I'm a little sad he didn't say anything about Seattle, only a couple hours from Vancouver and with sizable and thriving Google offices. It is also has "greens and greys and unfussily variegated people" -- clearly it's not Canada, but in general it would be a much less drastic transition!
Seattle is provincial, passive-aggressive, unfriendly to outsiders, and segregated. A hick town with skyscrapers as I've often called it. Californians who've moved there almost unanimously agree with my first sentence, and crack up at the latter.
(Sadly, I lived in Seattle for 17 years. The Bay Area before that, and New York now.)
> Seattle is provincial, passive-aggressive, unfriendly to outsiders, and segregated. A hick town with skyscrapers as I've often called it.
Sorry you didn't enjoy it here. Every city has its ups and downs, but a lot of people (myself included) love it. It's beautiful, we are surrounded by nature, we have the best summers of anywhere I've ever been, I find the people friendly (if a bit passive), there's a great classical music scene (this is how I spend my time), a great university in the middle of the city, lots of tech employment opportunities, a housing market that isn't insane.
I like SF and New York (and Vancouver!) a lot, but they have their own problems too.
I've always gotten the impression that about 40% of the people you meet or see in Seattle are at that exact moment contemplating suicide. That's just the general tone of the city.
I lived in Seattle for six years and I totally agree with Vonguard. It doesn't have anything to do with being a "hater." You just need to be good at observing people, specifically their body language.
I must say I had a wonderful time in Seattle. I found the people a ton more friendly, approachable and varied than in the Bay Area, where everyone is just interested in 'networking' with you rather than befriending you. Plus Seattle has absolutely stunning nature.
I didn't stay because of the grey skis. Couldn't take it.
I've been away from the Bay Area a long time. I don't doubt it is now how you describe it, but it wasn't that way before hi-tech startup culture started taking over. Seattle is slowly getting more friendly and less provincial. Maybe one day it will be better than the Bay Area, but unlikely because the same forces that are messing with the Bay Area are messing with Seattle (and New York) too.
New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city. – Patti Smith on whether New York is still good for artists.
Just kidding. But I understand your sentiment. The grey skies wouldn't bother me at all, but my wife would not be able to stand it. We live in a sunny climate, and every day that is overcast she tells me how depressed it makes her feel... Some people just need sunshine!
I'm not sure what you're expecting when the criticisms were vague jabs like "not a real city," "provincial," "hick town."
Also I did say that I find the people friendly, which is the opposite of unfriendly. Yes Seattle people tend to be passive, but that is not the same as unfriendly.
I note that the parent is mainly talking about the people, and you're mainly talking about other things, except to admit that the people are 'a bit' (I would say profoundly) passive. Believe me, I love the scenery and the sushi too, but goddamn this place lonely.
In 7 years in Seattle, I've amassed a mess of friends and playmates. If you are lonely, expand your social horizons, initiate (lunches, coffees, games, dinners, whatever), rinse, repeat. I'm not excessively charming, so that's about the only thing I can attribute my not-remotely-loneliness to... I just worked at not being lonely.
Given how itinerant Seattle's population is, it seems strange to think that the people here are massively different in behavior cities of similar size.
It's a skill, so you might suck. But it's possible you're just not doing the work. Be the guy who calls, hosts dinners, etc. If you DO suck, this will help with that too. :-)
People always complain about the "freeze" but I call bullshit. Seattle is the perfect place for people who enjoy a small social circle (Larry David style - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_M73MoxJE)
The one thing I always tell outsiders when they ask about finding friends when they move here is to pick an interest and go from there. For example, I love hiking/climbing. I joined a climbing gym and found a few great friends with that in common.
People here aren't outwardly friendly to strangers, but find a commonality and go from there, it's super effective.
"the perfect place for people who enjoy a small social circle"
I think this is absolutely spot on. I'm pretty surprised about this line criticism from this forum. Nerds (or "hackers" in this case) are a generally introverted crowd, no?
