There is an incredible amount of tacit knowledge in this city that is hard to really internalize until you are actually here and living through it. I think programs like https://www.siltahouse.com/home take a great advantage of these things.
There's a lot of counter intuitive things about early stage that you can't really convey in a blog post, or you may not even believe until you see it yourself up close from people. The open minded attitudes and culture around risk is something that you can really internalize when you are around other people who give you the correct social proof.
Is this all things you can get other places? Sure! It may not matter as much as it did 10 years ago, but you will have a hard time not getting a positive experience out of living, working, or building in the Bay Area.
[1] people have said this since the beginning of time about everything anyways
I'm sure some of it depends on what you're trying to accomplish in life, but since you didn't specify I'll answer for myself (someone who just wants to do work I enjoy for a really solid upper-middle-class paycheck and retire early)—no, you don't need to be in the Bay Area.
EDIT: To give some concrete numbers, San Jose and San Francisco represented ~180k of the nation's ~1650k software developers in 2023 [0]. That's ~10% of all US-based software developers and ~0.6% of all software developers in the world [1].
[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-many-software-developers-...
Founding a tech startup and getting VC funding? Working at a FAANG or tech unicorn? Maxing your compensation? Easily job hopping? Being part of large social or professional networks centered around tech? Working on the bleeding edge of the industry? Yes to all of these.
Working a software engineering job that will pay significantly better than the median salary in the area and let you have a good standard of living and a good overall life? No, if you have adequate skill you can achieve that anywhere in the world.
If you wanna buy a house with a yard and the above doesn’t draw you, it’s probably not for you.
Edit: and fresh produce at the farmers markets!
I've worked for prestigious, recognizable, tech companies and local no-name companies.
As long as you're in a metro area with at least a million or two people, there'll be enough software engineering and data center business to go around.
Most of my teams over the last few years have all been geo-distributed, anyways, so its much less common for everyone to even be in the same place, anyways, even if you live in the bay area.
In general I think it's limiting if you confine your job search to one area. (After all, your odds double if you try two different locations.) And there are other large tech cities -- Seattle, New York, etc.
There is also the possibility of a telecommuting position -- though more of those tend to be "hydrid" than 100% remote. Still, more of those than there were five years ago.
New York is an amazing spot because there’s just so much more density and diversity that there’s a bazillion more niche communities doing all sorts of stuff, including tech scenes, tech-art stuff, whatever you want.
You need to decide what you’re looking for, and if you can find it wherever you already are.
- NYC (still the hub) - Chicago (although that's declining in my opinion) - South Carolina (lots of banking tech jobs there) - Austin, TX (similar to SC above) - Miami (crypto friendly and a large hedge fund just moved its HQ there)
It doesn’t mean you have to move to the Bay Area, nor does it mean you can’t find a great job outside of a tier 1 city (Seattle, NYC, etc). However, the amount of opportunity is drastically different.
I am debating moving from another country to it to be closer to executives on my company (L1 possibly green card), but still unsure, I make very good money where I am and would make very good money in Bay Area. But my life is already pretty settled on a big tech company..
From reading online, doesn't look like the best place to raise a family, and costs are obscene even for high paid employees. Traffic also feels like would be a big negative impact on my life if I moved.
Moved away, and now deer eat everything nonmetallic, 110 degree summers and at times, a couple of feet of snow. 12 miles to downtown and 50 miles to an Indian or Thai restaurant, Whole Foods, and the VA medical facility.
Would love to move back and reinvent the enshittified web. Will gladly leave the snow shovel, chainsaws and bear spray behind.
The differences seemed small initially, but they add up. I find people are bolder - less risk adverse. The energy is about 4x London, the scale 10x (the USA market is 10x more valuable vs the UK: 5x the population worth 2x the dollars). Genuine success is important, you cannot arse about pretending to work (like MANY Brits do).
It was a move to a much worse work-life balance for me.
The downsides are significant, lack of quality art and culture. You earn 2x or 3x but everything from cheese to housing is 2x to 3x more expensive. The Bay Area is geographically isolated, no more weekend tries to Paris or Berlin. You’ve got Hawaii and LA (a 8h drive to a city uglier, more polluted and dirty than Delhi). Skiing is Tahoe at $160/day, whereas London gives you access to dozen of much better resorts at a fraction of the price. Tahoe was especially disappointing.
I drove through SF last week and there was only one billboard that wasn’t about a GenAI company selling a CRM system.
It also gets boring. Everything is now way more expensive. Disposable income gets consumed way faster now than before. There's not much diversity compared to other metropolitan areas that American expats have moved to.
Make filthy money there first, then live the life you want elsewhere.
Otherwise, the cost of living is ample reason to stay away.
On the entrepreneurial side, it's like these WeWork single-founder startups from the Great Lakes region (Michigan, Canada, NY) who are doing everything from crypto bro stuff to trying to build tech for acquire-hire, flying through engineers and designers to do so. On the enterprise side it's mostly companies servicing all these: Rippling, WeWork, Vercel, cloud providers, payment providers, Salesforce.
The entire Bay Area is getting calmer and more neighborhood-like: The peninsula and East Bay seem nicer than ever. A lot of SF people moved to Berkeley and Santa Cruz, and towns like Redwood City are really shaping up into lovely suburbs. Where I live (Upper Haight, SF) the old school skateboard/pizza/weed/fashion vibe is coming back, the Dead Heads are not a very strong influence anymore but there are some, kinda feels like a little 90s pocket here, but we lost a lot of live music and a lot of culture. The whole city seems to have lost a lot of music, restaurants, and entertainment - it's overall pretty boring right now. There's more spontaneous live music in Santa Cruz or peninsula. There's a pretty strong homeowner and gardening vibe in a lot of neighborhoods of SF, the Slow Streets thing is making it feel more suburby in areas. Bernal is stuck up beyond belief, just like before but multiply it, it's gotten more sophisticated, same homeowners up there as before, Good Life still there, remodeled but the same basically. Noe is strange, the babies are no longer babies but now giant 10 year olds, feels like an urban kid-ran neighborhood over there - strong cul-de-sac family vibes. More surfing and skimboarding at beaches than I remember from 10+ years ago, more action sports in general - skateparks have improved. Bike lanes and roads have improved, overall crime is lower and things are cleaner all over the Bay Area except for the classic bad spots of East Bay.
I've lived here for most of my life so it's hard to compare it to other places, I would say it's maturing and improving and I expect the West Coast in general to fill out like the East Coast over the next 100 years, so I take that into consideration with the overall growth trend. It's still very much a place of building and construction and growth. Though as I say this I've seen more "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs on buildings than ever before within SF - I think the surrounding areas are growing more than the city, the city is overall somewhat boring and quiet but I love it.