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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

back in the late 90s, I started a web site in my dorm room in NC and sold it less than a year later to a dotcom in SF. I moved out there in 1999. Lived through the first market crash, web 2.0, and the 2008 recession.

The bay area was so much fun during those years. The excitement of web startups, and the creative types of people it attracted. And it felt like everyone was in it together.

I don't know exactly when the Bay area started becoming "techbro", but basically what it's become is the new "NYC". The bros who would normally go into finance, have gone into startups. You have the investment banking mentality in the bay area now, and it doesn't feel like everyone is in it together anymore. It feels like one big competition.

Anyways, I left 4 years ago, and everytime I visit, I'm so glad I don't live there anymore.

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Been living here since the 80’s. 100% agree that SV is the new New York. Reading your post makes me think I’m reading sowmthing I myself wrote.

I don’t even go to many of the cafes here because I don’t want to feel everyone’s anxiety and competitiveness that permeates the air.

> SV is the new New York

Pity it doesn't have the good parts of NYC, like decent public transit, Broadway, Central Park etc.

> Central Park etc

Oh come on. Public transport and Culture, sure. But at least admit that there are a TON more parks and outdoor recreation options (which are easily accessible) in SF than in NYC :)

Not a ton more. SF doesn’t have as many parks as NYC. If we are talking about the Bay Area then you forget that NYS is just forest.

https://www.tpl.org/sites/default/files/2016%20City%20Park%2...

Moved to NYC after nearly a decade in SF (partially overlapping with the OP). I feel like it's unfair to call SF the "new New York": New York definitely cares about money, but it allows room for lots of different things. It's a far more functional city in every possible dimension, because it accepts (in fact, adores) what it is.

IMO, SF stopped being fun not because of the "finance bros", per se, but because the place just never wanted to be a big city. Fundamentally, San Francisco is a gorgeous little seaside town on a too-small peninsula, which valued counterculture and artistic expression. So it was fun to be here for a while when the "startup industry" was a few crazy people doing things against the grain, but it's a different story when those crazy people turned into armies of bland corporate CEOs, hiring armies of rich yuppies to "disrupt" the world in identical ways.

I was talking more about the 1980s wallstreet / 1990s American Psycho version of NYC.

If I may ask: where are you now? Do you think there are places that remind you of what you lived through before?

I'm in Charlotte, NC now. This city is not on the radar of most tech folks, and it's way under-rated. Everyone thinks there's no culture here, it's just chain restaurants and hicks. Granted, it's changed a lot in the past 2-3 years, so people still haven't realized it's actually a rad city and very affordable.

Any advice for finding a job in that area? The HN "who's hiring" page doesn't have too much in NC, and other job sites seem to show mostly finance and consulting companies.

Depends on what you're looking for. Charlotte is 90% finance-related jobs (I used to work there myself). I live in the Raleigh/Durham area, and it has a decent amount of engineering opportunities, especially in biotech.

It's not the Bay Area, but it's pretty comfortable.

The tech startup scene is small, but very friendly and open. There's a few incubators. Check out meetup.com, it's pretty tech/startup heavy in Charlotte, see if there's something that catches your eye.

IBM has a big presence there; most of IBM cloud engineering team is based out of RTP. Most of the companies will be branches of major corporations.

I actually like chain restaurants and hicks (dead serious - I have a tractor, 11 acres, horses, a goat, some cats, and a couple of guns to keep it all safe), so that'd be a selling point for me. I live in Grand Rapids, MI, and I'm afraid that our chain restaurant and redneck culture is being destroyed by an influx of people over the past few years. Hope the same doesn't happen to Charlotte. Downside is that here in GR tech jobs are kind of scarce, which is true of a lot of places that still have somewhat rural communities within commuting distance.

EDIT - 'To keep it all safe' ... really means safe from wild animals. If you keep a hobby farm, you know where I'm coming from :).

I don't have a hobby farm and I'm not in the US. What wild animals are a threat in that situation? Bears? Or do you also mean as a threat to gardens - deer, etc?

Foxes and coyotes for the goat (which has been de-horned), raccoons for the cats. So far just scaring them has worked.

Thanks. We don't really have a raccoon-equivalent in Australia. Possums are annoying (noisy, steal fruit, get in the roof, etc) but not dangerous. Dingoes generally don't make it into populated areas and foxes mostly traumatise chickens who typically have well-protected coops.

> This city is not on the radar of most tech folks, and it's way under-rated

On the contrary I don't believe its under-rated at all. It gets just the kind of people that like the lifestyle it offers.

As someone who has never lived in the bay, what is the "investment banking mentality" you refer to?

Basically, it's a place that attracts the very smart people who are only wanting to make lots of money. It used to be these people would go into investment banking when finance/oil companies ruled the world, now it's tech companies.

Also the “we’re better than everyone else because X” mentality, including the vacuous “changing the world” rallying cry.

I don’t recall feeling that sense of superiority in past decades nearly as much as today.

It's not only money that drives these people, but also ego/prestige. I did my undergrad in finance - during that time, most of my peers looked down on my interest in technology. At one point, one of my friends (who is an investment banker now) even told me to stop having a "poor person's mentality".

Of course, many of these same people jumped into the tech industry (if such a thing exists) as soon as it became "prestigious". Although they have only a very shallow interest in actual tech, they've brought that same superiority complex with them.

I've legitimately overheard someone say in a SF cafe: "I couldn't be a doctor...it doesn't change the world enough and you don't actually earn that much." facepalm

I’ve never framed “change the world” as an ego drive but that really does make a lot of sense.

I honestly don’t think outcomes were that important for the folks who were in the industry in the 80’s and early 90’s. “No one became a billionaire back then” is something I’ve been told a few times.

I’m face palming so hard my hand is embedded in my face st the last one. Especially since surgeons earn 500k+ so even leaving aside the tremendous difference you can make in a person’s life as a doctor, that comment is just completely ignorant.

So where’s the new SF?

You nailed it.

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