It's not a good city if you're a brogrammer who wants to party like a rock star every night. That's totally fine by me. :)
Now, some serious (as it was while I lived there, but funny now that I've escaped), all from Seattle newspapers:
But the dichotomy most fundamental to our collective civic character is this: Polite but distant. Have a nice day. Somewhere else. [1]
Your city is a lovely one, and people here are nice enough when you come into contact with them in such circumstances as a retail transaction or participation in a mutually held-interest group. However, there is an unmistakable coolness exuded by many inhabitants of this city toward people they don't know; it exceeds what I would consider "normal." [2]
Seattle public radio: while people here are “open” to new ideas, we’re just near the bottom of the states for being extroverted. Sociologist Jodi O’Brien at Seattle University added that this group relies heavily on digital devices to communicate which means they are losing the ability to simply hang out and talk. “If you email something I don’t like, I can scream at the computer, but I don’t have to interact with you. The more we can do that, the less inclined we are to engage in the messy social world.” [3]
Seattle Freeze: Can we blame it on the Norwegians? ...and there is even a meet-up group working to defeat it, the Seattle Anti-Freeze. [4]
Turns out that while Seattle has lots of romantic settings and events – the people themselves aren’t thought to be very romantic.[5] In a poll on that same Seattle newspaper blog, 80% of the readers say that the Seattle Freeze is very real and/or awesome. A slideshow of ways of dealing with the freeze agrees more or less with your advice to pick an interest and go from there.
Unfriendly to outsiders? I moved to Seattle from Alaska when I was 32 (I knew no one here and grew up near DC). 7 years later, I'm buried in friends. I play ultimate with a group of awesome folks twice a week, touch football once a week with another group, and bump into all sorts of friendly faces at tech meetups. People seems broadly friendly compared to most cities. I'll agree that folks are less confrontational than the east coast, which translates to more passive aggression (but certainly less OVERALL aggression than east coast cities).
As far as "hick town"... Seattle is literally the most educated city in the US. It legalized gay marriage and pot before almost anyone else. I don't understand what you mean by "hick"... I guess we do have a lot of plaid.
Being from Europe, I can only confirm that people in the Bay Area are in fact, incredibly passive-aggressive. The first few years I must admit that I felt like living on Mars. Even-though I'm coming from a "western" country whose lifestyle and tradition are somewhat similar, the cultural gap was actually much bigger than say, with Indians or Latinos.
At work for example, it took me a rather long time to understand the real meanings of "I'm not sure" which means 'no' or "interesting" which means more or less that what you said is stupid. Not to mention being asked 200-times a day how I am doing or whether I found everything I was looking for at wholefood.
Yep, people in this region have an imperial need to "be nice", at least on the surface and it can feel Orwellian at times if you are not used to it, especially on those days of bad mood. I think in Thailand they call that "sweet mouth, salty butt". But hey, that's also a huge plus, since it prevents a lot of bad vibes and unneeded frictions. I believe it's just a societal organization.
Sometimes I go back to my country for work, and over there people's number one characteristic is distrust and indifference, and I can guarantee you that I feel like a foreigner over there now - well, on normal days, because if I happen to be in a bad mood, I'm kind of showing signs of Tourette syndrome and want to punch everybody.
Overall, I think I'm mixing well in the Bay Area. And more importantly, most of my friends and relatives who share those character traits do tolerate that some foreigners like me don't necessarily think and act the same way. And frankly, wouldn't the world be boring if people were the same everywhere ?
As an Englishman, i have found this whole thread about the cultural differences up and down the west coast somewhat fascinating. What i'm missing is a cross-reference to the European scale of societies.
I live in London, where we don't speak to our neighbours or make eye contact on the tube; would i actually be more comfortable in Seattle than San Francisco? Or would it be over the top, like being in Sweden or something? Or is the variation along a completely different axis?
As someone who lived his first 22 years in the metro Boston area but has lived in various parts of California for something like 16 years, I'd argue that it is impossible to paint "California" with such a wide brush.
I live in San Diego and it is very different here than in LA or the SF Bay Area (with each of those also being very distinct from each other).
SF Bay Area is also too broad a brush - SF is very different from San Jose, and a number of other regions (Peninsula, Mountain View/Palo Alto, Berkeley, Woodside/Saratoga/Atherton/Los Gatos/Los Altos Hills) all have distinct cultures as well. I'd argue that MV/PA is actually closer to Boston culturally than to SF.
