The tech life: New York versus San Francisco

An interesting conversation at Hacker News about which city is better for programmers:

My previous team was split between Mountain View and New York. We’d travel back and forth. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Bay Area. The weather for one thing is simply heaven.
We’d often get into debates about this. My argument is that it is cheaper to live in New York than the Bay Area. The main reason for this is that almost anywhere you live in the Bay Area you will have a car. Between car payment, insurance, gas and maintenance you will more than make up for any difference in rent.
Your only real option to living without a car is to live in SF. That means an hour commute minimum each way every day (on the bus). Sometimes it can double with traffic on the 101. You have to catch them when they’re running (4-6 times in the morning and evening?). Or if you don’t have a bus option it’s Caltrain + bus. Caltrain runs every hour during the day (slightly more often in peak hours).
Even if your bus has wifi and you can allegedly do work I’d rather not waste 2-3 hours of my life on it each day.
Compare this to New York. Areas around the office (Chelsea, Meatpacking, West/Greenwich Village, Union Square) are expensive but I still have a second story (true) one bedroom walkup 7 minutes walk from work for $2000/month.
A friend lives in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Door to door will typically take him ~35 minutes. His one bedroom is $1000/month. How far afield are you going to have to go in SV to find a one bedroom for that price (or, worse, that price including the car cost, even adjusting for spending $100/month on a monthly metro card).
And I’d much rather rely on the Subway (or the commuter trains for that matter) than anything in Norcal (although I found the combination of BART + buses fine in SF even though I knew many people who complained about them). It’s like $2.25 to go anywhere in the city and it runs 24×7.
Rent in Manhattan is certainly expensive but you don’t need to live in Manhattan. You can choose to (as I have) but you don’t need to. You can get a pretty nice apartment in Forest Hills and have a relatively easy run in on the E train if you wish. Williamsburg is full of hipsters but is convenient (except when the L train stops running, which seems to happen all too often).
So rent aside, everything else is the same cost of cheaper. Food especially is cheaper. A Thai restaurant around the corner has $2-6 appetizer and <$10 entrees. A Malaysian place I like in Chinatown has ~$7 entrees. Why anyone cooks in this city is beyond me. On the way to work there are 3-4 laundromats. The one I go to is open from 7am-11pm 7 days a week and as long as I get them my clothes before about 1-2pm will have them back the same day, washed, dried, folded and sealed for <$1/lb. If you have a family you can stay in the city (expensive) or move to the commuter belt (as most people do). Long Island, upstate NY or NJ (or further afield at places like CT, PA) have good affordable options. If you're married and have kids you'll probably only need 1 car rather than 2 (since the trains will cover you during the week to go to work). New York really is great. Although if I weren't working for Google I'm not sure who I'd want to work for. Foursquare? Maybe but you're essentially banking on them getting bought out (admittedly, this seems fairly likely). Tumblr? Maybe. Amazon? I think they're out of the city somewhere. Palantir? Maybe. SV certainly has got way more choice.

And the original article:

This semester, I’m graduating from a great school (Hook ‘Em!). Being in the tech field, the natural place to work after graduation is Silicon Valley. I’ve spent the past three summers out in the Valley interning for Apple and Facebook, where I had a blast, and met some of my best friends. After reflection on my experiences in Silicon Valley, however, I realized that it is not the ideal place for me. Instead of Silicon Valley, I decided to go to New York City, where I’ll be working for Palantir. My decision boiled down to three reasons: a more diverse group of people, a higher percentage of females, and a lack of a commute.

Silicon Valley is great because of the high density of talent. Want to meet the person who developed that open source project? Chances are he’s not more than a half hour away from you (and is probably happy to grab a beer). This is great, but it comes at the price of diversity. You’re surrounded by engineers, engineers, and … engineers. Of course there are people in the Valley who aren’t engineers, but the density of engineers makes it hard to be surrounded by them. The biggest issue with the homogeneity is that it creates groupthink. Everyone (ok, not everyone, but a lot of people) talk about and focus on the same things (social media, group messaging, daily deals, etc.). At some point in my life, I am going to start a company. I’m convinced it’s not healthy to be surrounded by the same stale ideas that everyone is trying. I want to be surrounded by people who are in the finance, fashion, publishing, movie industries. I’m sure there are a lot of really interesting problems in these fields which I am woefully unaware of, not being involved in those industries. Being surrounded by a diverse group of people is a great way to get exposed to a variety of problems which most engineers aren’t remotely aware of because they are off in the ivory tower that is Silicon Valley.

A direct result of the lack of diversity is that there are very few women in Silicon Valley. A highly unscientific study found that the ratio was about 3 males : 2 females. Settling down isn’t on my immediate horizon, but I want to be in a place where going on dates is a reasonable possibility. NYC has much more favorable odds: Census data pegs the ratio at roughly 52% females : 48% males. (A note to those who will undoubtedly criticize me for talking about gender in Silicon Valley: this blog post is about why I chose New York, being a straight male.)

To mitigate the lack of diversity, some engineers choose to live in San Francisco. This solves a lot of the above problems — but it comes at a cost. A 1:30h commute. Each way. Every day. For those keeping count, that’s 15 hours a week commuting, every single day, for years on end. I don’t want to spend almost two full work days per week on a bus, no matter how comfortable its leather seats are. In NYC, I’ll have a 5-10 minute walk to the office, hardly a commute.

NYC is not all roses. There are tradeoffs: I realize that I’m not going to be employee #1 at the next Facebook or Google working out of NYC. Also, the weather is a lot worse than the Valley. These tradeoffs seem minor compared to the benefits I’ll gain: more diversity, a better dating scene, and essentially no commute. To engineers who are just graduating or who are looking for internships, I encourage you to consider NYC. There’s a lot of hype surrounding Silicon Valley, but not a lot of people talk about the downsides.