I'm in this situation, that is I'm graduating next year and I already have a job lined up in SV.
Personally, there just isn't anything for me here. I hate winter (depression for 7 months, anyone?). Everything is far. Entertainment is sparse unless it involves 1) hockey or 2) drinking, or both. Pay is shit. Prices are shit. Selection is shit (have you tried using Amazon CA?). Food, at least where I am, is good but no seafood.
Above else, thought, in SV I just feel like I belong. On the train here, an old man snapped at me for reading a maths text with some anti-intellectual line.
Well.. grabbing the light rail in the Bay Area and changing at Santa Clara around 9pm was an eye opening experience. Let’s just say an old man snapping at my geeky reading would’ve been the least of my concerns.
I had one guy pushing a cart trying to sell me drugs, a bunch of school kids leering at everyone and making a nuisance of themselves and just a general feeling that everyone with any sort of reasonable level of income was not using public transit.
I’m from London, where you’ll be on the tube train with everyone from cleaners to financiers. It’s pretty democratic. Not so in San Jose at all. Very depressing in fact.
See, that's the difference with much of Europe, including London.
Those financiers probably don't use the bus that often, as they have a home just a couple of minutes walk from the station. But they won't have a prejudice against using the bus.
But why isn’t it used by professionals? It seemed clean enough, punctual and conveniently located as well as being reasonably priced. Is there an alternative (besides owning a car) that I’m missing for travelling around the conurbation of Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose et al.
There isn't an issue with VTA itself (aside from maybe the expectation that it companies would move their offices to locations accessed by VTA rather than vice versa).
The South Bay is just really suburban and car-friendly, and the VTA was a failure as a result because most people in the South Bay are happy travelling by car don't need to use the VTA. In contrast, Caltrain is used to travel to SF, which isn't car friendly, so a lot more professionals use it.
Not that I advocate Vancouver in its entirety, but Vancouver has good food, good pay, and loads of outdoors activities and weekend adventure possibilities along with a shit-ton of tech jobs that need filling. The weather is pretty normal too, not far off of SF.
Problem with Vancouver is it's kind of dull entertainment-wise. Lacks vibrancy of some US cities. It's more or less as expensive to live as SF is, and obviously has less of a startup culture.
But overall I'd agree Canada is not all that appealing to people who have choices. Had I been able to choose when I was younger I'd have not ended up in Vancouver, but it sure beats out (IMO) London, UK which was my alternative.
I went to Toronto last summer for a couple of days, the area by the water was fairly nice, but aside from that it felt very oppressive - lots of roads, flyovers, and cars with priority.
I know Canadians like to think of themselves as "different", but I could see more difference between the three cities I'd visited in the previous couple of weeks - NY, DC and LA than I could between Toronto and anywhere else in the US
Perhaps I didn't stay long enough, but if I compare with other cities, like Berlin, Rome, Lisbon, London, Singapore, Nairobi, Sydney, Delhi, Tokyo, etc, Toronto just felt like a typical North American city.
Edmonton is my home town. There's better options here in the Toronto area and our winter is not so long. Forget what people out west say about it. It's mostly pretty good here, depending on what you're looking for. Vibrant city.
I have very similar feelings in Calgary although it's improving slowly.
But I have spent a lot of time in silicon valley and it has recently felt a lot worse, dangerous and gross. I hope my next trip brightens my spirits but it's getting harder for me to love the bay area.
I think something even stronger would be true if you asked about non-CA US states. Why would Canada, at 1/10th the US population, have more of an independent tech locus than does Texas (which has a population comparable to Canada)? Is this just a difference of nations re-distributing wealth internally but not between nations?
Austin is a huge tech town, and rapidly growing. I get a lot of recruiter emails to go there. Same with KC, but to a lessor extent.
I was just in Montreal - the difference in prices with the US was staggering. You forget how wealthy we are, sometimes, even compared to the rest of the developed world. (Had an incredible French meal with 2 bottles of wine over 3 hours and it came out to ~$90 a head American)
I don't think you're disagreeing? There will be reasons to have some local tech workers and entrepreneurs in all large cities, including Austin, Dallas, Toronto, and Montreal. But there will also be global nexuses of them in places like SV, and the higher wages in SV vs. Dallas/Toronto reflects the value of the nexuses (and is the economic mechanisms that induces workers to move there).
I'm not clear what you're saying here, possibly because I don't often have 3 hour French meals. $90 sounds neither outlandishly expensive for a fine meal, nor cheap.
Agreed. And I'd say different countries have different "adoption curves" relating to technology. Think x-axis as being how developed an idea/technology is and the y-axis as how much the country bets on it.
Canada is more "courageous" in some senses, but very conservative in others. I'd describe its adoption curve as flat in the beginning and then bending upwards.
Canada's diversifying its job investment portfolio around jobs in high-tech and pulling that funding out of natural resources. You're starting to see that across the country. Calgary's starting to become a mini tech center for example.
Calgarian who works remotely for Mozilla here: If I were to stay in Calgary and work for somebody else, I'd probably have to accept at least a 40% cut in total comp.
I am effectively priced out of the local dev market at this point.
Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston) has successfully attracted a huge amount of company headquarters and regional offices. There's a great cost of living, an existing talent pool, and great local entertainment culture, plus no income tax and great weather. Canada has none of this.