There are passive-aggressive people everywhere, but it is especially prevalent on the west coast. There’s an old cartoon that sums it up perfectly, comparing New York and LA: the New Yorker is shown to be thinking “I love you, man” but saying “fuck you!”. For the Angelino it's the opposite.
My impression of Seattle while living there was that it wants to be Manhattan, except that cars will stop to let you cross the street.
"Looking to be metropolitan" I guess is how I would phrase it. Wasn't really what I was looking for, but it was an interesting stay for a while.
I don't know what is more real about Vancouver, other than the newer part of downtown, I found it to be a sprawling mess just like your average US big city. Richmond was heavily Asian, Surrey seemed to have the heavier crime, and Burnaby was more suburban.
The weather in California is certainly better on average, though, I'll say that. Except for the cost of living, I'd almost assuredly go there, myself.
anecdata: my sister lives in los angeles, and her company once posted her to their seattle office for a few months. her impression was that it was an extremely white city; that might not be the sort of thing that strikes you if you're white yourself, but coming from california it would definitely reinforce the provincial impression.
> that might not be the sort of thing that strikes you if you're white yourself
Oh, it struck this Midwestern white boy almost as soon as he got off the plane. I mean, I'd heard the phrase "white bread neighborhood" and always took it to mean there's only a few non-white people living there. No, in Seattle (and Redmond, where I live) entire neighborhoods can be comprised of nothing but white folk.
I notice because I grew up in and around Indianapolis (with brief stints in Detroit). 20% black population in Indy (I could be off by a bit) means 1 out of 5 people I work with, buy groceries from, pass on the street, whatever, are black (ratio of friends was a bit lower than 20%). Now drop me in Redmond/Seattle where I rarely see a black person, and it's just...weird. I mentioned this to natives, and they acted like it was the most racist thing they'd ever heard. What, you thought I wouldn't notice that Bellevue's black population is 0.9%?
Blacks are certainly underrepresented, I'll give you that, but everybody's talking as if African Americans are the only minority that counts... because it is a convenient strawman for propping up their arguments about the "whiteness", I suppose.
I only use black because that's the only diversity one was likely to find in Indianapolis when I lived there. I'd believe the Bellevue stats, given the population around Crossroads Mall if nothing else. As for Redmond, maybe I need to get out more. Mentally touring my street and thinking of the race of the residents I know of, I'm coming up with only the Chinese family that lives across the street from us. I think the Indian family on the corner moved out a while ago. Granted, an anecdotal survey of my neighborhood and my general impression does not hard data make. But that's where I'm coming from.
Seattle is 16+% Asian and 70-% white, 8.4% black and 1% native. How is that very white? In contrast, LA is 50% white, 10% asian, 10% black, with a 50% Hispanic (many co-identifying as white or black).
Ya, I was born in Portland myself, though my dad is from walla walla and my mom is from Ketchikan. Seattle is the capital of basically the entire northwest, from Prudhoe Bay to Grants Pass, all the way east into Idaho and Montana.
That 16% asian population mostly arrived in the last 20 years from SE asia. They and the black population is highly segregated compared to New York or the Bay Area. No one here is holding L.A. as a great example. Try Vancouver (from the OP), San Francisco, or New York.
Actually, Seattle's asian community is increasingly Chinese, while San Francisco took in more SE refuges than Seattle did (and are more asian for it, but increasingly Chinese also). Both Seattle and the Bay Area have strong Vietnamese and Korean communities also (seattle area has the largest outside of CA).
All those demographics are on wiki: Vancouver is 40 % asian (and like 25% Chinese) which we all know, San Francisco is 33% asian but only 6% black (not counting Oakland I guess, but we aren't counting Tacoma for Seattle either). New York is New York.
I have no idea where you get saying they are segregated, at least when it comes to asian. Black is more urban, but that's hardly surprising (unless we want to start talking about seatac and Tacoma, which are different cities).
Dude, I'm obviously speaking hyperbolically, i.e. rhetorically. Relative to any big city with cosmopolitan aspirations, it is a hick town. The number of coworkers I had there who owned rifles and hunted, who drove pickup trucks, who brewed their own beer, who had difficulty with non-Americanized ethnic food puts it a lot closer to a small town than to cities like San Francisco, Chicago or New York.
