SF vs. New York? (Los Angeles, San Francisco: neighborhoods, movies, hippest)
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Your appreciation of SF is unfortunate and probably off. I don't find SF smelly or particularly subject to crime. On the contrary, crime in the Bay Area is a problem in cities like Oakland or Richmond, but not in the Peninsula. In fact, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties are two of the safest and wealthiest in the US. You should give the city a second chance and probably stay in a place different from where you stayed before.
Regarding talent recruiting, you must be more specific. What type of talent you're looking for. It seems that you are looking for professionals in technology, which strongly supports the SF case. Just think about the myriad of technology business in the Bay Area. Programmers, computer engineers, biotechnologist, etc. choose to live in the Bay Area for job safety. If you lose your job you want to be in an area where the bulk of your profession is. I invite you to make a quick research in Wikipedia to find the companies headquartered in the area. It's not only Yahoo, or Google, or Cisco, Oracle, Founder, Adobe, Youtube, BEA, HP, etc. Do your homework and look for companies in every city of the peninsula and the East Bay. You will be surprised. Suddendly you get the impression that every technology shop is from here. Stanford, Carnegie Mellon- Sunnyvale, Santa Clara University and Berkeley are excellent sources of talent.
Of course NYC is almost by definition a place with extremely talented people. But technology is not the driver there. It's the financial industry, although there is a good share of technology professionals working in the financial institutions backbones. I don't see how you could operate a technology business from New York, especially a start up. In the first place you need to think where your workers are going to live. Manhattan? No way. Salaries would need to be enough to accomodate for the cost of living and you are more likely to pay with stock options. You are now talking about New Jersey or some other place in the metro area.
Hope this helps. I work in one of the companies listed above as a Marketing Manager.
As far as Seattle vs NYC goes, i'd rather have it be cold outside than sopping wet in the winter. Winter clothing is very stylish in NYC. 20-30 degrees is cold but it's not ridiculous like the midwest(-0 temps). When you wear a winter clothes, 20-30 degrees is very tollerable. Drizzling rain is just downright annoying and depressing.
I would rather live in SF than NYC though just because NYC is extremely overpopulated. Someone said it's a pain to get in and out of NYC..well that is 100% true. Once you leave the city, its a congested labrynth of highways and dense urban areas. NYC is just the small center of a huge metropolitan area. It takes a long time to get to the country
Icazares, in regards to tech talent, I'm specifically looking for coders (C, Ruby on Rails), technicians (Linux, OS X) and web designers (graphics + Ajax). Essentially, the bleeding-edge Web 2.0 types. It's a software company that I'll be starting.
I'm certainly glad to hear that there are a lot of people who's SF experience is vastly different to my own. Do you have any recommendations for particular areas and neighborhoods, both for commercial endeavors as well as personal living?
I can appreciate the "closed in" nature of Manhattan, and the house prices no doubt turn away a lot of talent. Does that same factor not exist in the "hot" areas of the Bay? How do techs afford to live there - long commutes? How is it different from Manhattan?
Is there really THAT much difference in personal living costs of SF vs. NY?
SF tech salaries seem to be of the highest in the country. I've had junior technicians laugh at me for offering $80K/yr. Most seem to be clawing at the $150K/yr+ offers - which is a lot of money, even by NYC standanrds.
NY - 90 degree summers and 20 and below winters (snow storms)
SF - between 50 - 70 all year round with some rain on occasion
It's a trade off. NYC has warm spring and summer nights. It's cold at night here almost all year round. I rarely am ever outside at night here, no matter the time of year.
As far as Seattle vs NYC goes, i'd rather have it be cold outside than sopping wet in the winter. Winter clothing is very stylish in NYC. 20-30 degrees is cold but it's not ridiculous like the midwest(-0 temps). When you wear a winter clothes, 20-30 degrees is very tollerable. Drizzling rain is just downright annoying and depressing.
I would rather live in SF than NYC though just because NYC is extremely overpopulated. Someone said it's a pain to get in and out of NYC..well that is 100% true. Once you leave the city, its a congested labrynth of highways and dense urban areas. NYC is just the small center of a huge metropolitan area. It takes a long time to get to the country
Well, as someone who has lived in New York (state) and Seattle, I'd take a Seattle winter over a north east winter any day. What depressed me about winters in the midwest and north east is that everything is barren during the winter months - there's no green and no life. Seattle, at least, is green all year round. That's more to my liking. Now San Francisco beats them both
Icazares, in regards to tech talent, I'm specifically looking for coders (C, Ruby on Rails), technicians (Linux, OS X) and web designers (graphics + Ajax). Essentially, the bleeding-edge Web 2.0 types. It's a software company that I'll be starting.~L
Hundreds of people with those credentials around here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LJB99
I'm certainly glad to hear that there are a lot of people who's SF experience is vastly different to my own. Do you have any recommendations for particular areas and neighborhoods, both for commercial endeavors as well as personal living?
I can appreciate the "closed in" nature of Manhattan, and the house prices no doubt turn away a lot of talent. Does that same factor not exist in the "hot" areas of the Bay? How do techs afford to live there - long commutes? How is it different from Manhattan?
Is there really THAT much difference in personal living costs of SF vs. NY?
