I'm moving to the Bay Area - Tell me what I need to know
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Ok folks, I've accepted an offer to work for a company in Silicon Valley as a senior member of their DB team and will be moving out there towards the end of the month. I've lived in Boston my whole life so I'm asking what I need to know living out there?
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There's one big toilet and they make you all go at the same time.
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It's near a Bay.
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I'm fine with that. But poo force is strong with me, so they might be in trouble.
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Don't move to the Bay Area. Fuck. You idiot.
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Sorry Blakey, The offer was WAY too good. If your lucky though you may find me stalking you from the bushes...
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Sorry Blakey, The offer was WAY too good. If your lucky though you may find me stalking you from the bushes...
From... from the Bay Area? You know I live outside Seattle, right?
Do you have that disease that moron east coast idiots have where they assume every city is like 5 miles from each other?
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Who is that nerd and why is he staff here?
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Prepare to pay an (or several) arm(s) and leg(s) for housing?
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I actually thought you were in SF, But I'm in Seattle Every few months anyway. Plus this new company has an office there as well. So it's likely I'll be there every month.
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If you've been to Seattle, and the company has an office in Seattle, why the fuck would you go to the Bay Area?! Goddamned.
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I already had to sacrifice my sons soul for housing in Boston. I pay $3k for a 2 bedroom currently. So I'm used to it.
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Because they wanted me in the home office. They paid a premium for that I assure you. Seattle would have been my first choice.
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Ok well you're seriously going to hate it. People in Bay Area tech are the fucking worst. All entitled incompetent assholes. (Look at Uber's management for the typical Bay Area tech worker attitude.) Prices in the area are awful. Your commute's going to suck even more than a Seattle commute would. You'll be paying California taxes and having to deal with CA stupidity (congratulations, literally everything you look at is now "known to cause cancer in laboratory animals".)
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Do you have that disease that moron east coast idiots have where they assume every city is like 5 miles from each other?
I was going to post an edit of that New Yorker cover with Mountain View and Kirkland written in, but Discourse doesn't like displaying it at a readable size even with manually entered height and width.
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I live in Boston. Traffic is a way of life. I've seen 6 hours to go 2 miles. You often have to go north to go south, etc. I'll likely try CalTrain and/or live closer to the office to make things a bit easier. overall cost of living in the bay area is only a bit higher than Boston.
But I do agree it is going to be higher in the bay area. I'm just going to have to get used to it.
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Who is that nerd and why is he staff here?
He got grandfathered in as admin with @dhromed and me from the old board.
Like @dhromed at the moment, I suspect he's been rather busier IRL than I...
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Prices in the area are awful. Your commute's going to suck even more than a Seattle commute would. You'll be paying California taxes and having to deal with CA stupidity (congratulations, literally everything you look at is now "known to cause cancer in laboratory animals".)
This much, at least, of what Blakey wrote is absolutely correct.
What part of the Bay Area? It makes a big difference, especially in housing.
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I've been an admin here since around 2008.
Not surprised that newer users don't recognize me. I've been keeping extremely busy and travelling a lot the past two years. So my posting has been less frequent.
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I'll be moving to the valley area. Not exactly sure where yet.
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I'm staff because I've been involved with the site for many years. Originally I was a mod and then promoted along with PJH and Dhromed to Admin.
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Did you get a DiscoToaster® for that TriplePost™?
Consider replying to multiple posts at once
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hi admin i havent seen before!
best advice i can give for moving to bay area is get used to long commute to work.
probably disproportionately long given linear distance between you and work.
also stay away from Adam Savage and Jamie Hineman.
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Well, the Bay Area gave us Metallica, Testament, Megadeth, and Joe Satriani.
Just a bit of useless trivia.
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what I need to know living out there?
Highway 101 is the Worst of the Worst. You do not want to commute along it. Choose living locations accordingly if you can…
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I'll be moving to the valley area. Not exactly sure where yet.
Reasonable, but where's your office?
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The office is in Palo Alto
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From... from the Bay Area? You know I live outside Seattle, right?
Why would you assume any random person knows that?
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I already had to sacrifice my sons soul for housing in Boston.
Why would you do that, when you could live in Salem and pay a shitload less, and take the Blue line? (for example. Could be anywhere else on the T.)
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Salem is like another realm of existence. I avoid it at all costs. Too many tourists.
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Salem is like another realm of existence. I avoid it at all costs. Too many tourists
LOL--that's exactly why I said "could be anywhere else on the T". I lived in Salem for years, so I know it's actually also mostly fairly expensive (I lived in a converted triple-decker down by the college).
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Right now I live on the Melrose side of Malden. I tend to live in Communities instead of normal rentals. I like having someone else handle all maintenance. It means I have more time for family.
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The office is in Palo Alto
Ouch, pricey neighborhood. You mentioned earlier taking CalTrain; that sounds to me like your best bet. That would let you live as far away as San Jose, Morgan Hill or Gilroy. I'm not sure what's happened to prices since then, but a bit over 4 years ago my ex-wife and I sold our south SJ 1200 sq. ft., 3br, 2ba, mid-60s era house with a nicely landscaped 5000 sq. ft. for $450K, and she was paying $2200/mo (IIRC) for a similarly-sized townhouse (with a tiny yard). Morgan Hill/Gilroy should be less, but IIRC there are only a couple of trains/day that go that far south.
