Also everyone hates amazon. So if you don't work there, be outwardly and explicitly proud that you don't -- that's a huge selling point when it comes to making friends. Partly because of the white collar sweatshops (people in seattle generally liberal and pro-labor), partly because of the blue-collar sweatshops, partly because 'large corporation = evil', partly because the countless new techbros with no respect for Seattle culture who spend 11hrs/day at work and don't have time to develop a personality romping around town give it a real bad reputation.

>partly because the countless new techbros with no respect for Seattle culture who spend 11hrs/day at work and don't have time to develop a personality romping around town give it a real bad reputation

What does that even mean? I hear this all the time and I honestly have no idea how to "respect Seattle Culture". I'm nice to people and I enjoy everything Seattle has to offer. If you want a pat on the back for living in Seattle longer, sorry. I don't care.

I'd also point out that this hasn't been my experience at all. Everyone here has been very nice, welcoming, and helpful. I feel like Seattle natives really sell themselves short. It has been a great experience.

It seems like everyone in these places is just trying to re-invent a "cooler than thou" image, looking down on others who don't prize their typically temporary life-style choices. The gleeful embrace of self-imposed bohemian poverty, and the hatred of anyone who wants material possessions, is particularly annoying. As someone who grew up in poverty, I really hate getting lectured on how meaningless money is by a dread-locked trust fund kid who is waxing poetic about how great of an experience it is to "live simply." They don't seem to get the fact that for some of us, a "tiny house" is exactly what we fucking grew up in, except it wasn't considered cool, and was stuck next to a bunch of other tiny houses called trailers in a community called a trailer park.

The point is that the people in Seattle that act like assholes to you almost certainly fall into this category of idiot.

That's not been my experience of Seattle though. But then again, I'm pretty unconventional myself.

There is a point to "living simply". That's not necessarily counter-culture. Some folks eschew materialism as a self-image thing. But some folks have already been on the extremes of material wealth, have already found that it wasn't what it was cracked up to be, and choosing to live simply comes from wisdom and experience.

I hope you're able to find out for yourself whether the material possessions actually makes you happy -- and that you do find happiness, whatever form that takes for you.

This applies to all types of people, rich, poor, conservative, progressive and the stuff in between. On a meta-scale it would be the way a country might react to immigrants, and like a self-similar fractal the sentiment works at smaller and smaller scales like seaboard, North/South, state, county, town etc. I guess the underlying mentality is, hey we made this area for people like us, not people like you. Now you're ruining it by changing what it is...

Using the counter-culture area as an example, if large numbers of people move to an edgy place shaped by artists, musicians, bums, gender/sexual aberrations and people who generally reject what other areas have to offer, and they don't want to be part of the existing social fabric then they're treated in a way analogous to how an immune system would antagonize a foreign body. It could just as easily be old money getting shitty with new money flooding their uppity neighborhood with unacceptable values or garish sensibilities.

IOW: people generally don't like change. Especially if it's not in their favor or to their taste.

> looking down on others who don't prize their typically temporary life-style choices

It's easy to judge groups of people with generalizations - they're doing the same to you. The funny thing is most people would get along fine if they put that kind of mentality away and just spoke to each other with a common respect.

And it bears repeating, I haven't experienced any of this at all. I have only encountered nice people.

People in Seattle have worked very hard for years to build a community and a culture that they enjoy and on the whole represents them and is different from any other city in the country. That hard work is one of the biggest reasons people consider Seattle such a great place to live. Dumping a million rich young people who are there to work themselves to death at amazon for a year before they jump ship and work at a real company somewhere else into the middle of it isn't particularly good for that community or culture.

If you don't know what respecting the culture of a place means then I don't really know what to tell you. If you "hear it all the time" that means people are saying it all the time and it means something; I'd try to understand what they mean rather than being hostile to the idea.

Fairly sure I'm fitting in just fine. As I said, I don't have a bad word to say about anyone I've met. Apparently asking you what "respect the culture" means gets me a negative response where you berate for me not already know what it means and telling me I should "try to understand".

So asking you directly isn't good enough. I think I'll just pass, I'm doing fine and Seattle has been nothing but kind. But good luck with your approach, I'm sure making someone feel bad for moving to a new place works on someone.

Maybe I am just lucky? but I think Seattle is one of the coolest cities in the US, except of course for the traffic.

I find Seattle to be unwelcoming, personally, but it's not that people aren't friendly when you can get them to talk. It's the pervasive avoidance of eye contact and general desire not to engage with strangers that can make it a lonely place.

People here do want to be forced out of their shell though. If you don't require the slightest bit of affirmation in your personality, you'll do fine in Seattle. If not you'll most certainly get the blues. I do fine on some days and then sometimes it's just a chore.

I mean, sure, I remembered the street protests that lead to the minimum wage laws; and people getting angry about one thing or another. But by and large, I don't get the cold shoulder or hostile looks.

