Ask Slashdot: Undervalued, Livable American Tech Towns?

An anonymous reader writes: I've been working in tech as a software developer for about 15 years. As I've gotten older I'm starting to see the appeal of living in a city that's not crazily blown out and expensive like most established tech markets (think San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, etc.). Are there are any good tech job markets that are normal, affordable, livable, American cities, or am I forever doomed to be subjected to the rat race found in these overheated and overcrowded markets? Lots of cities have at least some vibrant tech scene; Omaha, NE, Raleigh, NC, and Ann Arbor, MI are three that spring to mind, but everyone's tastes and tolerances will vary. What do you find in your neck of the woods? (Even if it's one of those "crazily blown out" examples.)

Comments

Austin?

[Kohath]

What's wrong with Austin? Did something change in the last 2 years? Did Austin suddenly become coastal-California-level expensive?

Re:Austin?

[Hognoxious]

Word got out that it's in Texas.

Re:Austin?

[Kohath]

And that's bad because ...?

Re:Austin?

[DigiShaman]

It is, and always has been a "San Francisco" like city.

Re:Austin?

[mobby_6kl]

Yes. At least that's what I've heard from people there, never been myself though.

Re:Austin?

[InfiniteZero]

It's surrounded by Texas..

In case you are a Texan and offended, I live in Houston, which doesn't have a "tech" scene in the strict sense of software/hardware startups, but otherwise is quite heavy in science and engineering in general, and probably has the lowest cost of living out of all major cities in the US.

Re:Austin?

[Kohath]

In what way? San Francisco has water on all sides, lots of local impediments to development including almost no vacant land, a high demand for housing, and rising local wealth -- everything that causes extremely high housing prices. Last time I checked, Austin (and the local Austin area) doesn't have most of these.

Re:Austin?

[rock_climbing_guy]

I was in Austin about three years ago to take on a new job. It didn't work out and I don't live there anymore, but traffic is a nightmare in Austin. The desirable neighborhoods are poorly served by the major highways. Even looking at the Google Maps streetview, you can see that the cameraman taking the photos from the Google car (or whatever it's called) was stuck in traffic!

Re:Austin?

[ganjadude]

he means politically, Austin is a very liberal city

Re:Austin?

[Kohath]

I hate it when the football police drag me out of my house, handcuff me to the bleacher seats, and force me to watch high school football games.

Re:Austin?

[Type44Q]

And that's bad because...?

Speaking as someone who's lived all across the States (including central and west TX), all I can say is; if you have to ask, you wouldn't understand... but the answer is "Because culture and geography or specifically, a lack thereof." And, (with special thanks to all the inept English teachers who've incorrectly taught for decades that you shouldn't begin a sentence with "and" much less put a comma afterwards!), virtually anyone from anywhere in the English-speaking world who's spent any time in TX (with the possible exception of someone from the South) would immediately agree.

Re:Austin?

[ShanghaiBill]

he means politically, Austin is a very liberal city

So? I am not a liberal, but I don't mind them as co-workers. I don't discuss politics at work.

Re:Austin?

[SydShamino]

Austin has gotten pretty expensive, yes. We bought into a central Austin neighborhood at the bottom of the recession (thanks luck we both had jobs) and rode it up. We couldn't afford to buy in our own neighborhood now. Sister-in-law wanted to buy a year and a half later and the only houses in the price range in the city were on the periphery of the core city area. Now you mostly have to go to the suburbs or the funny offshoot bits of the city, and getting from those into downtown (or even in the core periphery area where most of the tech companies are) takes a long time.

On the other hand, if you live central and work at a tech company on the periphery, you commute against traffic. My ~10 mile commute takes 11-15 minutes.

Re:Austin?

[Kohath]

I'm not a Texan. But I'm not prejudiced against Texans either. If anti-Texan bigotry is the main "problem" people have with Austin, then they should just say so. Then people could decide to value or discount the advice they're reading without having to decode all the innuendo and double-talk

Re:Austin?

[Type44Q]

The same thing is happening to Austin that's happening to Boulder: they're growing tech spots that are being inevitably changed by too many enthusiastic arrivals who're coming there for "cultural reasons."

Re:Austin?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is just silly. And, I don't see the problem.

Re:Austin?

[ArchieBunker]

Crippling heat and humidity come to mind.

Re:Austin?

[PopeRatzo]

So? I am not a liberal, but I don't mind them as co-workers. I don't discuss politics at work.

