London vs San Francisco – back and forth

I moved here with my wife from the UK on a H1-B a few years ago now.

Three weeks ago we drove (less than 1hr) to Stinson Beach, spent all day hiking the hills, spectacular views of the Bay, the City and the Farallon Islands in the distance.

Two weeks ago we drove to Monterey, took a Whale Watching boat ride for a few quid. We spent an hour watching a group of Orca hunt Sea Lion a couple hundred feet away.

Last weekend, we drove to Tahoe. Spent two days learning to ski, hung out with friends in our cabin.

This is all in February, the weather has been great. I don't know what we're doing next weekend, but it's probably not something that was in driving distance back home.

It's obviously a personal preference thing, but for me, the lifestyle matters far more than the job. Both me and my wife couldn't stand London any more. It's great for a visit, but that's my fill.

Come to Switzerland. Four to five story apartment blocks everywhere; quiet, green, safe, underground parking everywhere, gorgeous and huge flats at reasonable prices, and despite having a pretty high population density it feels way less crowded than my old terrace in the UK.

So, I moved to SF in 1994 in my early 20's, which means my bona fides are longer than the OP, but still not native. However, from the greater baseline I can say a few things that won't be easily available to someone having lived in SF for a year:

1) public transit has sucked since well before the tech boom. When I moved to SF Oracle was probably the northernmost tech company of note (not counting Autodesk in San Rafael!) and the center of mass was decidedly in Mountain View. Today center mass is probably Foster City or perhaps Burlingame. Also, because the commute was only slightly less bad (CalTrain in particular hasn't improved much over the intervening 22 years) and there was no shuttle system, very few people chose to live in SF and commute south. And yet Muni was awful -- I worked in "Multimedia Gulch" (what the area around South Park used to be called) -- and typically if I wanted to get to work in any reasonable amount of time I had to take a cab. Today you'd take Uber, but same story.

2) Homelessness / dirtiness were just as present, if not worse. The Mission corridor was much worse, and parts of the Tenderloin have made huge improvements. Not to mention the tent cities around Rincon, the dramatic difference in the Embarcadero, Hayes Valley, and the Presidio. The Sunset and Richmond are mostly unchanged, and Visitacion Valley is still a part of town no one you work with goes to. :)

3) Housing prices -- ok, this is the one place where things truly have gotten incredibly, insanely worse. My efficiency in the city cost $600/month in October 1994. An equivalent space today costs $2100/month. There's a lot of things contributing to this, but I honestly think the shuttles are a huge part of the demand side of the problem. And of course the supply side has many well-documented shortcomings.

3) The number of silly companies getting started? Well, companies are just people, and honestly the number of silly people with crazy ideas in SF feels mostly unchanged. Their motivations are dramatically different, though. Today many of the most silly ones are simply in it for the money. Back in the mid-90's the people with rich fantasy life were all artists of the starving type. ;)

This is like Stalin vs. Hitler

London: gloomy, tremendously overcrowded, stressed people everywhere, binge drinking until 11pm and then you're out of luck, spineless european investors, and a cost of doing business so high due to high rents and expenses, that the Startup scene is really a non-starter.

SF: The frat boys have won, the nerds are a long-gone memory, the city is eating itself with brogrammers while america's homeless population of unfortunate veterans and mentally ill, pile up on the streets, looking in on the privileged class. The gridlocked system prevents even basic infrastructure enjoyed by most other civilized part of the world to exist (trains, housing, etc.)

Hitler vs. Stalin.

Live somewhere else. It is a wonderful world out there.

Try Prague for example. Safe, easy, cheap, full of great tech talent. Just to give one example.

I live in London, three weeks ago I drove (more than 1hr) 4 miles into the town centre.