| I'm almost entirely backend, but I can relate to the travails of interviewing in the Bay Area and dealing with unprepared interviewers. The engineers were like anywhere else-- and a fair proportion of them were very good-- but there are just a lot of arrogant people in the managerial ranks of the Valley. After you get an offer and you get to the negotiation phase, most Bay Area firms try to lowball you because-- even if you're from an objectively better place like NYC or Austin-- obviously everyone wants the privilege of working in California. (Expensive housing even in the suburbs, nightmarish traffic, and the most aggressive homeless population in the U.S. Where do I sign up?) Then there was one silly game company (which, presumably unrelatedly, is now being sued) that wanted me to sign a full NDA just to do a coding test. Not an NDA over the material of the test (which I would have signed) but one that included a one-year non-solicit covering all employees of that firm. I could be generalizing negative experiences, but it seems to be like they didn't prepare for your interview (recognizing that you were a front-end engineer) because of that obnoxious (and completely false) assumption that, if you were any good, you'd already be in the Bay Area. Obviously they had enough interest to take time out of their day, but not enough to prepare. In New York, there are a lot of startups that are of low quality; but the arrogance of Silicon Valley is unparalleled. Wall Street's reputation would have you expecting it to be worse but, by and large, it's not. |
I have seen sort of the opposite, though -- if you are experienced, you likely have a family and there is no way in hell you are moving to the Bay Area.