[halpme]

I went to UC Davis but would frequently visit Sac. It's such a beautiful and laid-back city, and the people are great. SF is only a one hour drive away and Lake Tahoe is relatively close too. I've been living in Mountain View for a couple months and I miss the Davis/Sac area more and more as time goes on. 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 for me to make friends. Also, yeah, the cost of living is so much cheaper. I'm paying $1700 for a tiny studio in MV. Back in Davis I was paying $1400 for a pretty nice 2-bedroom apartment. Meh.

[eclipxe]

>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 for me to make friends.

Is this your own set of insecurities being projected on others? I never got that sense in SV...

[luckydude]

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 snobbery about where you work and what you do, that's been there since the first day I got there (and I'm part of the problem, I was all snotty about the fact that I worked in Sun's kernel group; at the time that was the top of the heap, at least in my eyes).

Personally, I'm happier up in the mountains. Can still get to SF in about 1h15m, get to the valley in about 30m but I live among redwoods, falcons, etc.

[Hydraulix989]

If anything, I think low-level programming has become an underappreciated skill.

If you work on kernel development, be as snooty as you want.

These days, those jobs that require real expertise and in-depth knowledge aren't nearly as heavily compensated as your run-of-the-mill Rails dev Stackoverflow pasting position.

[Johnnybe]

Redwoods, falcons = real friends

[jjtheblunt]

Totally same for my wife and me: 15 minutes up into mountains and the nonsense is 10 miles away.

[el_benhameen]

How's housing up there? I went to school at the UC and have always dreamed about moving back.

[luckydude]

It's gotten expensive. Figure $1.2M for a decent 34 bedroom.

[trav4225]

Not too bad. My last 34-bedroom house was at least 10x that. ;-)

[halpme]

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 <cool company> then you become one more inside connection when someone needs a new job and a reference. YMMV.

[nostrademons]

You're looking in the wrong places. If you want to meet people with interesting niche hobbies, meet them in the niche. If you like rock climbing, go to a climbing gym. If you like building hardware, go to TechShop or Maker Faire. If you're into martial arts, there are some great Krav Maga gyms in the Bay Area. Or you could always hang out with the people in your company - no comparing yourself based on where you work for there, because you all work for the same place.

The networking scene is for networking, so of course it's filled with careerists. The coffeeshop scene is largely the same (though occasionally you meet one of the local students), since "let's grab coffee" is Silicon Valley shorthand for "I would like to assess your usefulness to my future career goals."

But there are many other scenes in the Bay Area. My wife ran the local Peace Corps alumni chapter for a while, so I end up hanging out with a lot of very interesting do-gooder international development types. I still get together for pizza with a bunch of my old Googler friends, even though I left almost 2 years ago. There are plenty of very authentic startup founder types around too, ones who aren't in it for a quick buck but because it's what they do and have been doing for 15-20 years now.

[sjg007]

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

[bcheung]

I was living in LA for a while (5 years). I got a job as a photographer at a modeling agency. Pay was crap so I tried doing more programming work but most of the work wasn't very innovative and really boring compared to Silicon Valley so I moved back to the bay area where I'm originally from.

Going from being surrounded by models all day to living in Man Jose is quite the difference. Wish I could still be there.

[tomcam]

OTOH the best way to make anyone, and I mean anyone, in LA happy is to ask them how their screenplay is going.

[wdr1]

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.

[beachstartup]

these days everyone in LA is working on some kind of tech-related nonsense. i moved here to get away from all that, and it followed me.

now i just want to go live in the woods with my dog.

[mikekij]

@beachstartup Me too. In North SD. Want to work on med device security and take company retreats in the woods?

[rosettesor]

@beachstartup @mikekij sounds great. when can we start? just moved from sf to venice, and now all i want to do is move where i can own land and start a farm.

[praneshp]

>> Do you actually go out and talk to people?

I do, and your description only fits a small minority of those I meet when I actually go out.

[BurningFrog]

> Watch people's reactions change depending on the reputation of your company

Does this mean you give different (mostly untrue) answers to this?

[halpme]

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 topic.

[BurningFrog]

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.

[Hydraulix989]

Haha, whenever I wear my startup's t-shirt, I see people "stealthily" eyeing the logo to size me up all the time here. Everyone wants to be on the gravy train.

[sheri]

> Is this your own set of insecurities being projected on others? I never got that sense in SV...

I am not the OP, but I share his/her views. To the above point, maybe?

I used to perceive NY/Wall-Street as all about image, and SF/tech-scene to be much more down-to-earth and friendly. I don't find that anymore. Taking Caltrain, I see people wearing Google/FB/Twitter/XXX t-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, bags etc. Company badges are displayed prominently, and its easy to recognize companies from the badge. YC t-shirts, sweatshirts are also common. If not company t-shirts, then I see tons of MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Harvard t-shirts, sweatshirts etc. I rarely saw any company or university branded apparel in NYC.

The prominence of these in SV seems like a way to showcase an elite status.

[nostrademons]

I think you're reading into this based on how the rest of the world operates. Most techies in Silicon Valley wear company schwag because it's free. My wardrobe consists of (or has consisted of, my wife made me throw a bunch of the older stuff out) T-shirts from Amherst, Brandeis, and Olin; a TellApart T-shirt; a Medallia T-shirt; a Microsoft T-shirt; a Foliage Software Systems T-shirt; at least 6 Google T-shirts; 2 Google hoodies; and then a bunch of unbranded stuff I got as gifts. I don't think I've ever bought a T-shirt with my own money.

[JBlue42]

Same in LA. A lot of crew t-shirts and other stuff given out at the end of production. And the recently-graduated college students? College t-shirts (sometimes sweatshirts in our 'winter').

[eip]

I used to go to the bay all the time and I would always wear Foursquare (snowboarding brand) hoodies. This was at a time when Foursquare the SV startup was really popular. People would always stare and ask if I worked there. Eventually I just started telling them I was a co-founder.

[kika]

Look, imagine two tungsten balls, 4" in diameter each, at night. One is painted matte black and the other is heated to 2500 degrees Celsius. Which one is more visible? These are two absolutely equal balls and one constitutes exactly 50% of the population :-)

I take Caltrain regularly (I live on Peninsula and work in SF FiDi) and I see these people, but nothing out of ordinary. There're, I believe, 8000 working in FB Menlo Park office. That's a lot of people. And the industry is heated up, so these people are more visible because the temperature is higher. So what, it happened before (2001) and will happen again :-)

[eclipxe]

Or maybe they just don't care to buy sweatshirts, jackets, bags, when they get them for free from their company? Who cares what people wear on CalTrain??!?

[pikachu_is_cool]

Not everyone in SV is elitist, it's probably something like 5-10% of people. Maybe you haven't run into anyone like that yet. But they're there. And it is a lot, when compared to the 0% in most other places.

[autotune]

$1700 for a tiny studio would be a steal here in SF.