And liberal cities have the hottest women. You can look it up.

Re:Austin?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Word got out that it's in Texas.

And that would be enough right there to cross it off my list of places to live.

I spent 20 years in Texas one week, and that was it for me.

Re:Austin?

[msimm]

Pfft! It's like an affordable San Francisco with good food and more available parking. Unacceptable!

Re:Austin?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

And, (with special thanks to all the inept English teachers who've incorrectly taught for decades that you shouldn't begin a sentence with "and" much less put a comma afterwards!),

Agreed, there is nothing inherently wrong with doing that. (I was actually taught that it was "something to avoid if at all possible", but that it wasn't specifically prohibited.)

Re:Austin?

[AmazingRuss]

Texans, mostly.

Re:Austin?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Crippling heat and humidity come to mind.

And Texans, there are shitloads of them all over the place down there. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Re:Austin?

[fermion]

Austin has always been a crap place to live unless you have a trust fund, are white, and young. It grew for a while because it became a tech hub for the well paid young mostly white people, but that just lead to it becoming more elitist and expensive. When people complain that Austin is in Texas usually take it to mean that while Texas is like only 40% white non-Hispanic, Austin is closer to 50%, so like, you don't have deal with as many Hispanic people there. In any case, as is mentioned, Houston is not a bad place to find tech work and live, if you make enough to live in the city. If you need a gentrified neighborhood, it is $500,000K and up for a house just like anywhere else in the US. If you can live with real diverse people then you can live minutes from downtown for $200K, and be against traffic going to work.

Re:Austin?

[Hognoxious]

You certainly shouldn't put a comma if a phrase in parentheses (the part beginning "with special thanks") is coming next. Either alone will suffice.

And there's little point in putting an entire sentence (as opposed to an aside or clarification) as one.

Re:Austin?

[fibonacci8]

I spent 20 years in Texas one week, and that was it for me.

How is the future, and can you get us lottery numbers?

Re:Austin?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

(I can if I want to.)

Re:Austin?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

How is the future, and can you get us lottery numbers?

1) The future isn't nearly as good as we hoped it would be.

2) 26 15, 31, 44, 11, 38, and 29 (but not necessarily in that order, sorry)

Re: Austin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Seattle. It is very liberal. I can say with 100% certainty that the women are not hot here.

Re:Austin?

[Technician]

Follow some of the tech companies that thought the same thing and looked for lower cost data centre cooling bills. Hate to have the neighborhood become crowded, but have you seen the location of the air cooled Facebook Datacenter? Others are moving in for the same reasons. Nearest interstate freeway is about 50 miles away.

https://www.facebook.com/Prine... If you don't like big cities.

Re:Austin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you like Texas.

But not all of us want to be surrounded by right wing gun toting rednecks, and if you have experience with Texas you know that is what makes up the majority of the Texas population.

Also, it's the state that brought us the Bushes, and Lance Armstrong. Texas creates ASSHOLES, and those assholes make the world
a less pleasant place to live. You might be stupid enough to think Texas is a great place, but not all of us are so stupid.

Re:Austin?

[Mashiki]

What a bunch of whining. You actually remind me of English-speaking people who travel to SE-Asia then whine and complain because it's not like the place they just left.

Re: Austin?

[PopeRatzo]

I live in Seattle. It is very liberal. I can say with 100% certainty that the women are not hot here.

OK, Seattle is the exception that proves the rule. I'll give you that one.

Re:Austin?

[AK Marc]

Obviously you like Texas.
But not all of us want to be surrounded by right wing gun toting rednecks, and if you have experience with Texas you know that is what makes up the majority of the Texas population.

But that's not Austin. Austin is the home of the liberal state Uni. As such, it has *always* been the liberal bastion in the state of conservatives. That you don't know what you are talking about doesn't change reality. You might as well say that gays shouldn't consider living in San Francisco because so much of the US is homophobic. Two true and unrelated statements. It's not like Katy, Texas, a very conservative suburb of Houston, or Alice, TX, which is very rednect, or Rockwall, TX, which is all trailer parks. Austin is no more gun toting rednecks than Manhattan or LA.

You don't sound like you have any actual experience with Texas.

Re:Austin?

[Type44Q]

Urusai, Mashiki-san.

Re:Austin?

[tnk1]

You also wouldn't correct Miles Davis for not having proper embouchure or Van Gogh for having rough brush strokes.

