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Comment by spillihp | Hacker News Reader

Want to put in a quick plug for Sacramento. Great quality of life here, generally great weather (sometimes a little hot in summer, but sunny most of the year), affordable housing with rents between $500 and $1,000 (and affordable to buy a house - still good places available for under $300k), nice neighborhoods, great amenities, bars, restaurants, all that. Good access to awesome outdoors. And really easy to get to the Bay if need be. By Amtrak and BART it takes me 2 hours 12 min to get from downtown Sac to Downtown SF - regardless of traffic (and you can easily work - or drink a beer - on the train). Given how much more affordable it is I am really surprised more folks don't set up shop out here and just head into the bay on occasion / when need be.

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I went to UC Davis but would frequently visit Sac. It's such a beautiful and laid-back city, and the people are great. SF is only a one hour drive away and Lake Tahoe is relatively close too. I've been living in Mountain View for a couple months and I miss the Davis/Sac area more and more as time goes on. The atmosphere here is, I dunno, toxic. Too many people here size each other up based on where they work and where they live and people are way too obsessed with advancing their careers and chasing higher salaries, more luxurious cars, nicer apartments, etc. Everyone seems to have some sort of inferiority complex if they don't work for the "Big 4". People in Davis/Sac seemed less superficial and it was a lot easier for me to make friends. Also, yeah, the cost of living is so much cheaper. I'm paying $1700 for a tiny studio in MV. Back in Davis I was paying $1400 for a pretty nice 2-bedroom apartment. Meh.

>The atmosphere here is, I dunno, toxic. Too many people here size each other up based on where they work and where they live and people are way too obsessed with advancing their careers and chasing higher salaries, more luxurious cars, nicer apartments, etc. Everyone seems to have some sort of inferiority complex if they don't work for the "Big 4". People in Davis/Sac seemed less superficial and it was a lot easier for me to make friends.

Is this your own set of insecurities being projected on others? I never got that sense in SV...

Do you actually go out and talk to people? The first thing anyone asks is what you do, followed by which company you work for. Watch people's reactions change depending on the reputation of your company. The whole social scene here is centered around networking, not making meaningful relationships. No one cares if you're a chill person with cool hobbies, but if you work at <cool company> then you become one more inside connection when someone needs a new job and a reference. YMMV.

I lived in LA and the first thing you learn there is to not ask what anyone does because everyone's an actor.

these days everyone in LA is working on some kind of tech-related nonsense. i moved here to get away from all that, and it followed me.

now i just want to go live in the woods with my dog.

@beachstartup Me too. In North SD. Want to work on med device security and take company retreats in the woods?

@beachstartup @mikekij sounds great. when can we start? just moved from sf to venice, and now all i want to do is move where i can own land and start a farm.

I was living in LA for a while (5 years). I got a job as a photographer at a modeling agency. Pay was crap so I tried doing more programming work but most of the work wasn't very innovative and really boring compared to Silicon Valley so I moved back to the bay area where I'm originally from.

Going from being surrounded by models all day to living in Man Jose is quite the difference. Wish I could still be there.

Eh, I've lived here & haven't found that to be true. Sure, I do know people who work in the entertainment industry, but by and large they're regular people. Some are assholes, some are kind. I found the same to be true when I lived in Sunnyvale.

OTOH the best way to make anyone, and I mean anyone, in LA happy is to ask them how their screenplay is going.

>> Do you actually go out and talk to people?

I do, and your description only fits a small minority of those I meet when I actually go out.

> Watch people's reactions change depending on the reputation of your company

Does this mean you give different (mostly untrue) answers to this?

No. What I mean to say is, if someone claims to work at Google/Apple/Facebook/Microsoft, or a "cool" start-up like Uber or whatever else is popular these days, then everyone all of a sudden becomes more interested in talking to that person. "Oh wow, that's so cool! What do you do? How's it like working there??". If you work at a boring old enterprise company, most people react with "Oh, I see" and move on a different topic.

