I've been far happier as an engineer in NYC and Berlin than SF. Gentrification has made SF a pretty boring place to be, and I felt that my overall sense of creativity plummeted there when I was surrounded by so few people from different backgrounds.

Agreed. I ended up moving across the bay and living in Berkeley while working in SF just for that reason.

I don't think there's nearly as much gentrification as people say there is, overall. I mean sure, there's a huge amount of gentrification in the 20% of SF that is not rent controlled: there only the super rich can live.

But, as for the other 80% that's rent controlled, lots of it is pretty dilapidated, almost borderline 3rd world country in some parts. 1% (7k people) of the SF population is homeless and even more are nearly there (despite over 240 million$ a year spent fighting homelessness).

Perhaps the reason people find SF boring is due to the hollowing out of the middle class.

It's kinda funny though, as people in Berlin at least (I'm sure in NYC too) are constantly complaining about gentrification too :)

Adding one: if you're doing anything security related, DC's your friend.

Good point!

And if you are into oil/gas, Houston. Marijuana, Colorado or Washington. Cars, Detroit (maybe?). Commodities, Chicago. Ag, Kansas City (maybe?). Outdoor experiences, SLC. Building something for Latin America, Miami. Ets, etc.

I imagine there are many other cities that dominate in niches that I'm missing.

St. Louis tends to be one of the best cities for Ag stuff.

For the ignorant, what's AG? Google isn't helping.

Someone should tell Google (hey googlers on here) to add that case to the search engine's special cases, as in: "Did you mean agriculture or (the chemical symbol for) silver [1] or ..." :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver

Agriculture.

I live in the Detroit suburbs. Can confirm many programmers working for auto companies around here and friends with a few.