[quote=spdrun]San Diego vs Sillycon Valley: in San Diego, you see people actually GOING HOME at 5-6 pm. Not as much silliness like people taking company-store buses home at 10 pm. Not so much tech-hipster-startup-dudebro culture either. Normal people. Good unpretentious restaurants. Very little stuff catering to pretentious hipster twits.
Quantity of money may be lower, but standards for “work ethic” are fairly normal, not encouraging of martyrdom.[/quote]
That’s not true. Ask Qualcomm engineer that works in QCT or any Broadcom engineer that is in Rancho Bernardo or Intel engineer that works in Rancho Bernardo or many of the tech startups here or many of the defense contractors here (the ones that are left). Or the Samsung engineers here. Or the Sony engineers that are still here..Or the Intuit engineers, especially during mini-peak and peak tax filing….They burn the same hours as silicon valley slave driving companies. It really depends on the culture of the place that you work. In the Bay Area, my hours weren’t that bad. I am an early person, but I didn’t find many people in the office before 10-10:30am and most of them were out of the office by 7pm, mostly to avoid commute traffic, since many of them lived further away.
And wrto the bay area, only a small percentage of people actually do financially well, most are average at best. So, wrto to being pretentious, I’d say it’s much more here than up there, because up there for an average person, the cost of living is so much higher, that they can’t afford to be pretentious…. Here, on the other hand, at least where I live, I see more BMW’s/Mercedes/Audi’s than I do Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys, and appearances do appear to matter more down here than up there, at least along the coast parts of town. Just look at how many plastic surgery places there are acattered all across SD (not nearly as bad as in L.A.)
The biggest drawback for SD is the ability to job hop. If you’re a worker bee, you can burn a lot more bridges up there without worrying about it. Down here, you really don’t want to burn any bridges, because the community is really tiny. And that goes both ways. Your best tech workers down here also know about some of the worst managers in the community.