Haha, whenever I wear my startup's t-shirt, I see people "stealthily" eyeing the logo to size me up all the time here. Everyone wants to be on the gravy train.

My thought was that to know what the different reactions were first hand, you'd have to try it yourself.

On second thought, you can of course observe how others are treated.

I can confirm that when I worked at Google, people had a lot more interest in talking about my work. That was in part because of the Google Glamour, but I'd guess it's even more because it's a company people have actually heard of and used themselves.

You're looking in the wrong places. If you want to meet people with interesting niche hobbies, meet them in the niche. If you like rock climbing, go to a climbing gym. If you like building hardware, go to TechShop or Maker Faire. If you're into martial arts, there are some great Krav Maga gyms in the Bay Area. Or you could always hang out with the people in your company - no comparing yourself based on where you work for there, because you all work for the same place.

The networking scene is for networking, so of course it's filled with careerists. The coffeeshop scene is largely the same (though occasionally you meet one of the local students), since "let's grab coffee" is Silicon Valley shorthand for "I would like to assess your usefulness to my future career goals."

But there are many other scenes in the Bay Area. My wife ran the local Peace Corps alumni chapter for a while, so I end up hanging out with a lot of very interesting do-gooder international development types. I still get together for pizza with a bunch of my old Googler friends, even though I left almost 2 years ago. There are plenty of very authentic startup founder types around too, ones who aren't in it for a quick buck but because it's what they do and have been doing for 15-20 years now.

Moved to Mountain View in 1987, then to SF about a year later, then to the Santa Cruz mountains about 10 years ago.

My wife and I were in tech that whole time (me: SCO, Sun, SGI, Cobalt, briefly at Google, then BitMover).

Neither of us enjoy going to Mountain View any more. It's the worst parts of a big city (crowded, traffic, parking, expensive housing) and the worst part of the suburbs.

And there is a lot of snobbery about where you work and what you do, that's been there since the first day I got there (and I'm part of the problem, I was all snotty about the fact that I worked in Sun's kernel group; at the time that was the top of the heap, at least in my eyes).

Personally, I'm happier up in the mountains. Can still get to SF in about 1h15m, get to the valley in about 30m but I live among redwoods, falcons, etc.

If anything, I think low-level programming has become an underappreciated skill.

If you work on kernel development, be as snooty as you want.

These days, those jobs that require real expertise and in-depth knowledge aren't nearly as heavily compensated as your run-of-the-mill Rails dev Stackoverflow pasting position.

How's housing up there? I went to school at the UC and have always dreamed about moving back.

It's gotten expensive. Figure $1.2M for a decent 34 bedroom.

Not too bad. My last 34-bedroom house was at least 10x that. ;-)

Redwoods, falcons = real friends

Totally same for my wife and me: 15 minutes up into mountains and the nonsense is 10 miles away.

> Is this your own set of insecurities being projected on others? I never got that sense in SV...

I am not the OP, but I share his/her views. To the above point, maybe?

I used to perceive NY/Wall-Street as all about image, and SF/tech-scene to be much more down-to-earth and friendly. I don't find that anymore. Taking Caltrain, I see people wearing Google/FB/Twitter/XXX t-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, bags etc. Company badges are displayed prominently, and its easy to recognize companies from the badge. YC t-shirts, sweatshirts are also common. If not company t-shirts, then I see tons of MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Harvard t-shirts, sweatshirts etc. I rarely saw any company or university branded apparel in NYC.

The prominence of these in SV seems like a way to showcase an elite status.

Look, imagine two tungsten balls, 4" in diameter each, at night. One is painted matte black and the other is heated to 2500 degrees Celsius. Which one is more visible? These are two absolutely equal balls and one constitutes exactly 50% of the population :-)

I take Caltrain regularly (I live on Peninsula and work in SF FiDi) and I see these people, but nothing out of ordinary. There're, I believe, 8000 working in FB Menlo Park office. That's a lot of people. And the industry is heated up, so these people are more visible because the temperature is higher. So what, it happened before (2001) and will happen again :-)

Or maybe they just don't care to buy sweatshirts, jackets, bags, when they get them for free from their company? Who cares what people wear on CalTrain??!?