Miles Davis maybe, but Van Gogh... that motherfucker takes ears. I just say, "Yes, sir, very nice brush stroke, sir."

Re:Austin?

[CmdrPorno]

I went to MotoGP in Austin a few years back, and stayed a few extra days to check the place out. I doubt I will ever go back. They have a great foodie scene, but a lot of cities do these days. Traffic was terrible the entire time I was there. Worse than Chicago, Atlanta, or Miami. Every 20 minute trip took well over an hour. GPS with traffic data was no help. I went to some state or national park, way out of town, and got held up for 20 minutes in stop and go traffic at some sort of Podunk Festival in a tiny town along the way.

I also made a day trip to San Antonio, which I liked a lot better. I wouldn't touch Austin with a ten foot pole.

Re:Austin?

[Kohath]

Got any examples of these oppressive laws? Were you denied the right to spend money you didn't earn or something?

Re:Austin?

[NickyLogic]

Even more so because grammar is a moving target. In 100 years, "r u rly ok? wtf!" may be formally correct English (or whatever they call it by then).

Re: Austin?

[cyber-vandal]

Liberal slave owners.

Re: Austin?

[sbaker]

Exactly. The trick to loving Austin is to live out in the burbs. Outside of downtown on the nicer side of Manor, I have a really beautiful 3500 sq.ft 4 bedroom 3.5 bathroom house with a nice yard, a workshop and a double garage with a mortgage payment that's significantly less than the $1800 that AC is paying in rent. I commute down 290, then 183 into the heart of tech jobs in NORTH Austin/Cedar Park (Research Boulevard area) - and by avoiding hwy 35, commuting mostly east/west and paying ~$5/day in tolls - I can usually get there in under 15 minutes. Since I started living in North Austin/RoundRock/Pflugerville/CedarPark/Leander, I've never been short of satisfying, well-paying tech work and I've never needed to either live or work downtown.

When I lived in an apartment about 18 months ago, I was on "Tech Ridge" just to the East of hwy 35 - and $900 got me a 2 bed/2 bath apartment with a garage and plenty of other parking at no extra cost...their prices may have risen a little over the past year or two - but I know they aren't over $1100 because there is a lot of apartment inventory out there with more sprouting up every day.

If you are totally car-averse, find someplace out in Leander near the MetroRail line - take your bike on the train - and you'll be just fine.

Downtown is a place to visit - not a place to live, and ideally, not a place to work either. Let the tourists enjoy that bit.

Re:Austin?

[eric_harris_76]

Texas has lots of geography. Haven't you seen a map? It's big.

And a long stretch of it is by the ocean, so it's not all dusty prairie.

Re:Austin?

[eric_harris_76]

Sorry. Failed wordplay.

"Because culture and geography or specifically, a lack thereof"

There's plenty of "geography". It may suck (opinions differ, obviously) but there is a lot of it. No arguing with that.

The reason it was supposed to be funny was because Texas is big, you see.

Never mind. Someone in this conversation lacks a sense of humor, and the more I type, the more it seems likely it's me.

Re:Austin?

[mishehu]

No, please, stop moving to Austin. We're seeing property values increasing at around 7-12% per year for quite some time now. I give it about another 5-7 years before it's unlivable.

Re:Austin?

[iceaxe]

By all means, everyone avoid moving to Austin. And all of you who moved here in the last 15 years can go away, too.

Kidding, actually.

Life in the less trendy but very comfortable Austin suburbs is generally quite affordable, and if you find a job that isn't located downtown the commute can avoid the worst of the traffic.

Personally, my commute is 15-20 minutes for 11 miles, or an hour each way by bicycle over a slightly longer route. And I love it here. (Austin AND my particular suburb.)

Re:Austin?

[painandgreed]

And that's bad because ...?

Well, as Chicago is cold, Texas is hot. It also gets cold, and then there are the tornados. I do miss the thunderstorms though. The chances of getting into a fight simply due to male macho bullshit posturing are much greater in Texas than most of the rest of the country. If you look weird, are weird, or deviate from the WASP norm in any way, this greatly increases your chances of getting into such a fight. One of the reasons Austin gets many of the people that live there is because it is the tolerant part of Texas. Then, it's one big FLAT landscape*. If you're used to mountains and forests, Texas probably isn't for you. Even the ocean experience may leave you wanting. It is very much a car and truck culture, even in the large cities. Expect to always drive everywhere for everything because nothing is in walking distance and there is no mass transit (as compared with the cities this article is contrasting to). Then there is the general southern conservative racist culture that Texas is known for. There are plenty of good people and you'll find people you like, but you'll also have to put up with everybody else.

