It was one of the primary reasons I left SF for NYC. There is still world-class tech employment to be found here, but it is surrounded by world-class industries of all other kinds, too.

My tech employee friends in NYC, who work for respected names and are great at what they do, don't spend weekends at hackathons or weeknights running from tech office to tech office for free food at meetups. Here, it is okay and even normal to finish a work day and go experience art, culture, history, etc... things which all do exist in SF and are often great quality there, for sure, but which in certain employment circles seem to be pretty much ignored.

To each their own.

NYC has some pretty brutal work life balance expectations in pretty much every industry I've talked to people from.

Outside of SV startups, many companies in the Bay have reasonable hours. There is definitely a workaholic expectation in NYC.

That's a common sentiment, but woefully exaggerated: it's not like the Bay Area is only tech. I mean, it's not New York, but neither is anywhere else in the country. The Bay Area has all the art and culture and music you'd expect of a cosmopolitan city, it has the same generic business/sales/finance/law professionals, it has two of the best universities in the country. It has everything you'd get elsewhere and tech.

It's a perfectly diverse metropolitan area with tech as an addition, not as a replacement. That's strictly more than many other cities I've spent time in from Ottawa to Charlotte. Calling it a monoculture is simply not accurate or, if it is, so many cities don't have even that.

Ehh, I don't think it's exaggerated at all - having lived both in SF and NYC.

There exists things that aren't tech in SF, but the scale of which is much lower than other major cities like NYC. More importantly though, even in non-tech scenes, tech is always there. It's the guy at the party that seems to find you no matter how much you move around the room. I found it suffocating - no matter where you go you can never fully disengage from the industry.

The measure of a tech monoculture isn't (IMO) the existence of other things, it's whether or not tech tags along with all of these other things.

Right, because that's the only thing to do in the Bay Area.

There are plenty of cultural events in SF not involving tech. Museums, art shows, live music, etc.

Yes, those things also exist in every other city and they [mostly] manage to do it without the hordes of brogrammers.