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Comment by halpme | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

>> 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.

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.

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.

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