~L
The bulk of the Sillicon Valley workers are in the South Bay, between 35-50 miles south of SF. Even though you can find some technology professionals in SF and a very high number in the mid-Peninsula (Oracle and Electronic Arts are in Redwood City for example, salesforce.com in San Mateo) the more you drive to the South (both in the Peninsula and in the East Bay) the more concentration of Sillicon Valley people you find. San Jose (Cisco, BEA, HP, eBay, Adobe) is home to more than 1 million people. It is considered the Sillicon Valley capital. Other cities with a very distinctive Sillicon Valley flavor are Sunnyvale (with a very high concentration of Indian nationals, for example), Mountain View (Google, AOL) and Palo Alto (this last one is an upscale suburb, very expensive and very nice). I have seen some commercial real estate available for sale and rent in nice places of all these cities, and also in Menlo Park along Highway 101.
As for living and since you are a single person, I must be honest. The Bay Area is not singles paradise, and the best place for you is by far SF. Commuting from SF to Palo Alto, Menlo Park or Mt. View is easy when the traffic is low but a real nightmare at peak times. One alternative is to choose your place and your company close to the Caltrain stations, so that your commute comes more easily, or close to Highway 280 which is many times better than 101.
Outside of SF, there is some singles action in the East Bay (Berkeley, Oakland), the largest suburbs in the peninsula, like San Mateo and the College city of Palo Alto. I like Berkeley a lot, with the additional benefit of being just across the bridge and a few miles north from SF. You can also get some great talent from UC Berkeley and have your company around there. Of course Berkeley is not for everybody and if you don't like the liberal mindset and abundance of yoga and Indian food business is probably not for you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LJB99
Is there really THAT much difference in personal living costs of SF vs. NY?
SF tech salaries seem to be of the highest in the country. I've had junior technicians laugh at me for offering $80K/yr. Most seem to be clawing at the $150K/yr+ offers - which is a lot of money, even by NYC standanrds.
Any thoughts?
~L
Yes, I see it that way both in the urban centers and the suburbs. Manhattan prices are driven these days by the insane i-banking bonuses of the last 2-3 years. SF is very expensive of course, probably second in the country after Manhattan, but you can still rent a nice place along one of the new buildings in Fillmore Ave for $2,100 like my friends are doing. About the suburbs... I'm renting a place in San Mateo for $2,700. It is a 3-bdroom, nice space, nice lighting house for my family of 3. I'm 20 miles south of SF, and because highway 280 is just five minutes away I can get to the financial district in SF in 30 minutes. I doubt you can do the same in NYC.
Salaries in the Bay Area are not as high as they used to be. 150K is the salary for a Senior Manager in a top company, not the salary for a programmer. A Senior Developer (5-10 years of experience plus a Masters degree) may be making 120K in total compensation anywhere in California. For a start up and with some good stock options package, you can negotiate it down to five digits and probably into the 80K range. For a junior developer you can pay less than 80K.
Thanks for the info, I'm certainly going to have to take a deeper look in those areas. I *do* like California - I toured it for 2 months last year and loved it. It was obviously just the tainted experience of SF that had me considering other tech epicenters for business.
I appreciate the thoughts on salary, too. It's hard to get an accurate answer, and that adjusts my sights accordingly. Thanks.
Tough call. Both cities have their pluses and cons.
My biggest problem with SF is that it has a ton of homeless people. In my experience this significantly affects the quality of life in the downtown area of SF. You can't walk more than a couple of blocks without being hit up for change. NYC on the other hand hasn't had problems like that since the 1980s.
I think the entrepenurial talent you're looking for with computers is definitely more likely to be found on the west coast. There are tons of tech people on the east coast, but they don't seem nearly as interested in creating new stuff, as out West.
I think SF's weather is more moderate, but I still found it a little bit odd. At night it feels chilly in San Francisco, even during August. In NYC there is a very stark difference between the seasons (really f'ing hot in the summer, really cold with snow during the winter, and more moderate weather in the fall and spring). I think SF has a similar climate to the UK in that there isn't such a greater variance in climate (although clearly it is usually warmer in SF than it is in London).
Both cities are very nice in my mind. Public transit in SF is definitely a lot nicer and newer in SF than in NYC, however there is less of a rail network in SF than there is in NYC. In SF you're definitely going to be relying upon the bus more often than in NYC.
Also the people are very different. SF sometimes seem a little bit too liberal and "far out there" even for their own good. People from SF are pretty reguarly ridiculed in the USA as being ultra-liberal. NYC people are generally very liberal as well, but it is different because the people in this area seem more business/goal oriented. Take all of those silicon valley offices that they regularly show on the evening news. The workers there have perks like free massages, game rooms, ball-pens like they have for little kids at McDonalds. If anyone even suggested doing something like that in your average NYC office they'd either be laughed out of the room or fired immediately.
Its a very different culture in my mind.
The biggest problem with SF is that it still has a lot of the social problems that NYC got rid of or somewhat-fixed 10-20 years ago (street crime, homeless all over the place, random idiots hanging out all the time doing nothing).
There also seems to be a lot more tourists, per-capita, in SF than in NYC. I think on the whole there are probalby an equal number of tourists, but SF is smaller, so there definitely feels like there are more tourists wandering around there than in NYC.
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