maxawaytoolong
Good job on meeting girls in PA. The secret of dating in SV/SF that I wish I knew when I moved there: the women are all in Palo Alto, Pac Heights, and The Marina. That may not be your "type" but it's better to broaden your range than hold out for what you think is your best match. It's not like in NYC where there's a match (or 10) for everyone.
Sadly, I think sometimes my posts come off as mean-spirited. I consider myself sort of a forum comedian who tries to throw some wisdom in while being entertaining. I wasn't trying to disparage GroupMe. I actually like and use their service! On the other hand, I also don't think anything I said is factually inaccurate!
If you don't think it's important to get laid, good on you, you've transcended to the next level of hacker zen. If you think it's easy to get laid in Silicon Valley, you are a bartender with a huge dick, not the VP of Product for Whatever.com.
As a New Yorker I am allowed to call bullshit, too.
NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women. It's not as easy as when you're in college. But it's about 100x better than Silicon Valley.
Relationships might seem unimportant when compared to your potential bazillion dollar website, but even the most autistic geeky weirdos want companions - see all of livejournal as evidence. I did startups in SV/SF for 10 years and could count the number of women I worked with on 2 hands. If you're working 12 hours a day, when are you going to meet the other women who aren't working at startups? At the bar, after work. But, you could go to any bar and there would be no women there, either. You end up condemning yourself to a life of near chastity hoping your startup sells so you can maybe attract a mate based on your bank account. That probably won't even work, there are loads of rich dudes in SF/SV who can't get a date.
The NYC startup scene is OK but kind of stupid. There is a lot of dumb money. For example, GroupMe got $10M for a product that took 24 hours to build and has already been built by a dozen other companies over the years. The guys working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands around. (Check their twitter history, I'm not just being snide.) I actually think they are cool dudes but I'm just using them as an example that the bar for funding in NYC is way lower compared to SV. The nouveau startup wunderkinds in SF/SV are now all straight-laced type-a achievers who went to Philips Andover, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.
(This is actually really weird, cuz it's the opposite of the previous bubble where SV/SF was a bunch of bipolar freaks and dropouts with purple dreadlocks, and you needed to go to Choate and Princeton and wear a suit to get a job in NYC)
I spent about 2 years in NYC hanging out with startups and came to the conclusion that most of them are just "playing startup." The startups that make the most sense there are startups that target the NYC market first, like Gilt and Foursquare and media/blog empire things like Gawker, Tumblr, and DailyBeast. GroupMe works well in NYC, too, as the main activity is to go out at night and you can use it to sync up. So if your plan is to service the NYC market first and then see how it spreads from there, it's not a bad place to be and it should be trivial for you to get funding $$$.
There is a game to be made, and the problem is that it hasn't been programmed yet.
But my point still stands as Twitter did not renew their contract...
It's also not what I've "been hearing"... I've had to work directly with Pivotal people.
A programmer will automate some tedious repetitive task, and then boast about the automation to his programmer peers and managers. The programmer will then be rewarded with more tedious tasks to deal with.
A sysadmin automates a boring task, and tells nobody. The only way anyone can request work done is to file a ticket in the ticket tracker. The work gets done, but nobody besides the sysadmin knows how it was done. If the sysadmin is good at his job, he is rarely seen at his desk, and often seen playing foosball.
They generally do a mediocre job at best, so their clients didn't renew their overpriced consulting contracts.
In California, if you work in Silicon Valley you can always live down in the Santa Cruz mountains. If you work in SF you can live in Marin. It is often faster to go from Marin to SOMA than it is to go from the Sunset or Richmond to SOMA. I can't say it's a quick commute from the SC mountains to anywhere, but the option is there. I know Apple has a shuttle bus from Santa Cruz to Cupertino, maybe other firms do, too.
NYC metro is not great for stargazing but I was surprised that there are nice places for hiking upstate, and in NJ and CT. Even Vermont and the Berkshires are accessible for weekend trips.
However, I have always been curious as to why Asian women have the names of white grandmas from the 1950s. The only Esthers I know are my great aunt and every other Korean-American I've ever met.
Why not? I worked for silicon valley startups for 15 years and not once did I meet a "product manager" who did anything worthwhile.
That said, coffee culture has trended towards very potent coffee. I now feel like most drip coffee I get in a coffee shop is too strong, and an espresso is the only manageable dose. This is a weird reversal of the situation 15 years ago, where drip coffee was just dirty water, and an espresso is what kept people up all night.
I am not a moron, and I used to help hire at various startups. We'd always get one or two offers "we couldn't refuse" from engineers of our competitors. Whenever we gave them a second of interest, they'd waste hours and even days of our time. What they were really interested in was not engineering, but escaping their current workplace hell and wedging themselves into our startup as some sort of non-programming decision maker, for a (relatively) huge salary. But, we already had non-programming decision makers. We were trying to hire an engineer. We eventually just dismissed these guys outright, because in every experience they ended up being mildly crazy. Not the good mad-scientist hacker insanity, either... More of a desperate, annoying, stalker-ish insane. So maybe you came off as crazy.