South Bay is just like a giant company town, it’s actually pretty boring - 60% of people work at the same handful of giant companies, the other 30% work at a startup, and the last 10% serve the first group fair trade coffee.

The weather and climate are amazing, but socially its suffocating when everybody you meet is a variation on a tired theme.

> It's weird. They always travel in groups of five. These programmers, there's always a tall skinny white guy, a short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.

And they all drive Teslas with vanity license plates.

People who work for startups can’t afford coffee?

This was funny and I meant to update it but instead down voted it and now can't find how to undo that. Sorry!

You can click the ‘undown’ button next to the username and timestamp of the comment.

there's a undown button to the right of the username if the timer hasn't expired

They have to make their own, and it’s not fair trade.

haha this, its great to try it, but like NYC, dont stay too long...

Yeah, its *super interesting* at first, but once the novelty fades you aren’t left with much.

That said, nowhere on earth had better driving directions on apps since people will notice the bugs on the drive into work and fix them. ;-)

What are you talking about, NYC is great! You could live your whole life there and never run out of things to do.

>You could live your whole life there and never run out of things to do.

Look, I know I'm being pedantic here, but as a rural nerd, I just gotta say that this is true of literally any habitable location on the planet if you decide to no-life the right hobby or hobbies.

I’m very fond of both New York City, and spending time in nature for the same reason: you just don’t know what you’re gonna see when you walk out your door.

Am I going to hear a violin performance on the subway platform that is utterly sublime from a world class performer?

Am I gonna see the rarest bird in North America perched branch in front of me?

For me, the worst is the middle ground between crazy urban and pure nature where there is low probability of seeing anything exciting.

Yeah, but you don't have to "no-life the right hobbies" to be satisfied in NYC because there's SO MUCH to do. You can just be a normal person who isn't hyper obsessed with one particular hobby.

> never run out of things to do.

Unless the thing is "afford housing"

Well that's why we do these high-paying tech jobs.

You mean besides drinking and dining and spending outrageous amounts of money on 13$ beer and overpriced bland food? As a european I dont like the city at all. The only thing going for it is the vibe and the energy of the people. If it werent for the high salaries, people wouldnt be moving here.

It needs serious clean up, from the mentally-sick homeless domesticating the subway, to the stench and the rats, from the grime, to the zero outdoor culture besides the monotonous central park which after dark gets swarmed with rats which my dog loves to chase. They need to narrow the avenues and start building outdoor areas the same way Barcelona is doing. In the winter you put heating mushrooms and you are good to go. NYC has a long way to start looking like a decent city that europeans would like to move to. Americans find it great because its the only thing resembling a city and not an airport where you dont need a car to move around.

NYC is way better than Barcelona, sorry. Let me know when y'all can figure out how to make sidewalks that you can walk straight along to your destination, rather than having to go diagonally along a big asphalt parking lot at every single intersection.

I'd argue this is true of a lot of cities where you're likely to bump into anyone, depending on how narrow your scope is of what one considers interesting. Also true of probably most universities if they're doing anything right.

The problem with some particularly uptight places is that people aren't always open to chatting (or maybe under strict NDA), and you want to find a place on that nice area of the venn diagram where you actually do bump into and communicate with new and stimulating people.

Everybody is interesting if you get talking to them. You just think the guy who collects your trash is uninteresting and never talk to him (or do you?). Sure not everyone has the same background, and so they are interesting in different ways, but they are all interesting.

This is exactly what I meant, but even beyond relatively common jobs, if you're likely enough to bump into open people, there's a good chance some of them will be doing more niche interesting things too

Interests must align. People must know common jargon which convey high density information faster. I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

> I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

Seems pretty hollow and transactional to me.

> Interests must align.

That's part of the dice roll. Sometimes interests do align, sometimes they don't, but someone looking for ROI is easily spotted and ran away from. Chemistry and common ground are a matter of luck.

some of my best conversations - that I still remember many many years from them - are from people who have nothing in common to me.

some of them made me question my reality that changed my life, something you may want to try. Even keeping a conversation going that you think is not going well,can be a really good skill to have

> I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

You must be fun at parties.

I usually cringe when people make this quip but it might be the first time I've seen it used effectively.

