"Plus I find the Bay Area congested, racist, incestuous, and overpriced." I like this guy.
Sounds like a nice guy going through a bad breakup.
Leaving Google
161–170 of 229 posts
Re: Leaving Google
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vancouver is a real city. Seattle is provincial, passive-aggressive, unfriendly to outsiders, and segregated. A hick town with skyscrapers as I've often called it. Californians who've moved there almost unanimously agree with my first sentence, and crack up at the latter. (Sadly, I lived in Seattle for 17 years. The Bay Area before that, and New York now.)
Seattle 8 years. Sadly I have to agree wholeheartedly with this, because I've been unable to find much contrary evidence. The 'Freeze', which is deservedly famous, is very, very real, no matter how many people try to minimize its reality. Go ahead, come here - it's on display every second of every day in every cubic meter of the city. The only people who will make eye contact or speak a word to you are the homeless -…
Damn it! I am planning to move to SF, Seattle, or NYC. The OP's story and your story are too sad about SF and Seattle.
Re: Leaving Google
#163I visited Seattle and Vancouver for the first time recently. I was surprised at how similar they were. I was expecting Vancouver to be a lot different than it was. Vancouver was even more high-rise, glass-everything, gated-community than Seattle. I spoke with the locals who informed me that was Vancouver's MO, and if I wanted a culturally interesting Canadian city, I should head over to Toronto.
The fascinating part about living in Toronto compared to Vancouver (or even another city, say New York), is how we view foreigners/immigrants. A few weeks ago I randomly spoke with a man from Egypt. My immediate assumption, even though he had an accent, was that he lived in one of the various multicultural neighbourhoods in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). Only after speaking with him a while longer did I truly realized that this was his first visit to Toronto and that he was not actually living in the GTA. I would hazard a guess that most Torontonians would make the assumption that any visible minority or person with an accent is an immigrant living in the GTA. Tourists and visitors walk invisibly through the city.
I compare this to my experience in Vancouver where, even though I may be a visible minority myself who only speaks English, I was treated as a foreigner. In New York, people were shouting racial slurs at me as I walked down the street. Seattle/Bay Area however, I was treated like your typical tech worker.
Re: Leaving Google
#164As someone who works 97% remotely from a mostly-colocated office, I have to agree that it's a terribly inefficient way to work. If everyone were remote, it could probably work, but if it's just one or two out of a dozen or a hundred, it's very difficult. On balance, my current job is still the best choice for me, but there's a constant background of frustration mostly surrounding communication failures.
In my experience, teams or companies that have significant problems communicating with remote workers just aren't very good communicators. Physical proximity is a crutch that can help them overcome their disability/dysfunction, but they almost always still have major communication problems--they just have more problems with remote employees.
A team that's good at communicating with remote employees is usually just good at communication in general.
Re: Leaving Google
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you realize that you didn't refute or deny any of his criticisms?
I'm not sure what you're expecting when the criticisms were vague jabs like "not a real city," "provincial," "hick town." Also I did say that I find the people friendly, which is the opposite of unfriendly. Yes Seattle people tend to be passive, but that is not the same as unfriendly.
"provincial, passive-aggressive, unfriendly to outsiders, and segregated" are not vague jabs.
Re: Leaving Google
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vancouver is a real city. Seattle is provincial, passive-aggressive, unfriendly to outsiders, and segregated. A hick town with skyscrapers as I've often called it. Californians who've moved there almost unanimously agree with my first sentence, and crack up at the latter. (Sadly, I lived in Seattle for 17 years. The Bay Area before that, and New York now.)
Seeing as California is extraordinarily passive-aggressive (from a New Englander’s perspective), that really says something.
Being from Europe, I can only confirm that people in the Bay Area are in fact, incredibly passive-aggressive. The first few years I must admit that I felt like living on Mars. Even-though I'm coming from a "western" country whose lifestyle and tradition are somewhat similar, the cultural gap was actually much bigger than say, with Indians or Latinos.
At work for example, it took me a rather long time to understand the real meanings of "I'm not sure" which means 'no' or "interesting" which means more or less that what you said is stupid. Not to mention being asked 200-times a day how I am doing or whether I found everything I was looking for at wholefood.
Yep, people in this region have an imperial need to "be nice", at least on the surface and it can feel Orwellian at times if you are not used to it, especially on those days of bad mood. I think in Thailand they call that "sweet mouth, salty butt". But hey, that's also a huge plus, since it prevents a lot of bad vibes and unneeded frictions. I believe it's just a societal organization.
Sometimes I go back to my country for work, and over there people's number one characteristic is distrust and indifference, and I can guarantee you that I feel like a foreigner over there now - well, on normal days, because if I happen to be in a bad mood, I'm kind of showing signs of Tourette syndrome and want to punch everybody.
Overall, I think I'm mixing well in the Bay Area. And more importantly, most of my friends and relatives who share those character traits do tolerate that some foreigners like me don't necessarily think and act the same way. And frankly, wouldn't the world be boring if people were the same everywhere ?
Re: Leaving Google
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a little sad he didn't say anything about Seattle, only a couple hours from Vancouver and with sizable and thriving Google offices. It is also has "greens and greys and unfussily variegated people" -- clearly it's not Canada, but in general it would be a much less drastic transition!
This was Google's thought when I was talking to them. "Seattle's only a couple hours away. You could possibly even commute!" I checked out the area through the lens of possibly living there when I went down for my interview. Seattle and Kirkland are not comparable to Vancouver in the slightest. Mostly the ghettos and rampant poverty, combined with the fundamental social differences between the countries. Didn't help…
Wait, have you actually been to Vancouver before? Vancouver has one of the higher crime rates for a North American city and is quite noted for it, Seattle is much lower. Also, Kirkland doesn't have suburbs (it is one), and totem lake isn't that bad.
http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/wa/seattle/crime/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-cri...
Re: Leaving Google
#168It's interesting to see how he states that his remote work arrangement would not have been as productive as him moving.
I think that's company culture friction ... if a group of people primarily works from an office, it takes a serious effort to accommodate remote workers.
Re: Leaving Google
#169You'd be surprised how many people that I've seen leave Valley-based companies to live in Vancouver. It's especially prevalent over the last few years. Likely why Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter are growing teams here.
Honestly, you made the right call. As a technologist, you can make an impact from anywhere but places like Vancouver take a very very long time to build and develop (Good Luck Mountain View :) ). I know, I've lived around several of Google's most prolific offices.
Re: Leaving Google
#170For those who don't know, Tim Bray was one of the original inventors of the XML spec and has been a Developer Advocate at Google for a while. Shame to see him go, I am joining DevRel at Google in the fall and I thought it was awesome to have someone as experience as Tim working kinda-sorta-near me. Hopefully he goes on to do something great.
> Tim Bray was one of the original inventors of the XML spec That son of a bitch... ;)
Remove some DTDs. Then remove the completely-silly need to put the tag name in the closing tag, and hey, it's a nice format.
At least it has comments and is suitable as a config file format, unlike JSON.