I understand where you're coming from, ideally I wouldn't want to drive everywhere either, but unless I get out the door before 7am on weekends I end up driving to out to the country to cycle, so I am already used to that. I've lived in cities for the last 8 years or so, i am used to crappy places to run...

This resonates with me. I'm torn because MTV is a sleepy town and idk how I feel about living, working, and dating googlers. However, as beautiful as Marin is, all the traffic really turned me off. I can imagine biking up that way and being run off the road by someone in a rental car. I've never run trails so that might be the largest adjustment.

Oughta be fine down in Man Jose!

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Eliot
blog thing - strava thing

...except i'm a straight dude. I'm imagining a situation in which i'm one of a dozen type A tech-athlete-over-achiever competing for the same woman.

I have plenty of friends that do the google SF PA bike route. That's another way of killing two birds with one stone. Good way to get training in and commute to work. The commute is the commute. All the young people seem to live up in the city and commute down here for work. The ones that seem to live down here are in long term relationships or some other tie to the peninsula.

In terms of dating...yeah it sucks... Sorry to break it to you but they don't call silicon valley Man Jose for nothing. Dating though seems to be better these days since all the apps cut through a lot of the bullsh*t. The only advice I've got is to not get insecure about salary and stuff. There is tons of wealth here so if you get into a d*ck measuring contest...you will lose (and I don't just mean exclusively looking at your male competition...the women that you meet will likely earn multiples of what you do). The good thing is that the quality people look for other things. That's how I met, dated, and married my wife:)

There are a bunch of wonderful activities here not just related to tri. I would say that if you are exclusively looking at the bay area for only the tri training opportunities then you've missed the entire boat as to what the bay area offers. Climb, windsurf, surf, kiteboard, outrigger, snowboard (hopefully with el nino), backcountry camp, become a foodie, visit the museums, opera, symphony...etc.

If you do get serious about living in the palo alto/ los altos area. Shoot me a pm and I will see if I can hook you up with housing opportunities down in this area. You are young and I would try the west coast out. Most poeple try their hardest to stay out here when they move here. Best of luck!

My response should have been in pink :)

Well whatever you figure out, good luck!

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Eliot
blog thing - strava thing

Wow, lots of different experiences articulated here. FWIW, I grew up in Texas, have lived in DC and Boston, and have spent a lot of time in CO and northern Europe, but I've been in the Bay Area since '97 and Menlo Park since '99 (spent the first two years in SF), and I'm not sure I'd want to live anywhere else other than maybe the Big Island, but even then I think I'd miss this place.

I moved here when I was 34, so I was a bit further along in my career than you are now, and I was also already married (still am), so I've never experienced the dating scene here firsthand. That said, the benefit of being on a local tri team that has athletes in a range of ages is that I get to observe the dating scene. A whole bunch of marriages (and hookups) have come out of my tri team (Sheeper, but it's probably the same on other teams), and now we're on a babyfest - 8 or 9 couples this year alone (one loses count). Not that you want that at age 27, but all of these couples were single when they joined the team, so it's not exactly an infertile wasteland of exclusively male SV types.

The riding and running on the Peninsula is first-rate in my experience, especially considering where we are. Best access is on the 280 corridor, and that gets expensive, though you can find house rentals and such in remote areas of Portola Valley and Woodside if you look. Open water swim options are few, but I brave the lagoon in Redwood Shores, despite the occasional (non-stinging) jellyfish encounter.

Money is the big issue; those who have "made it" have a very nice life. Those who haven't but want to can find it tough. And then there are those who grew up here and work normal jobs (bakery, schoolteacher, etc.) thanks to inheriting property from their parents. If you only hang out with tech people, you tend to forget that there are many other people who get along just fine here without doing that. Although tech has provided me lots of material things, I don't like to live it 24x7 - I like hanging out and training with people from all walks of life. On long rides, even if I'm riding with tech guys, we rarely talk work. Joint suffering may be the great equalizer. :-)

SF vs Peninsula: I enjoyed my couple of years in SF, but I was focused on running then, so I had lots of options from where I lived (about 6 blocks from Ft. Mason on the edge of Pac Heights). The riding and swimming weren't so convenient, and neither was commuting to Palo Alto (the restaurant options were outstanding, though). Commuting sucks the life out of you no matter where you live, and in a boom economy like we have now the traffic gets very bad. These things never go on forever, but I would take the plunge, play the SV/SF startup lottery and see what happens. If you're lucky, you make some money before a down cycle comes, and then you pounce on some good real estate and ride it up in the next wave. In the meantime, make time to enjoy it here - the weather's great, the landscape is gorgeous, and we have lots of open space and nice roads to ride and run on. If you want to check out Team Sheeper, PM me and I'll get you set up.

