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I live in Northern VA, and have grown up here. Beyond DC, investigate Arlington and Alexandria for more urban places to live. The latter is quite nice especially. It sounds like you're bringing your remote job with you. That's great! For non-defense tech, in Reston there are offices for Oracle, Microsoft, a bunch of AWS offices (more towards Herndon), and some smaller companies. Competition to get in all of the aforementioned is pretty fierce, and I suspect one good differentiator is having a security clearance. Community-wise, tech seems to still be putting itself back together after Covid. The local scene on Meetup seemed like a ghost town when I checked a few months ago. There are some efforts to restart Code and Coffee (https://www.meetup.com/NoVA-Code-Coffee/) meetups which look promising. Traffic is no joke. Think hard about where you want to live, how much you can pay, and how long you want to be in traffic. The less you drive, the happier you'll be. Finally, it's worth noting that almost everyone in the area is over-leveraged in at least one of time, money, job/life commitments, and that manifests as an ambient stress. Probably very typical of any area that has money and ambitious people. |