It's really because we (seattlites) just don't like Californians very much; they are turned on all the time, shifty, and drive super aggressively. Makes sense that he feeling would be mutual (e.g. Too passive, naive, and drive super cautiously). This was a real thing in the 90s at least.
As a born and raised Californian that has visited Seattle via car a few times, I agree completely about our driving habits. There is a reason we drive that way though, it's out of necessity. Our traffic is heavy and drivers are very self-centered so the only way to get anywhere is to be aggressive and take space and position or someone else will.
Personally I preferred the driver's mentality of the northwest and once I had been there a few days I drove much more like them since it was so refreshing to not have to not be in the take and defend mindset. Plus when you want to speed they get out of the way well in advance which is awesome when you're in a hurry.
I've heard many Californian transplants complain about Seattle drivers being so timid, and it really is true we can't drive when it is raining, snowy, or sunny (too much glare).
Times are changing my friend. Who would I go work for in Seattle to "make money" (if that were actually my primary goal)?
Amazon? In Vancouver now.
Microsoft? In Vancouver now.
Facebook? In Vancouver now.
Startups? Vancouver has our share.
Personally, if I were going to leave the country for a better tech industry, I'd fly right past Seattle and head further south. Sorry, but Seattle just doesn't make sense if you're not already there.
I grew up in Vancouver, lived in Seattle for two years, and agree with all the digs about passive-aggression and the such.
And while Vancouver's tech scene is rising, you should really stop by Seattle some time and see how wide the gap really is, and how far Vancouver has to go to even be within the same league as Seattle when it comes to tech employment.
> "Amazon? In Vancouver now. Microsoft? In Vancouver now. Facebook? In Vancouver now."
Amazon is the only real dev office out of those. Microsoft and Facebook are waiting rooms for Canadian citizenship to permit easier access to the US. It's funny how often these exact companies are trotted out in defense of Vancouver's tech industry when considering why these offices exist in the first place (tip: it's not to access Vancouver's existing tech talent).
> "Sorry, but Seattle just doesn't make sense if you're not already there."
I don't like the city much at all, but where else can a fresh CS undergrad fetch a $100K+ offer without paying $2K a month for a dingy studio apartment? Vancouver's rental market just as expensive as Seattle, and salaries far, far lower.
The tech industry gets better the further south you go along the west coast. Vancouver is not an exception to this rule.
I moved from Toronto to Seattle after finishing school, and it would have be a hell of job elsewhere to make me move else where. I don't know about Vancouver, but software industry in Toronto is in a sorry state right now. Toronto's living cost is well near the most expensive parts of US like NYC and SF. And yet, they pay like you live in Wyoming. And the federal, provincial, and municipal taxes you pay on top of little you make is simply untenable. I encourage Canadian developers to gtfo of Canada while you are young and mobile because it'll get harder when you are older.
As for SF, I think Seattle has its own perks as well. Slightly lower sales tax, lower cost of living in rent and other goods, 0 state income tax in Washington, amazing mountains and interesting beaches. Raw number in your paycheck wise, Seattle is probably lower than SF, but in SF, you pay shitload more on rent and tax.
I grew up in Victoria, and lived in Seattle for several months. Seattle was literally half the price and twice the wage in all aspects, you'd be stupid as a new grad not to go to Seattle if you grew up in Vancouver or Victoria.
I also found the people of Seattle pretty much identical to people in Vancouver. If you switched out a few street signs you wouldn't be able to tell much of a difference between the places.
Victoria beats the pants off Vancouver, in terms of being a nice place to live (if you can afford it) or visit. I always find Vancouver to be pretentious, crowded, overdeveloped and generally lacking in any sort of charm.
Totally agree with you 110% on the passive-aggressive thing. I've been on east coast now (Boston) for about 16 years. I've grown to appreciate knowing where I stand with people.
