[jandrewrogers]

Seattle has similar temperature range and city living, probably about as close as you'll get to San Francisco in a city with tons of good tech jobs. I left my car in the Bay Area when I moved here and walk everywhere, the only time I drive is to go hiking and similar. Seattle is expensive but less so than the Bay Area.

Lack of income tax in Seattle/Washington is huge if you make tech wages. My mortgage in downtown Seattle is less than the additional income taxes I would pay if I lived in California!

[TheSageMage]

How are the local laws and politics? I feel like SF/CA have a lot of regressive housing policies that some other US cities are trying to adopt.

[jandrewrogers]

Much better than the Bay Area, they are throwing up high density construction about as fast as they can build it (there are about a hundred sky cranes over the city right now), both glass skyscrapers in the downtown core and mid-rise buildings (4-6 stories) in the immediately adjacent desirable neighborhoods like Capitol Hill. Minimal restrictions on new construction.

Importantly, zoning is intentionally mixed, so a significant fraction of the population doesn't drive for much of anything unless they choose to move way into the suburbs and it is a very neighborhood-y city. When a building goes in, the lower floor is often restaurants/bars/retail/etc to allow everything to be local. This is important because Seattle's highways are at max capacity and they can't be expanded anymore due to geological limitations (surrounded by water, no unused land remaining). The only way to continue the insane pace of population growth is to build up in a way that minimizes the amount of driving required, so that is how they have been dealing with it.

[TheSageMage]

Is public transportation good as well?

[aji]

it's decent. not world-class, but getting better. the light rail was recently extended and future plans for expansion seem to be met with approval, although they're at least a decade off. the buses are crowded during peak hours which at least means they're being used. in my opinion, a lot of the region's problems with transportation stem from the sudden spike in people living here and the challenging nature of the geography. for example, a bus from Queen Anne to Captiol Hill is not exactly practical because there's a big lake in the way, so anybody wanting to bus between the two has to change buses somewhere downtown or walk some leg of the trip.

[ameen]

Is it possible to walk to work? I've always been enamoured by Seattle thanks to Valve and Microsoft, hopefully I'll move there in the near future.

[jandrewrogers]

Yes, walking to work is definitely an option, a significant percentage of the population does exactly that, with biking being another very popular option for people that want to live in the suburbs. My commute to work in Seattle has always been walking, across multiple offices and companies.

Tech companies in Seattle are clustered in a few different neighborhoods, but most of them are walkable from their respective neighborhoods. That said, tech companies are slowly migrating toward the greater downtown area due to the gravitational pull of techies that want to live there. And everything in the greater downtown area is walkable if you don't mind walking (and people in Seattle don't). It isn't a small area.

Microsoft specifically, though, is still mostly on the "east side" (the metro area has a 88 square kilometer lake in the middle, Seattle proper is between the "west side" of the lake and the bay). Microsoft has offices in the major urban neighborhoods but still have a huge campus in Redmond (an east side suburb).

[asah]

A tech friend just moved there, loving it and sh*tting all over CA.

It's still summer.

[crucifiction]

Seattle weather is terrible compared to the south bay area/silicon valley, but it is comparably terrible to San Francisco proper.

[Hydraulix989]

No, in SF proper it doesn't constantly alternate between rain and drizzle 9 months out of the year.

Your friend is in for quite a surprise, especially in January when the latitude means sunrise at 10 AM, sunset at 3 PM.