What is an "engineering style hobby"? I work in the SF Bay Area, and the most popular hobby of my coworkers is "parent".

I also notice it stinks pretty bad from whatever those smoke stacks are doing near Colfax & I25, and north of Denver - like some metallic smell.

In areas like North Thornton there is hydraulic fracking, so I'll pass on that, along with Arvada near Rocky Flats.

There is a lot of homelessness, but i read about 75% of those people have jobs - but can't find a place to live affordably. Rents might not be as bad as SF or Seattle but they are going up, apparently from the influx of people coming for legal weed and affordable housing shortage (luxury stuff is being built)

Oh, and avoid the 16th Street Circus. Centennial, Parker, Boulder, or Golden all look nice if you can find opportunities there - but the commutes from those (also nice to live places) are too much into downtown.

We are in Broomfield, since Boulder got too expensive after we grew enough.

I think you are maybe talking about Commerce City with the giant flaming smoke stacks? That area is indeed horrible.

Boulder is not part of Denver. It's its own city.

If you want someplace cool and good to live (though you will want to secure a 4-5 day a week remote job first, because driving down I25 to Denver will make you want to die. Ask me anything), may I recommend Fort Collins? :)

I can't comment on the rest of it, but many people move to Denver because they have outdoor style hobbies, and think that it's near the mountains. They are probably disappointed to find that it's more or less the standard Great Plains sprawl -- Dallas within a few hours' drive of Longs Peak -- and that Boulder is an overpriced NIMBY colony.

Denver has always been an ultra sketchy town, with a hard drug problem. Just look at the Gang statistics for Aurora. If anything Denver has been getting better, but the difference is 10 years ago you would avoid down town at all costs. Now you want to buy a run down house for 700k.

Though if you can find work in Boulder or Fort Collins, grab it. Denver, avoid.

What does this mean? If you mean cannabis use, who cares? It's legal and it's harmless. If you are talking about opioid abuse or something else, that's a different story.

It sounds like you had some subjectively bad individual experiences because you mixed with people that you are not socially compatible with, but there's nothing here (brogrammers that don't share your hobbies? weed smokers?) that seems like an indictment of the entire city of Denver. Similarly, while your new job is great and you have found your tribe in Austin, your nerdy coworkers are but a very small part of the selfhood of ATX.

Whether or not people use drugs or alcohol when they're not working shouldn't be relevant. If it leads to impairment in the workplace such that they cannot perform their job, then it becomes a problem.

Almost sounds like I have personal experience doesn't it?

I've lived all over as well. The Denver metro is about as friendly as Austin metro in my opinion. Texas as a whole is friendly because it's the south, but that pertains to non urban areas.

I do find people in the West to be poorly mannered but not unfriendly. Frankly, growing up in the South, people in other places have bad manners in general to me.

I think it's important to know that companies have different cultures, and your experience of Austin or Denver can be heavily affected by that.

The federal government sure does care. You won't be getting a security clearance if you are a user. This cuts you off from over a million jobs.

It's not harmless either, particularly if you breath it. Even non-drug stuff like Lysol and candle smoke will mess up your lungs. The drug aspect is real too; we don't have the term "pothead" for no reason.

Those jobs suck, and your attitude does as well. You sound like a stuck up prude.

It's nice having programmer co-workers who like to talk about almost anything else. If having other interests makes you a "brogrammer" then, well, OK, I guess I like brogrammers.

I loved living and working in CO, and am passively looking to move back there if the right situation comes up. Anyone trying to compare it to SF or NYC is not being serious. Those cities are in their own tier and we all know it. But Denver is a very active job market. Once I got some sufficiently "hot" technologies on my resume / LinkedIn, I had no shortage of recruiter hits, even when I had minimal experience.

It's true the traffic is HORRENDOUS and only getting worse due to the influx of people to the state every year. I would encourage anyone looking to work in Denver to negotiate part-time WFH unless you happen to live super close to the office. Mass transit isn't really a thing unless you luck into your home and office both being on the minimal light rail routes.

I absolutely had NO issues with people pushing drugs on me or making a big deal about drug use. If anything it's a bigger issue where I work now on the east coast.

I had no trouble making friends with people of diverse interests. Some of my buddies in CO were major contributors to OpenStack or Ceph. Some others were PhD's in ecology, or doctors, or poets, or restaurant managers, or lawyers. It's not all ski bums and stoners.

If you're willing to expand your search into the surrounding burbs, there are some good jobs to be had at the likes of Level3 or Comcast. Some of the smartest people I know work for Comcast on uniquely challenging problems of scale, on small, nimble teams. Calling them a dino seems a bit disingenuous. Though they are a huge and hateable company, won't dispute that heh.

Agree with the sentiment that Boulder is not Denver just as SF is not Oakland. Boulder was a cool place to live in the 70's, but good luck buying a home for under a million bucks today.

So I guess I lied a bit, I am responding to the OP directly. I am absolutely NOT discounting their life experience. They lived in CO longer than I did. But since it's one of the top comments on this story, and I had such a great time living in Colorado and want to move back, I felt compelled to share another viewpoint. It felt like home to me. Obviously to them, it didn't, despite being their birthplace. And that's fine.

I will also say I've worked with mostly young people. IE an old guy was a manager in his mid 30s.

I will also note, as someone who has worked at dino companies. That is not a reflection of the engineers. It's how the day to day works. How painfully slow work is because 3 departments need to get their act together. I'm sorry you took that as me saying your friends are bad.

My company is nerd to the core in the right way. Hate the brogrammer crap.

We regularly host tournaments for obscure board games, people hack on crazy languages like Haskell and elm for fun, and add to that the company wide obsession with rock climbing.

I love it. But some of the shops I've seen sound like what you described.

I heard spotx is a bunch of brogrammers for instance.

If you're into IoT, Software Defined Radio, and know the JVM pretty well... you'd be a perfect fit but we'll happily embrace people that demonstrate motivation and a desire to learn. We have a few core products that we work on for the defense industry as well as a random one-off research work. Some travel required periodically.

Apply here: https://cticinc.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=4&source=ycomb... or ask me questions.

Having done both, Android development is a pain and just not fun. The simulator/emulator situation has improved a lot which helps, but it used to be a terrible development experience.

Throw in Swift and things get worse. On the other side, Java/Kotlin interoperability in Android Studio is great and the tooling keeps improving.