undefined | Better HN

0 pointsak4g9y ago0 comments

I lived in NYC and frequented it's tech scene for about a year, ending mid-2013. Unless it's more-or-less quintupled in the last three years, there's no comparison.

The first python meetup I went to in SF (back in 2013) had 300 spots and a waitlist that I doubt got cleared. The NYC meetups I went to managed maybe 80 RSVPs and a couple dozen who actually showed up.

Once you get to anything more specialized than a programming language meetup, it's basically non-existent anywhere else in the country, but the bay area will still manage an active user group.

I really wish this weren't the case, and I really resisted moving here. I had every expectation I'd hate it and the city has more than lived down to expectations (easily higher rent and worse crime than NYC - or least the tech enclaves of NYC where I spent my time - by healthy margins). It is absurd and frankly unjustifiable how densely tech is concentrated here. But that it is so isn't really debatable.

0 comments

bogomipz9y ago

So a meetup with 24 new people to network with wasn't enough for you? It's better to have meetup that you can't attend because there's a waitlist? How is that better?

So far all I hear is density. Is density of tech workers the arbiter by which you just how good a "scene", I will take quality any day. Are all of them awesome, engaging, friendly and social and supportive?

ak4gOP9y ago

I did make the Python meetup and several since; it's not like the waitlist was thousands long. It was just longer than what I gauged as the no-show rate.

The Python meetup was striking to me because it was closer to the scale of a PyCon than any meetup I'd seen. The actual meetup I attend more often is SFPUG, the local PostgreSQL group, which is more in the neighborhood of 20-40 attendees, once or twice a month. In NYC, if there is an active group around the particular corner of tech you inhabit, you're lucky to get decent meetup a quarter.

And quality is what pushed me to move here, despite my expectations, in the first place. Simply put, all of the very best developers I knew from my hometown (in Charlotte, before my stint in New York) had moved here. There were two in particular I'll always owe for having opened my eyes to how little I knew; I work maybe eight blocks away from one of them, the other I ran into out-of-the-blue at the aforementioned Python meetup, three days after I landed at SFO.

I've been working with people who make me very aware that I'm not the smartest person in the room (by their expertise, not their attitudes) for 30 months now. I do hate to say this, but it is why I didn't stick around in the end - in NYC, I really, really missed that.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse