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191–200 of 267 posts

Re: San Francisco

#191

Post by spikels »

rdouble wrote: post #147
pfarrell wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oakland has about 600 police officers for a population which requires around 1,100. There have been five robberies on my street in upper rockridge, where we rent. It's an incredibly beautiful neighborhood and we pay a pretty high rent to live there. In 2010, the police announced that for a long list of crimes (including burgularies) they will not come out. We have caught people casing our neighborhood, strangers sitt…

The abduction happened in Rockridge?

Probably this one but there have been a few in the past few years:

http://rockridge.patch.com/groups/schools/p/two-attempted-ab...

Re: San Francisco

#192

Post by subsystem »

hack_edu wrote: post #185
subsystem wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument I've heard is that it's the "soul" of the industry that's being threatened, rather than the industry itself, and the fear is that SF will basically end up being "software hollywood".

Its not already?

I would think that SF is still a fairly good place if you want start tech companies and SV is fairly good if you want to work for one with substance. In comparison LA doesn't seem to be the natural choice if you want to make movies nor if you want to be in one with substance. But this is mostly speculation.

Re: San Francisco

#193

Post by corresation »

Enjoyable read, however the notes about the hotel gym were a bit strange to me. I may have a insufficient sample set, however I've never seen free weights in a hotel gym, beyond a couple of low weight dumbbells. Certainly no one doing deadlifts, and I can't imagine a hotel dealing with that.

Re: San Francisco

#194

Post by cmccabe »

keiferski wrote: post #64
danmaz74 wrote: post #47

"UK people are especially hard for me to understand, and I guess the opposite is also true. Fixing the language if you don't practice it is either impossible or requires a lot of time, probably I'll star to travel more." One very enjoyable way to improve at least understanding spoken English is to watch movies and (if you like that) tv shows. BTW, I agree that UK pronunciationS are much more difficult to understand (…

My guess is that foreigners are used to hearing American English from TV shows and movies, and thus find it easier to understand.

The UK was where English first evolved, and it seems like there is a lot more diversity in how it is spoken there. Fragments of older dialects that didn't win out still linger.

The US was settled relatively quickly and there wasn't that much time for regional accents to evolve. There are a few recognizable ones, like the Southern US accent, but it's not as dramatic as something like a Cockney or a Scottish accent in the UK.

Re: San Francisco

#195

Post by cmccabe »

baddox wrote: post #72
lnanek2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, yeah, I stayed at the StartupHouse a bit too. It was great being right in the middle of the city and being able to walk a block for groceries or tech meetups. Got a lot of coding done too! Too bad someone filed a complaint and got it shut down. I've never found the cost for living terribly high. All I need is a private room in a shared dwelling. The most I've ever paid for that is $2000/month in the center of S…

> I've never found the cost for living terribly high. All I need is a private room in a shared dwelling. That's fair enough, and describes me when I moved to SF straight out of college. It's probably also fine (even necessary) if you're a student or bootstrapping your own startup. But I've only been here two years, and it didn't take long for me to get sick of having a home situation that's in many ways worse than wh…

You don't have to live like a college student. Move to the south bay and you can get a 2BR place for half of what you're paying now. We have dishwashers, washing machines, garages, and storage rooms here too, oh my!

Re: San Francisco

#196

Post by stephencanon »

ryandrake wrote: post #66
michael_miller wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The schools in Palo Alto itself are very good. Palo Alto HS has an excellent reputation amongst people I know. It's a bit of a pressure cooker, as everyone in the school has parents in the tech industry who care about education, but the quality of teaching is great. The cost of living is another matter. A very basic starter home will in Palo Alto will run $1-2 million. Not unattainable for an engineer, but it will re…

Not to nit-pick, but I'm curious about how a $1MM starter home is attainable for an engineer. For someone making let's say around $100,000/yr, your mortgage payment (assuming 4.5% is $5,000) is going to be at least 50% of your gross salary. That's a lot of sacrifice. The common formula is that you really don't want your total mortgage payment to exceed 28% of your gross income: $5,000 * 12 / 0.28 = ~ $214,000/yr sala…

After including annual bonuses, ~214k is perfectly reasonable (on the low side if anything) for a good engineer with 5-10 years experience at google/facebook/apple/etc. Add in a second income and its easily feasible without bonuses. Million-dollar starter homes are obscene, but people actually do buy them.

Re: San Francisco

#197

Post by jweir »

rdouble wrote: post #152
davidw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that I really noticed when I moved from San Francisco to Italy was that here (Padua, Italy), there are young people, old people, rich people, and people not so well off. San Francisco is this kind of weird bubble where everyone has to have money to be there, so "regular people" don't exist. No kids, no old people, no people with sort of average jobs. I didn't like it, it felt too strange to me. I pr…

There are actually a lot of kids, and people with average jobs in SF. They just aren't white so tech people don't notice them. Regarding old people, retired people are actually the fastest growing demographic in the city.

Look at the census data for SF. There are far fewer children there than average in the US. I think the average is around 24% for under 18. In SF it is around 12%. Brooklyn, by comparison, is average.

Re: San Francisco

#198

Post by nilkn »

potatolicious wrote: post #153
ryanSrich wrote: post #80

Eh. They can keep it. • Average engineering salary in sf: 116K / year [1] • Average rent for a one bedroom: $2,700 / month [2] After taxes you're coming in around 72k / year - 32k / year for rent You'll have roughly 40k to play with. That may sound like a lot but factor in food, health care, travel, energy, internet, phone, and numerous miscellaneous expenses and you'll be hard pressed to save anything over 10k a yea…

Your math is reasonably fair, IMO. That being said, the type of work being done in DC and SF is vastly different. I attended an iOS conference in DC a few months ago (I'm based out of NYC) and was shocked at how few "tech company" people were present. Nearly everyone was working for a government agency, a government contractor, or freelancing with a primarily government client-base. Personally I don't think I can do…

Overall, SF makes me feel like the standard of living for developers is really going down, not up. For all that the startup culture has produced, it has also encouraged lots of people to basically save no money and significantly reduce their living standards all for the sake of "doing a startup." I'm always shocked to hear so many stories of people living in near poverty to work on a startup idea which is, in total honesty, far from amazing.

I don't mean to come off the wrong way or as judgmental. But when I think of a software developer in SF, I don't think of someone with a nice house with a backyard. I think of someone in a cramped apartment, probably with roommates.

Re: San Francisco

#199

Post by seanmcdirmid »

gyc wrote: post #166
philsnow wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in SF, summer is often colder than winter. I've never lived in DC, but - presence of good chinese food - weather (even though I love winter weather, DC summers would not be worth it) - jobs (which companies have large presences in SF vs DC-area) all conspire to make me completely incurious as to whether DC is "$11k/year" nicer than SF.

DC, especially in the suburbs, also has very good Chinese food.

Ya, I think parent hasn't been to DC before.

Re: San Francisco

#200

Post by keiferski »

cmccabe wrote: post #194
keiferski wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that foreigners are used to hearing American English from TV shows and movies, and thus find it easier to understand.

The UK was where English first evolved, and it seems like there is a lot more diversity in how it is spoken there. Fragments of older dialects that didn't win out still linger. The US was settled relatively quickly and there wasn't that much time for regional accents to evolve. There are a few recognizable ones, like the Southern US accent, but it's not as dramatic as something like a Cockney or a Scottish accent in…

Mmm, can't agree with you there. There are significant, noticeable differences between American accents. Boston, NYC, Western PA, the South, Texas, Midwest, and California all have very obvious differences, on par with the difference between Cockney and other UK dialects.
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