It is absolutely not where the most opportunities are. It is the place where the most startups are, which means the top of the opportunity pile eclipses other locations in terms of earning potential and networking. But quantitatively, the most programming jobs per capita are in Washington, Colorado, and Utah.

The more interesting companies are in the bay area I find personally. In Seattle you have amazon, which has a horrible reputation, and Microsoft, which has another kind of bad reputation, but is better than amazon. In the SFBA, you have facebook, apple, google, and many many others.

Also I don't find jobs / people in the state the most accurate indicator. To someone living in LA, moving to SF might as well be moving to Utah. The open positions / qualified people is the far more useful metric, and SF will still beat all of them on that.

That's actually wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google all have some of their largest engineering satellites in Seattle.

True. But sometimes being in a satellite office just isn't the same as being at HQ.

And here on the internet.

Source for those #s? Curious

Absolutely this, if I didn't have my business where I am I'd probably end up moving to London, it's the last place in the world I'd want to live but the salary gap even adjusting for cost of living/commuting is huge.

I could easily live somewhere cheap and commute for a few years then build up enough to move somewhere nicer.

What irritates me the most is there is absolutely no physical reason why London has to be the place for start ups in the UK and a whole bunch of reasons why it's not a good place.

Where I live now rent and house prices are incredibly cheap (even compared to most parts of the UK), the city is rolling out excellent fibre (I have 150Mbps at home and 100Mbps at work) and transport links are excellent, it would be a good place to start a software company (I am doing) but hiring is going to be hard since it will require relocation to get the talent needed (or working entirely remote, something I'm considering).

You don't have to live in San Francisco to work there. There are plenty of people who live on the other side of the bay and commute by train. This gives you a much more affordable place to live than San Francisco.

That has its own set of trade-offs. Prepare for at least an hour commute each way by BART if you work in SOMA, for instance.

Or 10-20 minutes if you live in oakland and your company is on market st. It's faster to live in oakland and get to work than live in the western side of sf in that case.

Huh? I literally live at the end of the line and my commute is 30 minutes...

Google maps thinks it's 36 minutes from Richmond station to Embarcadero station, and all the other combinations are slower. Where are you travelling between?

I used to commute via BART from Pittsburgh in the East Bay and it was easily an hour on BART alone.

You're not at the end of the line in the East Bay, then. The BART ride alone would be at least 40 minutes, and that's if there wasn't some kind of delay.

Del Norte (I guess its 2nd to last) to Embarcadero is 31 minutes.

Many professionals work long hours and thus want short commutes.

Well there are options and nothing is perfect. If people want to live in an area with high demand and they are not willing to compromise, they should quit their complaining and pay the high rental costs.

Plenty of places outside of SF are doing interesting things. Boston has plenty, as does Austin.

I live in Austin and have seen many of my coworkers and friends leave for the bay area. Besides interesting work I think there are more opportunities for career growth.

I am in security (but it's similar in many specialties) and while there are very good companies in Austin if I want to to rise become a security architect or director of information security I have to go to the tech headquarters. Companies like Google and facebook may have regional offices but the core innovative security/ai/pl work and executive decision making is being done in the home campuses.

That being said, I would never leave Austin for the SF bay unless it involved a $350k+ salary.

For security you could also look at the DC area, especially if you're an AMCIT who wouldn't mind undergoing an SSBI. The downside is that most of those jobs are playing whack-a-mole with breaches, but for high-paying, high-profile forensics, response and research positions, federal contractors are hard to beat.

Yes, but San Franciso has the most. Plenty of other cities have theaters, ballet, and opera—but people move to New York.

Austin is more hype than substance. And it has gotten really expensive as well.

San Diego, for example, stomps all over Austin in terms of software jobs, and Austin's hardware scene is laughable.

What are the SD companies?

Go down to Sorrento Valley. Take a rock, and throw it at a building. Austin doesn't have the defense and biotech sectors that San Diego has.

Big ones: BAE, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. (Previously I would have listed Qualcomm ...)

A zillion biotech startups: I drive past at least a dozen near here every day: https://www.google.com/maps/@32.9104712,-117.2304182,18.57z

Rockstar San Diego seems to be hiring as far as I can tell.

In addition, a lot of manufacturing companies up in the San Marcos/Vista area all need automation programmers.

If you're not finding SD companies with software jobs, I'm very surprised.

I, too, would be interested to hear the response.