In WV, you can find food at most places until 12-1am 7 days a week. And the major local grocery is a Walmart, which is open 24 hours.
Last Easter I had no clue nothing would be open, and didn't prepare for that. So I just had some crap picked up at a gas station to hold me over until the next day. It's a really bizarre situation compared to most other metros, but even compared to a bunch of small towns.
In my case, definitely.
Thanks for the clarification.
Yes and to finish my OP thought, I would argue that this was without a doubt the worse of it as well.
The people here are poor, and my perception is that they don't have much hope and/or desire to affect any kind of change in their life. They just seem not to give a crap.
I don't live in a nice part of town, and I suppose it could just be culture shock for me personally having moved from Irvine to Not-Summerlin, Vegas, but that's my perception.
Then again, another thing with Vancouver (that I think I've heard said a bit about SF, but less-so) is that there's no night life. The bars close at midnight. (Actually, you can't even get a license to operate a "bar" here; you have to build a sit-down restaurant in order to serve alcohol.) I wonder if the correlation is actually between this sort of Victorian-era teetotaling "healthy living" sensibility, and the sort of generalized NIMBYism that prevents highrises from deflating housing pressure.
I think you're onto something with the Victorian "healthy living" bit. There is some hypocrisy as well: the way Vancouverites talk down about alcohol drinkers or tobacco smokers all the time but meanwhile promote the pot trade and never talk about the rampant heroin problem in that city.
Really sad to hear that Vancouver and San Francisco are plagued by real estate siphoning out all the potential of what those cities could be. Feudalism seems to be a trend everywhere though.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-14/millennial...
All the great things that Vancouver has to offer happen in the day or afternoon. The only thing I'm sad about is the Jazz Cellar closing down. RIP Ross Taggart.
That said, nightlife closing at 2AM is a plus and a minus. I kind of like there being a defined end to the evening, I'd rather not stay out too too late and this way I don't have to be the party pooper :)
I've spent 8 months looking for a technical position. The only interviews I've managed to get are in Roanoke/Blacksburg, VA. Every interview I've had (not many because the market is dry), either drastically undercuts my experience (one company tried to write down my experience below the length of my last job) or otherwise offers a very meager salary, 30-50% lower than even the cost of living adjusted figure from my last job where I was living SoMa.
Also due to infrastructure, and partially the company who marked down my experience because they don't consider remote experience, I'm no longer interested in remote positions.
I can't find food after 10pm.
Morgantown also has late hours in my experience, though you might have to walk to High St.
I'm there fairly frequently.
The Asylum serves regular bar food til about 11 I think. Still later than what I was seeing in SF.
The public transit system shuts off by 12 AM - 1PM, and most service workers would likely have to live outside of the city, as well as most people coming into SF to work. The city is forced to shutoff at a certain time because of the transit situation, even if not for any other reasons.
The current disparity certainly causes plenty of concerning issues, though SF's early closing has been a thing since at least 2007 when I first lived there, at which point cost of living was somewhat reasonable.
I moved here because it had a pleasant climate and (once had) a vibrant art/culture scene that provided ~80% of what you could get in bigger cities, at a discount. It was a city, but with a higher quality of life. For that, you might be willing give up some things.
That's no longer true. I don't know how new people rationalize the costs here, except as an "investment" into something else -- their career, real estate, whatever.
And they've all worked out, shopped for groceries, had breakfast, etc. before 9am.
Even then, the jetlag only made it work for a week or two.
As others have noted, people who have the sorts of jobs that put them behind a register can't afford to live in SF, and public transportation shuts down at midnight or so. If you were working a restaurant it would have to close by 10:00 so you had time to clean up with a little buffer to make sure you were on the last train.
This one took me by surprise when I visited SF for the first time five years ago. I thought it would be booming with activity just like NYC, so I thought nothing of trying to find food when I arrived at ~11pm.
NOTHING. Nothing was open.
It must be a huge bummer to live in a city with NYC prices without that (very important --- to me) NYC perk.
Has nobody started a great 24/7 food delivery service bringing overpriced food to tech workers on demand?
You probably couldn't see anything open from your hotel in Union Square or SOMA, but it's there. Just open foursquare or Yelp.
Even if we lower the standard to include fast food and/or greasy post-drunk food, the number jumps to perhaps 30, on a weekend night. So there might be a late-night restaurant in every neighborhood, but there's definitely no more than one. If you want something good, you need to eat before 9.
Also, get off your high horse for implying that a greasy spoon can't be good or have high standards.
I routinely had good meals at 10pm or 11pm at night. Never once did I eat at a diner.
Lots of restaurants stay open later in NYC, and then there are plenty of gastropubs serving great food even later.
In NYC at 4am, I could Seemless any meal/quantity I wanted!
In Seattle, I can only get pizza past 2am.
