One day, I would settle and live in San Francisco.

I grew up in palo alto. pros: california has some really beautiful natural landscapes, good food, pretty diverse culture, great arts involvement, and if you want to be part of the tech industry there’s no place quite like silicon valley.

cons: it feels like everyone is in tech and is obsessed with tech/entrepreneurship (a ton of kids at my high school had “”start up”” projects), it feels competitive and cutthroat, some areas of san francisco have a large homeless population, california in general is probably undergoing a climate crisis with the drought and wildfires. Outside of downtown san francisco, California sometimes feels like one large suburban strip mall.

It is also hard to raise a family there (if you want one). The median price of a family home is currently around $3 mil for palo alto. Violin lessons for kids cost $110-175/hr. Taxes are high. Etc. Both of my parents are in software engineering at big tech, they make solid household income that would be considered lower upper class in other areas of the U.S., but in palo alto it felt more like middle class.

I’m currently a CS major and I plan to move out to NYC/Boston/Seattle as new grad to pursue software engineering jobs, california is great but idk if I could do silicon valley again

/r/CasualConversation Thread