I think you're reading into this based on how the rest of the world operates. Most techies in Silicon Valley wear company schwag because it's free. My wardrobe consists of (or has consisted of, my wife made me throw a bunch of the older stuff out) T-shirts from Amherst, Brandeis, and Olin; a TellApart T-shirt; a Medallia T-shirt; a Microsoft T-shirt; a Foliage Software Systems T-shirt; at least 6 Google T-shirts; 2 Google hoodies; and then a bunch of unbranded stuff I got as gifts. I don't think I've ever bought a T-shirt with my own money.

Same in LA. A lot of crew t-shirts and other stuff given out at the end of production. And the recently-graduated college students? College t-shirts (sometimes sweatshirts in our 'winter').

I used to go to the bay all the time and I would always wear Foursquare (snowboarding brand) hoodies. This was at a time when Foursquare the SV startup was really popular. People would always stare and ask if I worked there. Eventually I just started telling them I was a co-founder.

Not everyone in SV is elitist, it's probably something like 5-10% of people. Maybe you haven't run into anyone like that yet. But they're there. And it is a lot, when compared to the 0% in most other places.

$1700 for a tiny studio would be a steal here in SF.

Lately I've been very interested in moving to Sacramento. I like just about everything I read about the city (can't really say the same about SF/SV).

My main worry is that searches for local dev jobs turn up almost nothing. I don't think I could handle a 2+ hour commute daily. Any advice?

Find a remote job maybe? Shouldn't be super hard to find one in SV. I know GitHub is one such employer.

Been working remote in Sacramento for the past year it's definitely the way to go. Sf wages but Sacramento rent prices

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/silicon-valley-based...

I've entertained the idea of living in Sacramento, mostly because it's closer to the Sierras than SF. But one question: do you guys have air conditioning? I presume so, if it gets hot. SF's lack of air conditioning is brutal!

Sacramento gets about 3-6 weeks of 100+ weather a year, and probably 1-2 weeks worth of freezing weather (freezing overnight only). Almost all homes and cars sold here have AC. The heat here is pretty dry so people complain about it but not a lot. Sacramento very consistently gets a ~30mph wind from the southwest in the summer (we call it the "Delta Breeze") that will push temperatures at night down to the 70s or 60s. I rarely run the AC in my house here overnight and instead open the windows after ~9pm.

Honestly, a bigger problem for a lot of transplants to Sacramento is allergens. We're right at the tip of the central valley and lots of stuff will bloom in the spring and fall and lots of people will be red faced and sneezing for a week or two.

Very true. We live in Sacramento area, and I rather like it here. It's a pretty diverse area and the cost of living to salary ratio is a lot better than in the Bay Area.

We're considering having to move somewhere else that's less allergenic because of the allergy situation. I start sneezing and blowing my nose a lot in April or May, but it's manageable. My wife and kids have much more severe allergy and asthma issues. My wife pretty much has to remain indoors all the time between March and October because her allergies to various pollens have become so severe and Sacramento has a lot of pollen in the air. She doesn't really like that and wants to live somewhere else where she can go outside without having breathing issues.

I sure love the nice Delta breezes we get in the evenings. It cools everything down and summer evenings are very pleasant. Unfortunately, we're unable to open the house up because of the breathing issues it causes among my family members. Very frustrating.

The Bay Area would be better for allergies, but it's so astronomically expensive that I want to stay far away. Sure I'd probably double my salary, but my cost of living would probably go up by 4x or 5x. No thank you.

My wife loves Seattle because she can breathe so much better there so maybe we'll end up there someday.

Hey, I'm in the process of moving to Sacramento (mostly live here now), at least for a while, I think.

If you click my profile, you can email me and I hope you do. I wouldn't mind discussing the tech scene here, the city, etc, although I may end up working remotely.

I also think Davis and Sacramento have potentials.

they are cheap, safe and close to bay area.

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