Curious for anyone living in SF/SV and thinking about moving - what are your top choices?
NY/CHI/PDX
This Is Silicon Valley
211–220 of 227 posts
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not necessarily wrong, just condescending. I'm still going to wear sneakers, t-shirts, and a puffy because it's dramatically more comfortable than dress shirts and leather shoes. I can know I'm dressing poorly and still choose to do it... company logo is another story - that one escapes me
Nothing wrong with sneakers and jeans + a tee provided they fit and the sneakers aren’t “dad sneakers” read: White new balances or god forbid saucony or brooks running shoes.
That seems a bit superficial. Both Saucony and Brooks make very good running shoes. It's not great to wear good running shoes during the day, but I'd look more askance at people wearing faux-athletic shoes that aren't really good for anything other than sitting in an office.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you solve it? I think it's a really tough problem and a significant fraction of the homeless population has serious mental health problems. I live in a city (Salt Lake City) that did a great job fixing its homelessness problem... for a couple of years. Now it's worse than it has ever been. Partly this is because more homeless people are coming to the area because they've heard about how great the resources…
It's simple. We need more fucking housing. Period. End of story. We need condo towers. We need townhomes. We need mid-rises. And secondly, we need free and low cost mental health services. That's it. Problem solved. The problem is we're 20 years behind.
More affordable housing only solves a problem for those with moderate incomes. Evidence: every other city in the US that has cheaper housing but also still plenty of homeless. Free and low-cost mental health services are closer to the mark, but still far from a simple problem. Many homeless people have complex, multi-faceted problems. Many resist initial contact. Many have trouble with maintaining any kind of regular schedule for either medication or counseling. Funding that many therapists (not just head-counters) and ensuring their security is a challenge unto itself. Not a simple problem at all.
If there's one thing that makes Silicon Valley unpleasant to me, it's the "simple, just do X" hand-wave that so many there indulge in regarding every damn topic. I'm sure your job isn't so simple a child could do it. Why act like everybody else's is?
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#214I'm gonna offer a slightly different perspective: SV isn't that nice, and it's not worth the price premium. There is a distinct lack of culture, of nightlife, of arts and humanities - even in San Francisco. We're a mediocre land of strip malls and suburbs masquerading as an international destination. Go to any other city and tell me that it's not MORE vibrant (Chicago, LA, NYC, Miami, Austin, Portland, Seattle, Houst…
Heh, plus one from me. There are 3 things you can do well in SV - work, sleep, and sit in traffic jams.
You can escape to SF, but then you are basically in an ordinary US city (maybe slightly better than Austin or Denver, maybe slightly worse than Portland or Seattle, but really not very different) but at twice the price; and to get anywhere (work, mountains, doesn't matter) you still have to drive forever to/thru SV or East Bay sprawl. Ugh.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#215I'm gonna offer a slightly different perspective: SV isn't that nice, and it's not worth the price premium. There is a distinct lack of culture, of nightlife, of arts and humanities - even in San Francisco. We're a mediocre land of strip malls and suburbs masquerading as an international destination. Go to any other city and tell me that it's not MORE vibrant (Chicago, LA, NYC, Miami, Austin, Portland, Seattle, Houst…
I live here and agree. For me, all of the nice parts are the access to beautiful outdoor opportunities. The arts, restaurants, culture, nightlife, and other aspects are sub-par given the cost of living. The trajectory is also poor, as every year feels like paying more for getting much less, particularly for the mediocre food options.
This is actually the part I don't understand when people mention it. I mean, it's better than Ohio, but outdoors anywhere near SFBA is sub-par; the closest skiing (I don't ski) is 3+ hours away, the closest decent rock climbing is 2 (St Helena and Pinnacles I guess?) and good rock climbing is 4+ (Tahoe, Yosemite, Bishop, etc.), the closest decent hiking is 3-4+ (Tahoe-ish), mountaineering 5-7 (Shasta, Sierras); and all these times are with no traffic. It's much worse in traffic, and the traffic just never ends on Friday night, it's all the way to effing Merced.
In many lesser tech hubs, all/many of these things are one hour away, and 3 hours is considered a long drive; plus sprawl ends 25 exits away from town so you get there much faster traffic or not.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#216Its a rant but I'm also surprised at how she writes "people's perfect life". Whats perfect about San Francisco, that has such a low demographic representation of family, the city is super dirty, people live with 6 figure salaries live in terrible housing conditions. Maybe google gets to shelter their employees from a lot of the cruft of SF, but walk 2 blocks away from the google offices in SF and you'll get yelled at…
You have to yell back at homeless people, keeps you energized.
Someone I know working a very good (esp. by Russian standards) tech job in Russia told me that he wouldn't want to live in the US or especially Europe, because the everyday struggle in Russia is what makes one feel alive. Only half-joking ;)
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#217People need to seriously get over themselves. The world is not fair. Life is not fair. Neither of them ever have been and neither of them ever will be. Every city has major problems. Every person experiences tragedy. Up and moving to a new city is just a band-aid. You'll see that new city through rose colored glasses at first. But after a few years those rose colored glasses will become a lot clearer and you'll see a…
The first part contradicts the rest. World isn't fair, life isn't fair. That means there's no universal law declaring that every city has problems or that everyone has to struggle. Some cities (and countries) have much fewer and smaller problems than others, and life can be much more, or much less, of a struggle; regardless of you (in)action(s).
It is in fact exactly what it should be - a search for better life until you are satisfied with what you have, whether you are escaping war-torn Syria and hoping to run a barbershop in Beirut, or escaping boredom-torn SF and hoping to run a hedge fund in NYC. Nobody owes you either, therefore you have to make if happen all by yourself.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really I think that hints that homelessness should be addressed federally just to stop the buck passing. Not helping matters is the electoral college biasing against urban areas where homelessness is more of a problem.
The buck-passing however is from San Francisco to other cities. Guardian published a piece estimating San Francisco would double its homeless population if it hadnt exported it.
The point is that it is multi-lateral circular shipping as a result of incentives - following them doesn't speak well to their character but it is a systemic problem.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mind boggling that a criticism of the narrowness of a monoculture is being called superficial.
But, it's not monoculture. At all. You are making a judgement call with that. An extremely wrong one at that.
> But, it's not monoculture. At all.
Then this part from the article didn't happen.
>The lack of diversity doesn’t stop at work — it permeates every aspect of life. Everyone wears Patagonia and North Face, everyone has AirPods hanging from their ears, and everyone goes to Lake Tahoe on weekends. And everyone talks about the same things: startups, blockchain, machine learning, and startups with blockchain and machine learning.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price premium you are paying, especially for housing, is really all about raising kids e.g. sending them to some of the best (albeit pressure-filled) public schools in the country all while keeping your high paying SV jobs. Basically assume that the quality of public SV schools are high enough that high earning parents are "OK" sending their kids to those schools rather than paying for private school. If you have…
> sending them to some of the best (albeit pressure-filled) public schools in the country Nope. https://www.niche.com/k12/search/best-public-high-schools/ Gunn just misses the top 20, PA just misses the top 50. Everything else is further down, and those are expensive places to live even by SV standards. Several states/areas, notably IL, do much better for a fraction of the cost. My daughter attends #56, in what is co…
You're paying SV prices because you're getting paid more than you could otherwise anywhere else.
Yes, for the average rank-and-file it's probably a worse deal than elsewhere, but if you are mid-level and have a chance at upper mgmt role then what you make is wayyy more than what you could elsewhere, even with the CoL.