Weather here is amazing! Vancouver has such a bad rep when it comes to rain, but honestly it's not that bad. Here's what it's really like:
Between May and October, basically half of the year, you'll have very comfortable T-shirt weather, and blue skies I'd say 70% of the time!
Between December and March it's gloomy, but you'll have awesome snow in the mountains, just 30 min from downtown :) from our office we can see the slopes. Just went skiing with the team 2 months ago.
Vancouver is one of the few cities you can ski in the morning and lie on the beach in the afternoon, grilling BBQ and play beach volleyball.
Life's not that bad! I've been here 5 years :)
BTW, if anyone is in town for the YC interviews, I'd love to show you a good time!
The temperatures are very moderate in the winter, but the rain is bad. It can, and does, rain for multiple consecutive weeks in the winter. The lack of sun is even worse. It can have a very real effect on mood if you're from somewhere that gets more reasonable amounts of sunlight, which is pretty much anywhere else in Canada.
I lived there for four years and I had a very tough time with the lack of sun. It can be very oppressive. Vancouver has a lot of things going for it (as you mentioned) but I think it's unfair to gloss over the overcast weather.
I moved out to San Francisco during a historic El Nino season so I'm sure my perception is a little warped, but I'd note that you're providing a lot more detail about one than the other, and no citations. Not that any of this matters.
> Vancouver gets 1900 hours of sunlight a year. That's not a lot. Compare to Seattle (which is considered gloomy) at 2170 hours and SF at 3000 hours.
Are you talking about sunlight or sunshine? I think these are different. The city where I live gets apparently between 1500 and 1800 hours of sunshine, is a bit South of Vancouver (but in Europe) and not particularly known for not being sunny. So the amount of sunshine could actually increase for immigrants, not coming from California.
Ski in the morning and play beach volleyball in the afternoon? What month of the year? Whistler-blackcomb tops out at only 8000ft.
March or April. We've had an exceptionally harsh winter this year (snow on the ground in Vancouver for weeks on end -- happens about once a decade) but usually around now people are admiring the cherry blossoms on their way to the beach.
Whistler/Blackcomb has a perfectly skiable alpine through to the end of April, and you can ski past that if you want (but I wouldn't personally recommend it).
Ok, but even in May average high in Vancouver is 16.7C, average low of 8.8C. That's hardly beach volleyball weather. I'm skeptical of the claim that people ski in the morning and play beach volleyball in the afternoon...maybe one or two lucky days a year?
These are exactly the temperatures tons of people in this thread are saying is cold when referring to San Francisco. They actually correspond with March in SF.
People definitely play beach volleyball in Vancouver in May. Maybe they are just insane. But some days are much warmer than 17C, and when it's sunny the air temperature doesn't matter that much.
16c is almost tshirt weather in northern europe, which is about same latitude as Vancouver. This would pass as a colder summer day too. No rain = beach :)
60 Farenheit is not T-Shirt Weather, it certainly is not beach weather, that's cold for a high. As far as the latitude that's fairly irrelevant thanks to the Atlantic Drift, Great Britain is at the same latitude as Southern Alaska though their climate is quite different
I visited SF for the first time in December and at first I didn't realize why people were complaining about the cold when it was rather nice weather outside (I'm from 60 degrees north) and the weather was in the 60-70 Farenheit range (20 celsius) which I consider to be nice and temperate climate.
But after a week it hit me. It's cold as hell indoors! I have warmer in my house now than I had in my hotel room or office and it's snow and ice outside.
Blackcomb is open until late may, and then also has a summer season. (glacier)
Vancouver does get a lot of concentrated rain, but summers are sunnier than most cities in North America. 90% of that 1900 hours is between June and September.
Sunshine hours has more to do with the fact that the sun sets here at 4:00pm in the winter. More often than not it's sunny or cloudy with sunny breaks.
Actually, just the opposite. If most of the cloud cover/gloomy weather happened in the winter, then much of the clouds would be at night...which wouldn't dramatically reduce your sunshine hours.
If the gloominess happened during long days, you'd really see a drop in mean sunshine hours.
If people are used to Seattle or Portland OR weather, they'll be used to Vancouver weather. I must say though, getting used to the Winter gloom takes some getting used to.
Canada has lower corporate tax, liberal startup grants, greater income mobility, higher qol, health care, safer, more tolerance - but it's an itsy bitsy tad cold, no one goes.
This is only true if you're right up on the Peninsula. The South Bay area where YC is located is gorgeous for a huge fraction of the year, and the East bay is at least far less cold than downtown SF.
To each their own. SoCal is too hot for many people. Your comment might seem to imply that SF weather is silcon valley weather. 30 minutes south the weather is consistently warmer though leave the coast a little ways and the tempature can also dip more at night.
My family is from Victoria/Vancoucer and likes it cooler to enjoy active outdoor activities like running, biking and hiking. For this SF and Oakland weather is wonderful.