Maybe it is because people in Seattle are sensitive to being judged, and are aggressive about political correctness? I'm OK with that.

Seattle is a beautiful city. I'm glad I had the chance to live there :-)

I lived in Seattle for 4 years and I generally found people cold and distant, my wife did too.

Or better yet: How would typecasting what Seattle folks are like give me insight into myself, or into the city, or improve my life?

That, and they should have said "yes" to federal light rail dollars forty years ago. Now we're stuck with a tunnel that I'm becoming increasing convinced is never going to get finished.

I think you do a great job summarizing the hypocrisy of the left on this issue. According to the left, if a person is financially disadvantaged, they deserve sympathy and support. However if a person is socially disadvantaged[0], they not only deserve it, but also should be shamed for taking up space that more interesting people could be occupying.

[0] I don't believe for a second that there are many people working 11 hours a day. The people you describe are simply more introverted/shy people who work in tech, and you're looking for some explanation that makes their social situation their own fault.

What does socially disadvantaged even mean? Autism spectrum disorder? Having nothing interesting to say? Having no interests or ability to socially interact?

And obviously I'm not referring to shy introverts when I describe these people as "techbros" "romping around town".

And it's Amazon. 11 hours is an underestimate.

Clearly haven't been following much of the news on Amazon as a workplace recently then.

11 hours a day is totally believable.

Which is why getting and talking about hobbies is a better choice. Who is most likely to screw this up? East coast or mid-western kids coming to work at Microsoft and Amazon.

A better opener for new-comers to Seattle is: "So what is your favorite brunch place?" or "what do you like to do on the weekends? I like going to Bainbridge", etc.

What you do matters way, way less initially.

Glazer's Camera

Downtown to Eastlake

yeah.

Head up to the REI and hang a left, you can bypass the cluster fuck of SLU traffic.

I was wondering why Seattle did not have as vibrant of a tech meetup community as Atlanta. I chalked it up to that, in Atlanta, everyone has to drive to get to the meetup. But now I see, it might be something else.

I'm not sure about bonding and making friendships with people with mutual dislike for one company or another. It's in my experience, those affiliations makes for good acquaintances. But friends? A friend is someone who, if I knocked on their door at 3AM and said I need help, they might be cranky, but they'll let me in. A friend is someone who, if I get a call from them saying they need me to bail them out of jail, I'd do it.

People who are proud of hating Amazon, or upset that I am neutral about it -- I think I will just walk away. That's one of the shadow sides I notice, living in Capitol Hill back in year of 2013: people are aggressively politically-correct, many are passionate about liberal stance, or being tolerant of people. It's a big contrast from living in Atlanta.

What I learned after a while was you can't really do anything about #1; thats just the NW culture. To deal with #2...just don't bring it up and don't be a stereotype and get to know Seattle and all it's good for. Music, mountains, etc. I loved living there the second year I was there.

I find the Bay Area is so inundated with tech it's almost impossible to encounter #1 or #2...almost anyone you meet socially if you live in SF will work for tech in some way or another which was not guaranteed at all in Seattle (also true of Oakland but not quite the same). People are friendlier in the Bay but that's got no bearing on you actually being friends with them.

The answer to number 2 is to be more than your job. To leave work /at work/.

fuck, is this not SOP for everyone?

conversation order of operations: work < people < things < ideas

Unfortunately, it's not SOP everywhere.

Learning what someone does for a living is, to me anyways, far less important than learning what they like to do, what interests they have, etc. I can be friends with anyone where there's common ground, not just fellow software folks.

Talking with work is fine, it just can be interpreted as rude if it's one of the first things you ask.

Because of this, if someone does ask them what they do, they can be pretty sure right away that that person does something "better" than what they do, and (wrongly or rightly) it can make the situation uncomfortable for them.

Obviously the extent to which this is relevant depends on the demographic of the group in which you're socializing at a particular moment.

Remember a while back when someone wrote an entire awful clickbait article about the horror of discovering that the guy she was on a date with played Magic: The Gathering? Not that he was unpleasantly obsessed with it, not that he couldn't talk about anything else, just that he was a frequent player.

No one here that I've ever met hates Amazon (though some are bummed by the economic effect on the city). I've never worked there, but I have friends who have-- some of them didn't like it (and left), others really love it. Like any big company, depends on your team and your boss.

Odd, compared to Bentonville where everyone loves Wal-mart.

Plus, it's apples and oranges. Seattle attracts counter-culture folks, and has for a long time. They tend to be assholes in general in my opinion.

There is this philosopher who picked apart the word "asshole" to try gain insight into what it means. I liked his definition of it -- someone acting out of entitled superiority.

There are lots of folks who are like that. I don't generally distinguish people along the lines of "mainstream" and "counter-culture" in my head. It's more of whether someone is superficial, or someone is impeccable or has integrity. So sure, I've met asshole counter-culture "types". I've also met some very interesting people too.

Have you read that article about the philosophy of jerks?