Companies neither have to have physical offices nor do they have to be located in the Bay Area. And unfortunately culture dictates that an office is always necessary and that you need to locate your tech company in the Bay Area for dubious reasons like fundraising (which should only take a small portion of the operation of your company anyways), hiring (good engineers might come here if they agree with the lifestyle, and the job opportunities, but that doesn't mean jobs should come here because good engineers are here), or synergy (the belief that the physical proximity to other tech firms may help your company. Only applicable to certain markets at best).
Even the crack heads in SF are high class though. Where else do you see homeless people sleeping in $250 REI tents?
Sorry, but this is flawed logic.
Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as well — Twitter, Square, Uber, Google, Facebook, Reddit, AirBnB, Apple, Oracle, Box, Palantir, Pinterest, Lyft, Stripe, CloudFlare… not that these are all of tech, but finding even a fraction of these anywhere (other than perhaps New York) is a stretch.
Given that, it's patently worth it to pay the extra cost per employee, when the relative value of each employee to the company ends up being so high compared to other industries.
This is not to say you can't build a strong tech company in other parts of the US, but you're stacking the odds against you by doing so.
A quick scan of Fortune's unicorn list* shows 12 out of the top 25 are from outside of California, and two of the Cali ones are LA, bringing SF down to 11 (after generously counting Palo Alto in SF, because I assume you meant the Bay Area). Without numbers on how many startups are started in various places, I'm not sure what these numbers mean, but it doesn't obviously favor your winner-takes-all argument.
For an area with less than 2% of the country's population, that is overwhelmingly dominant. I'm not sure if you could have underscored my point any more succinctly.
The point is that you still have contributed no idea of what portion of startups are starting in SF. If 95% of startups come out of SF but only 80% of winners do, it still has an overwhelming majority but is by the numbers a terrible place to start a startup.
Of the top 25 international, only about half are American, so stop pretending the denominator is 25 if you've decided that international companies for some reason don't count. There are 2 in LA, one in Boston, and 1 in NYC (what list are you looking at?), giving the Bay Area something like 2/3 of American companies, and about 1/3 of all.
Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.
Having a distributed tech team is not hard, but most startups aren't distributed because the VCs aren't distributed. They want face to face meetings.
...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.
Which you have to pay yearly, not as a one-time discounted cost. In fact even down at the very, very low-end of tech-related jobs (~$50k in PDX) the difference between SF and PDX is ~$18k.
There is literally no shape of tech-oriented business you could operate where having to spend only $15k per employee when they're onboarded isn't a net financial benefit compared to having to pay SF-area competitive salaries for the same positions.
You shouldn't need most of the rest of that, either. Make sure everyone has a 2nd monitor, and you'll need to buy a $30 webcam if they don't already have laptops. I wouldn't worry about the headset, either - cell phone headsets or earpods generally work fine and most everyone has a decent one nowadays. Wait for the folks who want something nicer to ask for one.
Cheap internet is fine. I worked from home with rock bottom residential service, the cheapest they would give me, and my connectivity was fantastic, better than anything I've ever had from an office. The secret is that nobody's on the Internet from home during the day, so you've got infrastructure that was meant to handle the whole world watching Netflix at 8pm more-or-less to yourself.
This is assuming a distributed team. mind. They have a tendency to self-assemble. Partial co-location is where things get messy and you start needing to worry about smart whiteboards and fancy videoconferencing equipment and all that crap. All that's really for is to make it an eensy bit more likely that the co-located folks will be willing to collaborate with the remote folks rather than forming a clique and forgetting that the rest of the team exists.
Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck.
But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.
0/10, would not try again.
I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.
Also, of course, few around here believe that there are good programmers outside of the city. Mostly, though, I think it's about 20-somethings who want to feel like they've made it because they're running a startup in the most expensive city in the country.
The cult is powerful, for such a group of disruptive, innovative thinkers.
The main requirement is that everyone communicate over the same channels. No planning sessions at the watercooler. Take it back to your desk and have the conversation in Slack instead.
If people really figure out how to consistently develop any kind of software remotely, with any team size and with average programmers, a lot of programming jobs will move away from high living cost areas, as happened with manufacturing jobs.
If you're in the US, where software developer salaries are much higher than most of the rest of the world (even on developed countries average programmers don't earn 6 figures), you'll be probably be on the losing side.
This is a false alternative, since it's not something SF government can do.
...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. The cost of living here is the invisible hand of the market showing you that you're making a mistake by locating your company in the bay area. Yet the dominant techno-nerd narrative continues to be that the bay area has somehow made a mistake in not anticipating the bizarre fetish that global wealth has developed for local real estate since the early 1990s.
It's insane that an industry of otherwise-intelligent people insists on cramming itself onto a tiny peninsula with seismic development challenges, and I chuckle every time someone draws the comparison to New York, which has seven times the land area, a capable and efficient transit system that has been developed over more than a century...and one of the highest costs of living in the world. Development is not a panacea.
I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros, where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.