It’s official, I will be moving to San Francisco on September 1st. I spent four days there and managed to get a job and a place to stay in the first two days I was there. I also explored the city and checked out all the neighborhoods, food, and anything that might put me off if I didn’t like them.
Overall, it was a great trip and I’m looking forward to living there and experiencing the new laid back startup vibe. Here’s a few short things I experienced while I was there for a few days, and my perspective on the place so far.
First, let’s start with the only potentially bad thing that happened.
I went down to the Mission to get some Mexican food, because there is absolutely no good Mexican food in New York. None. After eating at some random place I hopped on a bus that the driver said was going back toward Market street. In NYC the MTA personnel actually do give a shit that you get on the right bus, but apparently not in SF, because I ended up going way out in the middle of nowhere.
I asked a few people on the bus if this was going back to Market and they gave me this weird look, and this older Hispanic woman tells me that I have to get off and go the other direction.
I get off at the stop to change buses and the older woman comes over and says, “Mira! You be careful around here. People around here are crazy.” Then her and a few other women looked around fearful and ran off toward their houses.
She looked really scared.
I managed to get on the bus safely, but I’m dying to know how a 10 minute bus ride in the wrong direction could turn into a potential death sentence. To do the same thing in NYC I’d have to seriously be looking for trouble and not by accident.
Now the good stuff. The weather was great, although I’m betting that’s just the awesome Summer weather every place on the West Coast uses to trick you into thinking it’s always great there. It was chilly and sunny the whole time. I actually got a slight sunburn on my head from walking around.
It’ll be nice getting away from the wild weather extremes in NYC. These last few years the weather has been all over the map here, with Summer swinging violently between monsoon and tropics from day to day. Even if SF will be a little colder year round, it’ll be consistent, and the micro-climates will be an interesting experience.
I kept hearing from New York transplants that the food in SF was worse than in New York. I’m not sure if these guys were eating at Five Star joints every night when they lived in NYC, but I found the food to be about the same, except a hell of a lot cheaper.
Granted, I think if you wanted to go ape shit and drop a couple grand on a meal, then New York beats SF hands down. However, if you want to just go out and eat at a random restaurant from a random nationality, then you find about the same spots and styles.
However, the one thing you can find in SF you can’t find in NYC is Mexican food. NYC has the worst Mexican of any American city hands down. If you go to a place for gringos then it’s watered down, not spicy, and probably a trendy douchefest. If you go to a place for Mexicans it’s usually low quality grisly meat shoved in a taco for four bucks.
In SF I just ate at some random small place in the Mission and it was infinitely better than every place I’ve tried in NYC.
I’m not quite sure why people from SF try to say that it’s as expensive as NYC. It must be some misplaced pride thing, but you guys need to quit it for two reasons.
First, SF is not as expensive as NYC. Just about everything I did in SF as a tourist was 2/3 the price of the same thing in NYC. I got a prix fixe meal at Fisherman’s Warf that was very tasty for $20. The same meal at BLT Fish would run me about $40, and you’d have to know where to find BLT Fish in NYC. It wouldn’tn’t just be sitting there at Times Square.
Second, SF being cheaper than NYC is a huge selling point for people moving to the city. You wouldn’t believe the number of people I met who were NYC transplants. People are flooding out of New York into San Francisco in droves, so trying to be superior with the slogan, “We are just as expensive!” is kind of dumb.
Either way, so far everything is about 30-40% cheaper than in NYC.
Even in the “shittier” parts of SF it was way cleaner than the nicest parts of NYC. Remember I got stuck waiting for a bus in an area that was bad enough a random woman had to warn me in fear that I might get hurt. That place was cleaner than all the streets in Manhattan.
When I walk out of my apartment at night there’s a pile of garbage that constantly has about 20 rats crawling all over it. The owners even put the garbage in cans inside a grill and there’s still rats everywhere. My building has to be sprayed for cockroaches all the time. NYC constantly stinks like dried vagina in the summer.
Meanwhile, SF was shockingly clean. I didn’t see any garbage on the sidewalks despite there not being that many actual garbage cans around. Sure there were a few dingy places, but the dingiest place in SF was cleaner than the cleanest streets near me.
Now, you can go to just about any city and find a shithole. I’m sure in SF there’s some part of the city that’d make God weep. But I won’t be going to those places, and the places I will be going were very clean and tidy compared to the same places I go in NYC.
This is the most important part of my decision to move: Technology in San Francisco is infinitely better than in New York. The companies there get it, the hackers there are into it, and the things they work on are interesting. More importantly, the general feel of the technology scene in SF has almost zero douchebag in it.
To give a great example of what it’s like in NYC, I received this email from someone when I posted I was looking for work in SF
I have an idea for a business involving level 2 stock quote analysis that will be able to ask arbitrary questions of the NYSE data stream using indexed log files in Hadoop as well as a backup idea to cannibalize the enterprise search market by doing what they do for cheaper money using this technology and lucene. In both cases, I’ll need a badass coder to help me with the application and deployment parts, ideally using a dynamic JVM language. ... I have personal funds to work for 6 months so I’m planning on doing this for 2-3, presenting a prototype to some financial people and ideally getting funding and connections to sell it in one fell swoop. Just registering the idea. Real-time analysis of a whole bunch of email could be an option as well, if you had a business idea.
Yes, I actually did receive this in response to my blog post. This is actually a very common pitch and style for the NYC entrepreneur. This cocky, muscular, alpha-male-wannabe “my dick is bigger than yours come work for me and make me rich” is tiring and the main reason I’m leaving. If NYC entrepreneurs want to know why they can’t find “techies” (another way of saying “fucking nerd”), all you have to do is read the above.
By comparison the companies that contacted me from San Francisco were all incredibly polite, professional, and told me exactly why I should work for them. Each one immediately pointed me to their existing technology. Each one told me their funding levels. Each one had their business model thought out to some degree. There wasn’t a single company that I thought didn’t get the business, or was trying to screw me.
When it comes down to it, the primary difference between the companies who contacted me in SF vs. NYC is this:
Now obviously the SF companies are all really looking for an employee to make them rich. The difference is in their approach and how they don’t say it so blatantly or in such a gigantic douchebag way. Their touch was lighter, more collaborative, and definitely not with the attitude of me being some “beta-male” to their “alpha”. That lack of cocky dickwad douchebag in the SF technology scene will be refreshing and interesting.
A lot of what I’ve written here is based on a few days trip to San Francisco. If you have a totally different experience, then feel free to clue me in at zedshaw@zedshaw.com when you get a chance. I’m interested in any aspect of life out there, especially things I should watch out for and places I should check out.