I've found Seattle quite friendly to newcomers (Some friends visited and it took 3 days before some stranger didn't cover their drinks when out for dinner), and open and welcoming to me on multiple levels (as a tech person, as a board and RPG gamer, and as a geek in general, not to mention as someone far more socially liberal than Virginia was kind to).

That said, I've learned there are a ton of neighborhoods here, each with their own flavor and style, and I've only "known" a few of them. Woodinville is not Freemont is not Bothell is not Bellevue.

People are so openly hostile I kinda stopped trying to talk to anyone. The "Die techie scum" graffiti all over doesn't really help either.

Seattle itself seems pretty nice. Its a shame this forced isolation is just going to lead to even bigger division.

Maybe we should hang out?

Shoot me a private message, lets grab a bite or beer sometime.

[1] http://www.thestranger.com/news/feature/2015/09/09/22831041/...

And that is the primary reason I'm in NYC now instead of Silicon Valley. Of course there is proximity to family and my love of this city in general, but the main reason is that at the end of the day, I go back to my block in Bushwick and spend hours almost every day just sitting with my Puerto Rican neighbors who have lived vastly different lives from mine. And I love it.

The other option would have been to be a in a heavily white and asian male dominated situation with a bunch of people just like me, and i understand the appeal of not having to deal with things that are "different", but for me that's the best part of life.

I'm happy to have lived with whites, blacks, latinos, asians, men, women, straight and gay people throughout my life. And I'm much more comfortable in working class neighborhoods than middle and upper class neighborhoods.

So to me, it sounds like Seattle has a helluva uphill battle if it has to compete with the likes of entirely tech worker dominated buildings and wants to maintain any sort of culture at all besides whatever uniform culture that situation imposes upon an area.

I'm lucky in that a lot of my social circle is non-tech right now, but a lot of the keep-to-yourself aspects of Boston's culture don't sit really well with me. I've thought about NYC more and more lately. Might be worth another look, if I can figure out how to generate a client base down there before I make a jump. =)

I silently follow a private facebook group for a bay-area city (which you need prove you're a resident of to get access) and it's an echo chamber of xenophobia, anti-tech bias, and misguided hate.

I will have to say, though, that as much as I love it here, I definitely don't see it as a particularly soulful city. But I'm from the Ozarks, which while not really diverse still has a lot of music and art. Especially the music: People literally sit on their porches playing music, and you can come up and join them, chat them up, whatever. The boundary between music producer and consumer in the Ozarks/South is a wide spectrum with most people somewhere on it, instead of it being a hard line with most squarely on the consumer side (as in Seattle, supposedly a musical place).

But there are still fun, artsy and 'gritty' events in Seattle. The Fremont Soltice festival/ naked bike ride was super fun to ride in. The Deadbaby Downhill in Georgetown was crazy. But no one will mistake it for New Orleans...

That said, Woodinville and Bellevue are not Capitol Hill, which has a very different vibe. I'm as uncomfortable in that neighborhood as they would be in mine, I expect.

http://www.movin925.com/2015/08/10/second-date-update-podcas...

It's funny and also strange in that the people with such attitudes are the same kinds of people who used to post other no [immigrant group] but people don't get as outraged, somehow this sentiment is deserved. Like me, most people think it's funny.

Yet, this is just the same phobia and fear of newcomers -new comers who are going to ruin the neighborhood, but instead of driving the prices down causing wealth flight they drive housing upwards.

Are you saying that it's the people that are opening the apartment complexes that are complaining? Cause otherwise I'd imagine the average resident of the neighborhood isn't running apartment complexes.

I moved to San Francisco ten years ago with $700 in my pocket, to stay with a relative, who kicked me out pretty soon because, well, having an adult man stay in your guest room when you are accustomed to pre-teen daughters, even if you really direct your misplaced desire for a son at your broke ass nephew, is hard.

I lived for years under the poverty line and basically today, when I meet someone in person, this is exactly my experience.

First, some advice I have a hard time taking: Don't let it get to you.

Second, get involved with your community. When you detect this disdain, tell people (and mean it, and research why you should), that you are concerned about what is happening to the community and that you are rightfully afraid of the things that you admire in the community being driven out.

Find ways to help.

I'm sorry, software is not eating the world, Marc Andreesen's brain is eating his soul, there can be utility and benefit to what we do, but working folks who use their hands and muscles and mouths for a living in ways we likely can't imagine are rightly upset about being pushed out.

I fucking promise you do not want to be in a city or neighborhood ruled by tech folks. People who moved to SF in the past few years are already facing their rents doubling.

You want to know what it's like to live on a third of the salary you make? Start paying exorbitant rent. [I can hear you saying that you already are, wait until it doubles. My rent is currently 5x the inflated mortgage of the house I grew up in.]

Who the fuck is Owen?

I've lived paying 70-80% of my income to rent. That was unpleasant and not sustainable. My conclusion was this: own a house that you can afford.