[michaelochurch]

Don't rule companies out because they're in the financial space. If you refuse to work for finance in, say, NYC, then you'll be unemployed often because that's a lot of what's out there.

Code quality problems aren't limited to finance and the people in finance are, on average, somewhat better than (at least) the NYC startup crowd. (There are good people in each, of course, and bad.)

I don't know the UK scene, but if you're certainly moving to London, you shouldn't rule out finance. Even though there are some terrible financial firms out there, I don't think that the whole set of financial companies is, as a category, any worse than other businesses (including startups). Those blue-sky R&D jobs (to which finance might compare poorly) are so rare and inaccessible to our generation that one can assume them not to exist in the corporate world (at least, not in the U.S.).

[jorgeortiz85]

    If you refuse to work for finance in, say, NYC, then
    you'll be unemployed often because that's a lot of what's
    out there.

Nonsense. NYC has a blossoming startup scene. Many prominent startups (Tumblr, Etsy, 10gen, Foursquare, Kickstarter, OkCupid, Mashable, BuzzFeed, SecondMarket, ZocDoc, Fab, Birchbox, Gilt, Seamless) are based in NYC, and many large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay) have growing NYC offices.

List of tech companies in NYC: http://nytm.org/made-in-nyc/grid

Map of tech companies in NYC: http://mappedinny.com/

[michaelochurch]

The startups are there and they pay well for someone in his 20s, but by the time you're 35 and looking to raise a family, you've priced yourself out of non-financial jobs (if you need to stay in NYC) unless you're independently wealthy or extremely well-established.

This is much of why I think the future is elsewhere. Not NYC, not the Valley. It's going to be somewhere where it's possible for a normal 40-year-old to have a career as a programmer (not a manager who occasionally codes) because it genuinely takes decades to become great at this stuff. Most of these "social" apps could be built by anyone, but if I needed a medical device, or an extremely high-performance numeric library, I'd rather the code be written by a seasoned gray-haired guy who understands technology at a deep level than by the sorts of people in charge at a lot of the startups where I've worked.

[ig1]

The median household income in NYC is $48,631, as an average software developer at an average startup you'll already be earning significantly more than most families.

Sure if you work in finance you can earn more, but it's about funding a more lavish life-style than a necessity. Pretending anything else is insulting to the millions of families who are living on less.

[jorgeortiz85]

Many people raise families on programmer salaries at large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, etc).

Do startups generally pay below market? Yes. Is finance even more lucrative? Yes. But you certainly won't be "unemployed", as you suggested, if you don't work in finance.

[doubter]

I'm 31 so this is kind of my concern too. I can see amazing startups I'd love to work at, but probably the work schedule and the pay wouldn't match the needs of a family in London.

[nwp]

As a guy coming up on 40 this is my number one concern.