Seattle 8 years. Sadly I have to agree wholeheartedly with this, because I've been unable to find much contrary evidence. The 'Freeze', which is deservedly famous, is very, very real, no matter how many people try to minimize its reality. Go ahead, come here - it's on display every second of every day in every cubic meter of the city. The only people who will make eye contact or speak a word to you are the homeless - I'm unable to decide whether this is because their livelihood depends on it, because they've transcended excessive self-involvement, or both. People are passive-passive, extremely unfriendly. It's like everyone is playing a private success-seeking game in their head, never really showing their cards, but presenting a cultivated image. Yes, of course in 8 years I have met some awesome people here and there (and I'm not saying the rest aren't awesome, but they aren't sharing). Yet there is also a persistent shallowness and aloofness even to a lot of my friendships that I can't seem to crack sometimes. And yes, very segregated. Scavenger hunt: find one black person on the Eastside. It might take you days. No idea what to blame for that, but it's true.
I liked the snowboarding, and I liked working at MS for less than half the time I spent there, but I'm definitely looking into relocating at this point. (For reference, I'm from Boston, where I assert that people generally say what they mean or what's at the front of their mind, instead of what's faultlessly polite or strategically advantageous.)
I have lived in the bay area, south bay specifically, for 2 years now and I dont remember the last stranger who spoke to me beyond the general politeness. I meet people through a common activity, like playing a sport, tech meetups etc. but that is the same for Seattle. So what really is the freeze and how does it affect you?
P.S. - I have lived in Seattle and would move back in a heartbeat if I had the same professional opportunities as I have here.
Whether it is possible to proactively mitigate a circumstance has no bearing on whether the circumstance exists. I met plenty of people through sports and work. The Freeze is a local, cultural ambient background of social norms. It's an impression that each person is, more than usual, in their own private world. It's a lack of friendliness. It's strangers never looking at you or saying 'hi' - and there are places in the world where it is normal to look at strangers and say hi when you pass them. People don't say much. When they do they don't emote much, and it tends toward mealy-mouthed politeness. I could theorize about potential factors - off the top of my head I'd guess it's partly due to an unusually high population of affluent introverts. By now, even second-generation affluent introverts (e.g. the grown children of the people who made Windows). It affects me as a constant general background of insularity and alienation. It's quite apart from the issue of whether I've made friends through activities - I've done that. Obviously, nobody is saying that no human being in Seattle ever associates with any other, ever.
It also occurs to me that it's maybe a sort of social tragedy of the commons. There's nothing wrong with being a locksmith, but an entire society of locksmiths would probably run into problems. Likewise, it's not a sin to be introverted, but a party (or a city) where everyone is introverted is going to be missing something, and become very dependent on the presence of Guitar Hero or Settlers of Catan stations for fun.
I think the only way to find out if you'll be happy in a city is to move there for a while and see if you like it. Cultural affinity is very personal; you'll read all sorts of opinions from everyone on HN, but they won't tell you anything about whether you will like it.
FWIW, I've lived in Boston and Silicon Valley and have a number of family in NYC. I can't stand NYC - it's too busy, no greenery (Central Park doesn't count, it's all man-made), and generally feels like I'm living in a concrete cinderblock. I really liked Boston, but the culture is just a little bit too conservative, and I didn't feel like there were any professional opportunities that didn't involve paying my dues for 30 years while the world moved on around me. Silicon Valley has a wonderful openness to new ideas and a nice "seize the day" mentality, but everybody seems just slightly insecure about how their next-door neighbor just sold a company for $100M, and there's a big unhealthy competitive dynamic behind the surface. SF (& Berkeley) is charming but also has a slightly ridiculous lack of self-awareness - there is a huge population here who really values their quality of life but doesn't realize that their actions are the cause of all the things they complain about. (Witness all the folks who love their iPhones and Uber but hate the techies who make them, who protest rent increases but won't allow new housing construction, who prevent the state from raising taxes and then wonder why California is in perpetual budget crisis, and who hate the Comcast monopoly but won't allow any new fiber lines to be laid.)
On the whole I think Silicon Valley is probably the right place for me, but I still wish I could find a place with the openness to new ideas of Silicon Valley but without the competitiveness and greed.
Your mileage may vary, but anecdotally I've lived in all three and NYC wins by a really wide margin.
That said, Seattle is a lot more economical - salaries are a tad lower than SF or NYC but more than made up for by lower cost of living (though this is changing).
