And there is a lot of snobbe…

Redwoods, falcons = real friends
Post reply on HN