You could also live on the Peninsula, north of PA, but I don't know much about housing costs there. A little further north gets even more expensive, but beyond that, I don't know (until you get to SF, itself, which is insane).
Highway 101 is the Worst of the Worst. You do not want to commute along it.
Also avoid 17, unless you like (a) driving too fast on a mountain road with an SUV 3 inches from your back bumper because its driver wants to go 20MPH faster than you do, and/or (b) parking on a mountain road with a few thousand of your closest commuter friends.Kids? If you can afford to live there, Cupertino has some of the best-ranked schools in the area. SJ schools are OK. East Side Union not so great, but their scores are dragged down by a large non-English-speaking population of every ethnic group on Earth; my kids went to one of the one or two best schools in the district, and they weren't bad. I don't know about other districts.
Weather: Hot(ish; it's not Phoenix) and dry in the summer; expect zero rain for months. Temperatures 80s-90s daytime (less near the water, more inland); 60s night. Hot temperatures don't feel as bad as they might sound to you, because the humidity is low. The typical pattern is hot during the day, clouds form overnight (you can see them flowing over the mountains from the coast), but disappear by 9-10AM. (None of this applies to SF, where summers are cool and foggy. The hot air inland rises and sucks the cool, moist ocean air over the city.)
Winters are cool and rainy. Frost is common inland; temperatures occasionally drop below freezing on clear nights, but only a little — 25 would be a near-record low. The mountains get snow a few times a year (enough snow to ski on is about 4 hours away, if you're into that), but it's almost unheard of at lower elevations — once every 20 years a few flakes will hit the ground and instantly melt.
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From everything I've read, it seems the show "Silicon Valley" is spot on the reality over there. So don't cash on your big idea (unless it's JavaScript and can be decompiled)
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Fremont schools are pretty good. Mission San Jose has a cheating streak due to the large population of Asian parents demanding nothing but the best. Kennedy has a large population of whites and latinos that just don't care, but you don't see them if you stick to the Honors and AP classes.
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Ok well you're seriously going to hate it. People in Bay Area tech are the fucking worst. All entitled incompetent assholes.
I'm of the opinion that every major metropolitan area is going to have its own share of entitled incompetent assholes.
For example, near* where I live, you'll have people whining that they don't get paid $100/hr ("It's bullshit that they're not paying me 'market' rate!") while they dine on selections from a gluten-free and organic menu and drink $15 cocktails. In between hopping to the next establishment two doors down the street that's also serving $15 cocktails, they engage in lengthy discussions about politics and philosophy, but after a while it becomes clear they're really only interested in One Thingâ„¢.
*but far enough away. They also complain about property values, but they seem to ignore that there's reasonably affordable housing about 25 miles away.
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Highway 101 is the Worst of the Worst. You do not want to commute along it. Choose living locations accordingly if you can…
It can be bad, but it's far from TWoTW. During a trip out there, I made the mistake of getting on the road just after a big game at Candlestick finished. It was bumper to bumper all the way to the Bay Bridge. I thought to myself, "Hey, this reminds me of home!"
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while it becomes clear they're really only interested in One Thingâ„¢.
Cloud server maintenance?
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@blakeyrat said:
From... from the Bay Area? You know I live outside Seattle, right?
Why would you assume any random person knows that?
EXIF?
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Blakey (jokingly) complaining about the horrible weather in Seattle?
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Blakey complaining about the horrible weather in Seattle?
Do you follow all his complaining?
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Not even @blakeyrant himself follows his complaining.
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Not even @blakeyrant himself follows his complaining.
that explains the inconsistencies
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Blakey complaining about the horrible weather in Seattle?
I've never complained about Seattle weather. Where do you people get this shit?
EDIT: I think I once posted a joke saying that if flights were cancelled due to rain at SeaTac airport, it'd still have airplanes on the runway from 1980. Or something like that. That was a joke. Not a complaint about the weather. Other than that, I have no fucking clue where aliceif is inserting this bullshit into the brain from.
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Other than that, I have no fucking clue where aliceif is inserting this bullshit into the brain from.
shoulder aliens. it's always the shoulder aliens.
someone told me about them once, but i forget who it was.
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It's always raining and horrible and miserable, especially in late-summer DO NOT MOVE HERE IT IS HORRIBLE no seriously Californians, STOP MOVING HERE goddamned.
This?
I intentionally overlooked the sarcasm in it.
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This?
I intentionally overlooked the sarcasm in it.TBH, that might have been a (not-so-covert) complaint about Californians...
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This?
Goddamned you dumb pieces of shit.
I intentionally overlooked the sarcasm in it.
"DERP! I intentionally ignored the joke and now I'm going to say it wasn't a joke when it obviously was one and I am a fucking retard!!!!!!!!!"
I guess at least you admit to it.
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EXIF?
What pictures has Blakey posted that would have exif data in them with geolocation? He doesn't seem that stupid.
For that matter, who leaves geolocation on in their phone's camera?
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How to demoralise employees was front pagified, someone in the comments looked at the EXIF and pinpointed his workplace, to the building IIRC