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Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

There are many different neighborhoods with pretty different feels, but generally speaking I would say this:

The city is dirty, there are many homeless people, public infrastructure is not great (bad roads, questionable public transit), and it is the most expensive rent in the world. Culturally, it is much less "gay" and "hippie" nowadays, and almost entirely "tech," at least in my own experiences. If you're a software engineer, there are plenty of jobs and you will never have issue finding work. The pay, in general, is excellent. If you're NOT a software engineer, I'm not sure.

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Seriously though, that city is SO dirty and smelly. The public infrastructure is not only bad and falling apart, but politics is sufficiently broken that very little is likely to be done about it. (Same for housing and homelessness: politics is completely broken, don't expect much to improve in this department.)

And yes, it's a huge techie bubble. In a bad way - most people there are completely detached from any "normal life" perspective. But then again, the same can be said for those in politics in SF.

> If you're a software engineer, there are plenty of jobs and you will never have issue finding work.

Even over 40? I am genuinely curious.

I'm not there yet, myself, but articles seem to indicate that it's tougher. I would imagine that the problem is possibly even exaggerated here, though, where tech is as much of a trend and culture as it is a job, and people feel like they need to be on the cutting edge, new, and cool.

> Even over 40? I am genuinely curious.

It'll be tougher, especially if you are a white or asian male, but there are plenty of software jobs out there. You are less likely to be getting choice projects, raises, promotions, etc. And you are on the top of the list come lay off time, but you won't be on bread lines anytime soon as a software developer. But you will be marginalized as you get older and even more so if you are part of the overrepresented group in the industry.

Any age, as long as your skills are current. The demand here is savage enough to overcome most prejudice. There are many times more older engineers in the bay area than anywhere else I’ve worked.

I am kind of worried about this myself. On the other hand, everyone I know over 40 in tech is making enough money to retire in less than a decade assuming some decent personal finance skills. It could be survivorship bias, but I think you’re fine. Even if you have trouble getting hired in 5 years, you’ll have a million+ in the bank to fall back on and retrain in something else.

> Culturally, it is much less "gay" and "hippie" nowadays, and almost entirely "tech," at least in my own experiences.

It's interesting how many tech people dislike the company of their own kind.

Isn't that a neutral statement by the OP? It seems objectively true, at least from my own limited experiences visiting SF twenty+ years ago and then again a few years past.

gay and hippie are cultures, tech is just a job

Hippie is a culture. You're right about tech tho.

Tech is also a culture. Tech people are generally rational, open to innovation, individualistic. HN is a good representation of the tech culture.

I don't think it's disliking tech people so much as disliking a monoculture.

True, but a city of "artists" is also a monoculture.

Less so, because in reality most "artists" actually end up doing normal jobs to make a living in a variety of fields and just keep art as a side interest. A city of hobbyist programmers wouldn't necessarily be a monoculture either.

In current realities that's probably true. I've read about a city (town) of artists in post WWI France, which was dominated by Americans who moved there to pursue their artistic interests (painting). They were regular American folks, but thanks to the wealth disparity between USA and France at the time, they were basically wealthy by French standards, which allowed them to live a life of leisure and do nothing but paint. In that city, there were the dominant part of the population.

In practice, it becomes an artist/yuppie duoculture within a decade :)

Speaking for myself I enjoy the company in limited doses. HN is fun to visit, but fuck me if I’d live here. There’s a big world full of perspectives and ways of thinking that would be concern trolled and rules lawyered to death by a group of techies. As monocultures go, tech isn’t terrible, but it’s still undesirable IMO. I do find the tech culture easier to swallow outside of the specific manifestation of SF/VC tech culture though. The more people over 40 around, the less it feels like a cult gone horribly wrong.

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