Having a conversation with someone who provides a perspective or experience I do not have is automatically a positive ROI in my book.

How tiresome

I’m in Philly and about 20 years ago I sat next to an old man at a dinner for something. Neither of us wanted to be there. We talked, found out we both did tech things. I asked him what he worked on and he said “well back in the day I helped build ENIAC.” I was blown away. Had a great talk.

These are the moments in life to cherish. As Ferris Bueller once said "Life moves fast, if you don't stop to look around once in a while, you might miss it".

Incidentally, one of the scariest things about the volatility in the housing market and in my (lack of) career, is that I may at some point be forced to abandon the neighborhood and city in which I've adopted as my home and in which I've befriended many of these random delightful people of all ages, and they might have to too. They're my community, I see them at the gym, the coffee shop, walking down the street, or at the park. A 1 bedroom condo starts at around $650k CAD, and most of the people here who haven't already owned something for a while depend on renting basements.

And I am so happy I live in a place where this doesn't happen.

Interesting, but I can't understand why that makes you happy. What benefit does it bring you?

It can be alienating to move through the world in spaces where your work is everywhere you go. It's a thing I appreciated moving from San Francisco back to the midwest. Every once in awhile, I bump into someone with a Github sticker or whatever, and it's a happy surprise, but for the most part the world I inhabit has nothing to do with my work. Everyone has different things to talk about.

Some people like talking about things not related to their job when they aren’t working. The culture out in SV is very much still “work is life”.

The benefit of being a part of the actual human world, where real people live. Where not essentially everyone is obsessed with their careers and/or comparative wealth. That sort of thing.

I love not having to think or talk about work when I go outside.

If some one asks what I do they'll say "that's neat, must be nice to work from home!" and that's the end of the conversation, we can talk about hobbies or something else instead.

Please elaborate

The Bay Area is pretty special that way

It is amazing, and happens exactly this way.

I'm a "regular person", engineer, and since moving here over 10nyrars I've met a lot of famous tech people, witnessed lot of amazing things, all mostly by happenstance just because there is so much of it, so many people like me, here.

Different strokes I guess. How long have you been…working? The vast vast vast majority of people want a little more variety in lives as opposed to more more more of the stuff they spend 40+ hours a week doing as it is. The exceptions to this rule are almost always unhealthy workaholics / people that’ll learn about the benefits of work / life balance the hard way. It doesn’t make them some higher tier of world-class engineer like some (often including themselves) expect.

Interesting things happen in many places, not just Silicon Valley. You simply need to keep your ears open and listen.

You have to step over the poop and the needles to get into the coffee shop though, and while you're inside your car is being burglarized.

These people are everywhere. Most are not stupid enough to yell about it in public.

Why is it stupid to talk about non-confidential aspects of your job in public?

The Apple Car R&D project is (or, I suppose, was) absolutely confidential. I am sure Apple has reprimanded or fired people for less.

Fired people for less than what?

What part of it is confidential? Its existence? Obviously not. The fact that it uses SLAM? Not confidential, of course it does. That a person was transferred from that to the Vision Pro? Probably also on their linkedin page.

Nothing that OP described this person as saying sounds "stupid" or confidential. Sure, maybe they also said something that was confidential in addition to what was described. Maybe they also insulted your mother. We don't know.

Apple employees most certainly cannot talk publicly about unreleased products. Including loudly discussing their roles in restaurants.

Is that an official, Apple-specific policy written down somewhere? That doesn't seem right, and doesn't match other similar companies.

I've known people at Facebook and Microsoft who were working on upcoming not-yet-released products and were free to talk about the products and their roles on them. These people, much like the person we're discussing, worked on upcoming projects which had already been publicly announced.

Of course publicly discussing a confidential project that no one knows about could get someone fired, but that's not the scenario we're talking about.

Apple never announced a project to build a car. Nor did they announce the cancellation of a project to build a car.

Reporters reported on internal communications and noteworthy patterns in who was hired.

Apple does not pre-announce products by more than 6-9 months, and only that in cases where developer support is needed at launch.

More generally, Apple is notorious for having policies around new product secrecy that are vastly more elaborate than other tech companies. Using Microsoft and Meta as comps seems like a bad idea.

Yeah, it is surprising. Apple is like fight club.