It’s extremely pretty, there’s great food, lots of tech jobs, you meet diverse and interesting people, great public transit (for the US). There are many reasons for living in the Bay Area.
You can find the same in Minneapolis with a better cost of living. (At least the other reply mentioned weather). there are more people in the bay area, but in minneapolis you can find more people in minneapolis than you have time to meet.
there are many other cities in the us that likewise have a great tech scene. The bay is not unique - it has a little more but it isn't unique-
8 years in the Twin Cities from Chicago originally.
People are nice, but everyone who I ever interacted with in stores or outside of work was from somewhere else. The natives just weren’t up for making friends or casual conversation.
Despite the cold, Winters in Minneapolis are 100 times better than winters in Chicago.
Food in Minneapolis can’t hold a candle to Chicago or New York.
Public transportation barely works even if you have a government job where you can leave exactly the same time everyday. You still need a car for everything else.
Grew up in Minneapolis and spent most of my life in the twin cities.
You really can’t compare it to a tech hub, or even a major city like NYC or Chicago. It’s just a different league.
I miss the twin cities quite a lot and will likely eventually move back - but definitely not for professional reasons or the opportunity to expand my exposure to cultural diversity.
Living in both a few mid tier cities like MSP and a major “real” city comparing them is pretty tone deaf to me. Calling public transit even usable in Minneapolis is a joke - and I lived without a car for over 20 years there taking it every day. Not even a comparison to a large city with a rapid transit network.
The Bay Area may have fallen off since I’ve been there, but the tech density even 10 years ago gave opportunity for career growth that Minneapolis simply did not remotely have. If you were a super star developer doing Internet things in the early to mid 2000s you left a lot of money on the table by not being willing to move.
That's an understatement: Bay area weather is magical. It is the same all year round. You don't need "winter" and "summer" attire, your plans never get rained out, and you never have to deal with snowstorms. The downside is sometimes it rains ash.
Personally, I had to leave because the pizza out there is unbearable but damn I miss the bay area weather.
When the sky turned orange in 2020, my wife and I were just done. Also, there's something to be said for living in a place with four seasons, and a sense of time passing by.
For highly-specialized engineers and researchers, there’s often only a tiny handful of companies they could work for that offer jobs in their specialties. For example, if you’re a compilers expert, there are only so many companies that hire compiler developers, whether it’s working on a commercial compiler like Microsoft Visual Studio or contributing to an open-source project such as LLVM (Apple is a major contributor). These jobs tend to be concentrated in a few global metro areas.
Additionally, Silicon Valley in particular benefits from having multiple companies in overlapping specialties. Suppose I’m a GPU expert working for NVIDIA, and suddenly I hit a setback and it’s time for a new job. Well, Apple is just a few miles away, and Apple makes GPUs and NPUs, and so I’d have a shot at working for Apple.
Contrast that with people living in areas with little diversity among tech companies. For example, Intel recently laid off a ton of engineers working near Portland, Oregon. There are few alternative technical employers in the region, especially in the specialties Intel focused on in Portland. Those laid-off engineers are facing the prospects of pivoting to a different tech specialty with more employment opportunities, competing for remote jobs at a time when so many companies are requiring their employees to return to the office, or relocating from Portland, which is massively disruptive and can potentially be very expensive. Some may be forced to retire early.
Silicon Valley may be insanely expensive and ultra-competitive, but it also has critical mass, which is vital for highly-specialized engineers and researchers.
I think the same can be argued for global investment banks. All of their important offices are in six cities globally: New York (Manhattan), London, Tokyo, Hongkong, Singapore, and Sydney. All other locations pale in comparison. Probably 1% of headcount (sales, trading, i-bankers) is responsible for 99% of revenues. There is a reason why investment banks are all crowded into very tall buildings in the same six cities: They are trying to access those "1% people". I see the same for tech clusters around the world. (For tech, I guess that less than 5% of staff generate most of your important intellectual property.) There is a reason why Oracle stays in Silicon Valley instead of moving to Montana or Oklahoma were real estate and salaries would be much cheaper!
There are plenty of other cities with enough job options that isn't something you only get in the bay area.
for the intel emplopees I doupt there is anyone else in the us who needs them. Maybe one or two to a military contactor but most have to find a new spectialty. I wish them luck. Fortunately specalists are mostly easy to retrain.