I also work a few blocks from the ferry building and wear shorts near year round, though that isn't saying much spending all
my time in a temperature controlled office.
Vancouver's climate/geography is a feature, not a bug. Mountain biking, climbing, and skiing in Vancouver is amazing. And you don't have to drive two or three hours to get there. It's literally right outside your front door. This will be a draw for outdoorsy types.
In my opinion, Silicon Valley is what it is majorly due to the kind of people it pulls in. There are several other places in the world which have a much better weather than SV, but don't have this kind of an ecosystem.
I don't mean people move to SV because of the weather. But if Vancouver somehow manages to have interesting and innovating tech companies, lots of jobs, high paying jobs, it would still be missing one key ingredient that California has - lots and lots of sun.
Oh, and burning man. That might not be everyone's thing, but its culture permeates throughout the bay.
Literally one of the things I hated the most when I visited California and all I hear about California is the weather (I should say, "San Francisco", not CA, since obviously CA is a pretty big state). I can't imagine what living somewhere that is the same every day.
If you grew up on the east coast, where you have about 1 week of pleasant weather in between hellish hotness in the summer and ball-shriveling cold in the winter, you'd appreciate SF's boringly middling weather.
I did grow up on the east coast, and have, so far, lived my whole life here.
I would never describe the summers as "hellish" nor the winters as "ball-shriveling". I thoroughly enjoy the tremendous variety through all the seasons. I would say there isn't "1 week of pleasant weather", but rather, a year of tremendously varying, enjoyable weather.
But, of course, that's sort of the point - to each their own.
I think he meant NY or New England when he said East Coast. North Carolina doesn't fit that pattern of having consistent 0°F to 105°F range every year.
Except Vancouver IS also the same every day: dark, gloomy, overcast clouds with constant rain or drizzle.
I lived in Seattle for a year, and I got depressed from the weather. My doctor handed me a huge bottle of Vitamin D to take, saying most of her patients that lived there are deficient.
I couldn't handle it, so I moved back to sunny California, and immediately, my happiness levels returned back to normal again. Humans rely on the light to regulate their biorhythms, and Seattle/Vancouver are so far up north that in December, the sun rises at 10 AM, and it starts getting dark at around 3 PM.
For what it's worth, I grew up on the East Coast in Pittsburgh, PA with its notoriously bad weather, and I could cope with the variety of having four distinct seasons, including real winters with snowfall, much better than Seattle/Vancouver's monolithic climate (excluding the short summer that gives you two months of what SF weather is like every day).
> Seattle/Vancouver are so far up north that in December, the sun rises at 10 AM, and it starts getting dark at around 3 PM
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Even on the shortest day of the year in Vancouver, the sun rises at shortly after 8am and sets just after 4pm, which is a full 3 hours more of sunlight than you're giving it credit for.
Yes, if you want to be pedantic, and you define sunrise as the "bottom of the sun" touching the horizon -- as a meteorologist would -- instead of the much more practical definition of the sun is "sufficiently above the horizon for it to no longer be dark outside."
I came in to work at 10 AM every day, and that's when it would start getting light outside (9 AM, still dark out).
Then, I struck a deal with my boss to work later and run my daily 5 kilometers midday at 2:00-2:30 PM instead of after work because by 3 PM, it would be too dark outside to feel safe from cars while exercising.
100x this. I get a lot of energy and happiness walking in the sun in the morning. Something so simple, yet has a dramatic effect on my quality of life.
I do feel like an outlier in that I really enjoy living in distinct seasons. It feel like it helps me mark the time internally, and reminds me that I'm a pretty small part of nature overall.
> I do feel like an outlier in that I really enjoy living in distinct seasons.
You're not really an outlier, I learned that I feel the same way after living in SF for a while. It's just that it doesn't occur to many people because many people don't live in two such radically different climates.
You guys realize that our weather sucks right? A handful of days over 75F per year, near-freezing cold and fog in _July_ in some parts of the city, needing to carry at least a light jacket/hoodie every single day of the year?
I've met a Londoner in Seattle (which is about 2 hrs from Vancouver), said he felt "at home" with the weather in Seattle... I'm guessing they're about the same, though I suspect you're right, given the UK's one big island ...
Winters are mild in Vancouver. What kills anyone who wasn't born there is the nearly yearlong overcast gloom... Sunshine is a necessary ingredient to feeling good. Coffee is just a temp fix.
Between May and October, basically half of the year, you'll have very comfortable T-shirt weather, and blue skies I'd say 70% of the time!
Between December and March it's gloomy, but you'll have awesome snow in the mountains, just 30 min from downtown :) from our office we can see the slopes. Just went skiing with the team 2 months ago.
Vancouver is one of the few cities you can ski in the morning and lie on the beach in the afternoon, grilling BBQ and play beach volleyball.
Life's not that bad! I've been here 5 years :)
BTW, if anyone is in town for the YC interviews, I'd love to show you a good time!