Some people (like you) don't see it, but that doesn't mean the phenomena doesn't exist. Why would you think it has a common name -- the seattle freeze -- if it was a problem isolated to these two individuals?
Well, there is that deep well of unjustified fear and hatred I've stored up in my heart. I wasn't going to mention it, because I was worried it might undermine my credibility.
I suspect that moving countries becomes a significant issue when you have a family. In a weird way, Seattle's proximity and similarity might count against it - you'd have to go through a lot of hurdles just to end up in an incredibly similar situation, a short ferry ride away from where you were.
Google are really consolidating in a few offices, mainly MV, NYC, Zurich, possibly London and Tokyo. MV is a whole different ballgame to the other locations and is a world unto itself.
If by "consolidating in a few offices" you mean that growth in MTV, NYC, and ZRH is outpacing growth in places like Boulder, Cambridge, and Kirkland then you're correct; that doesn't mean that the smaller offices aren't growing as well, however.
Neither of those things are true at all, from my experience and from what I have observed working in the Seattle office for five years. Where are you getting this information?
The Seattle/Kirkland offices have over 1,000 employees and are growing. They have people at all different levels including directors and principal engineers and lots of important projects going on. These aren't minor little operations.
Easy, above fairly junior level you're either told to be in one of the big offices at the point of joining or they'll hire you then crank up the pressure to move.
Places like the Seattle office exist mainly to get people in the company, then to drag the ones they like further south. Many of the rest will effectively be being paid to not work at MS or Amazon.
There's a good reason I described MV as a world apart.
This was Google's thought when I was talking to them. "Seattle's only a couple hours away. You could possibly even commute!"
I checked out the area through the lens of possibly living there when I went down for my interview. Seattle and Kirkland are not comparable to Vancouver in the slightest. Mostly the ghettos and rampant poverty, combined with the fundamental social differences between the countries. Didn't help that the one restaurant I ate at in the suburb of Kirkland had a fresh bullet hole in one of the windows. No thanks.
I found areas of New York (Williamsburg and Dumbo to be specific) that felt more like Vancouver to me than anywhere in the Seattle area.
My calls with Google are now pretty short. "Is there a Google office in Vancouver yet? No? Not interested, thanks."
Seattle doesn't have ghettos. Seriously, compare Oakland or south-central LA to Seattle's "ghettos" and tell me they are similar. Vancouver's Downtown Eastside had the worst concentration of poverty and desperation I'd ever seen in North America while I lived in Vancouver.
Vancouver's poverty is kind of odd and I think not entirely comparable to other areas. It's concentrated in just a couple of blocks on hastings, in a highly visible area. The overall homeless rate is actually higher in less populous municipalities like Abbotsford. It's also not a "violent" ghetto, I've never felt unsafe walking down that stretch of road, compared to some of the places I've been in the US.
I probably misused the word ghetto there (forgetting some parts of America have real ghettos).
The word I should be using is poverty. It's rampant and seems to be everywhere. You can mostly avoid it if you stick to the very central downtown core which I always did as a tourist.
But that was definitely just my impression of the city. I'm not damning the city for it, everywhere has problems. I just can't imagine living around that would have a positive long-term effect on anyone's state of mind. It's not where I would chose to be.
Wait, have you actually been to Vancouver before? Vancouver has one of the higher crime rates for a North American city and is quite noted for it, Seattle is much lower. Also, Kirkland doesn't have suburbs (it is one), and totem lake isn't that bad.
But it's clear the group he was working within is in the Bay Area. And so it seems like even going to Seattle would mean changing groups (and possibly the focus of his work) within the company. Moving countries and changing the work you are doing is pretty disruptive.
Yet, it's still _not_ Canada. I live in Buffalo, and the major reason why I stay here - is because its _not_ Canada. At least the greater GTA (Greater Toronto Area). But I _do_ enjoy visiting ... to the extent I have been known for stretches to be there 10-12 week(ends) in a row visiting friends, eating, exploring, etc. I really do get the SF point of view for sure. But that's a'typical of the tech industry on the whole - I mean its a male dominated industry, and its a rat race down there. I can see how easily jaded an outsider can become. But I do enjoy its Southern California culture, weather, and in particular asians - because of the food/design/culture they bring to the bay area.