Ian

I lived right in the middle of SF for eight years. Very glad I moved. Cost of living and traffic are absurd. I had an easy 10 minute walk commute to work. People that live in SF and commute down the peninsula, or vice versa, are, in my opinion, insane. Studies show that people are at their most unhappy when commuting. People wildly underestimate the opportunity cost in money and happiness of commuting. Time is money, and commuting is misery.

There is a certain disconnect with reality that pervades California, Silicon Valley, and especially SF ("the city"). People have an inflated sense of importance, and think SF is the center of the universe. Sorry but your app that makes it easier to send anonymous pictures of your penis to random girls is not "changing the world".

The training is superb. OWS at Aquatic Park, cycling in Marin, running in GG Park. I could do all of these things basically by stepping out of my front door, and trained year round without any issues.

95K/yr is more than enough. In medical school I survived with a wife and a baby, living in the heart of SF, on about 45K/yr. We had a cute but small apartment, went on modest vacations to see family, ate out once a week, and had money to buy gear and enter races. The fact that other posters on here think that six figures is insufficient is more evidence of how out of touch Bay Area residents are. I had dozens of friends who were single, lived in the city, and had a nice lifestyle on wayyy less than 45K/yr.

Again, very glad to be gone. What it boils down to for me is that it is too crowded and way overpriced for what you get. Caveat to my perspective being that as a doctor, my career opportunities are not constrained by living away from the Bay Area. In fact, I can make 2-3 times as much by moving to a less populated area with the cost of living that is 25% or less of the Bay Area.

my two cents.

OK gotcha. (I live in Woodside so don't even need to get in the car.) A good tradeoff might be to move to Redwood City. Fairly affordable, near 280, and short (5-10m) drive to the trails.

Boy I can't imagine how anyone would get that impression after reading this thread... /s

Wow that got very financially deep quickly. I can't comment on the reasonableness of those figures but I sense that they're probably pretty close. My point of reference is my own situation living in a DIRT CHEAP area of the northeast (upstate NY...and I mean Lake Placid upstate). I'm a regular old CPA bean counter and six figures isn't too difficult of a barrier to break even relatively early in one's career. And a NICE home goes for like 300K here. 450 will get you a house on the water (sizeable lakes up here) and 1M a mansion with a helipad (no jokes). But it's DANG cold up here.

At any rate, that's pretty useless information for the OP aside form the fact that he should be looking for way more than 95. Maybe 150 and I'd be considering the move more seriously.

1. What's the growth potential on the 95K? Is it an engineering gig at some VC-backed startup? You're not going to be happy living long-term in SV at 95K and I doubt you want to be stuck here when there's a cyclical correction.

2. SV is a sausage fest and will probably be even after any downturn. Supply and demand is not on your side.

Venture backed startups (I've worked for five with three in series-A, and talked to dozens of others) can meet big company base salary through around the principal engineer level, although you won't get a match on bonus or restricted stock sellable for a lot of money as soon as it vests.

Note however the pay goes with the position not the person. If they need a senior engineer with five years of experience, the cash and stock budget is for that level and you won't do better with twenty and director level experience.

I pass on venture funded startups that won't pay enough because the position is more junior than they claim, they don't value engineers making good treatment less likely, they don't understand the difference better engineers make, and/or their technical problems don't require better engineers so they're boring. There are plenty of others with work at least as interesting, some of which are doing the same thing.

Tangentially, quora.com is probably a better place to get answers on software engineering in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A friend of mine just bought a glorified cement trailer on 1/10th of an acre in a lousy neighborhood in Redwood City for $1 million. It's the ugliest house I've ever seen.

That's my definition of insanity, but to each his own.

If I were young and single and ready for an adventure, I'd move to Colorado.

For what it's worth, I've lived in SF for seven years (five of those years as a student with no money).

Fantastic post! haha
I used to live in LA at the beach and the options were more or less the same.

Bill Foster: Why am I calling you by your first names? I don't even know you. I still call my boss "Mister", and I've been working for him for seven years, but all of a sudden I walk in here and I'm calling you Rick and Sheila like we're in some kind of AA meeting... I don't want to be your buddy, Rick. I just want some breakfast.

Do you mean nerds?

SoCal (LA/Orange County) and the Bay Area are extreme. There is no better description. So many amazing qualities that can't be found anywhere else, but it comes at a massive price, and not just a monetary price.

1. That offer actually came from GOOG (non engineering position). With cost of living, 95k in SV would def be a paycut relative to what i'm making now (startup that just raised B round, insanely stressful-- ie gf couldn't stand it). With the perks and weather, I think could stomach a slightly smaller paycheck for the experience professionally. For sure, within a couple years if I wasn't north of 130k i'd be out of there, stock package be damned.