*OK, I haven't been to Austin. My transmission blew out on my one trip there for SXSW and I never made it. I spent most my time in Dallas and Houston. And for full disclosure, I left 20 years ago.

Re:Austin?

[gstoddart]

The longer I am aware of the rules of grammar, and the more I realize I know more of them than a lot of people .. the more I realize they're largely meaningless.

Having known a lot of people who aren't native speakers of English, the more you try to explain the nuances of arcane rules which depend on a lot of exceptions, the less you can explain why it matters.

And some of the best jokes and puns I've ever heard came from people who were slightly abusing the grammar, but doing it form a perspective of doing what seemed sensible in context.

As you say, knowing the rules is good for providing a foundation to be understood. And then there's an infinite number of ways you can convey your message, and not all of them rely on strictly adhering to "rules" which sound like the explanation of Fizbin from Star Trek.

Breaking the rules is often a key to expressing yourself better.

Colorado

[Niris]

Colorado is still relatively cheap to live in with a lot of smaller cities with tech, and worth checking into. Parts of the state are growing fast, like Boulder and Denver, but Fort Collins is an amazing town, and you can definitely do alright with tech in Colorado Springs as well without being overly crowded and expensive. You will run into a fair amount of assholes who refuse to accept that the state is growing (they almost all have a "Native" sticker on their car), but they tend to not be in tech.

Re:Colorado

[Lumpy]

Not denver. It has exploded so fast there that house prices and rents have tripled in the past 2 years. A company offered me a 100% raise to move out there and work for them, when I researched real information from friends living there I shot back declining the offer.

You can extrapolate it out and a lot of people are going to be royally fucked there in a short time when all the other costs of living skyrocket to catch up with what is happening there so fast.

Re:Colorado

[Anonymous Coward]

I just left Fort Collins/Loveland. The traffic is insane, home prices are ballooning and the number of CA plates is disturbing. They're building out into the prairie (Weld county) because the I-25 corridor is built to the hilt. When the dry years inevitably come there will be severe water shortages.

It may not be as bad as San Francisco, but there is nothing "undervalued" about it. It's California II and if you commit to it now you'll be miserable in five years.

Re:Colorado

[Greyfox]

That might have been true a couple years ago. Real estate and rental prices have shot up in the last couple of years. Unless you mean somewhere way out on the plains, like Greely (Which is practically Kansas,) or in Pueblo, which is practically Arizona. We tend to think of Pueblo as the butthole of the state, but you can get a house there for a third what you'd pay around Denver. Longmont has gigabit fiber though, and that's incredibly easy to get used to.

Re:Colorado

[rock_climbing_guy]

I posted above that I live in one of the 'burbs south of Denver. I've lived here for two years, and I purchased my home just before the prices started going up. Even still, my home value has gone up about 25% and if I were thinking of moving to Colorado today, I wouldn't be deterred.

Re:Colorado

[Greyfox]

On behalf of the tourism board, we have one of the higher rated dropzones in the country, a number of really good restaurants, Left Hand and Oskar Blues breweries, a pretty decent downtown, a couple of ice skating rinks in the winter, a number of good pools and climbing walls at the local recreation centers and... no weed shops. If you want a weed shop, you have to drive 20 minutes to Lyons. You can find one in Boulder, too, but it's a longer drive and the traffic's worse.

Re:Colorado

[BrianRoach]

Even though the Denver metro has gone up the last couple years, it's still a bargain if you're a software dev in terms of cost vs. what you get vs. what you'll make.

You can buy a nice, < 15 year old single family home in the burbs for $250k. That same house would be 3x - 4x that in any of the coastal "tech cities".
(That goes up the closer to the foothills/mountains you go. Stay east of I-25 and it's completely true, west of I-25 and you're going toward the $350k range).

A Sr. Engineer is going to start at about $130k, a mid-level probably just north of $100k. Unless you go to work for one of the big guys (Google, Oracle, HP, Twitter, etc) in which case it's actually more.

The city, area, and people are wonderful. Denver is *like* a big city, but it's really not at all - the entire metro area has maybe 1.5m people (I think Denver proper is at about 700k). Great music scene, great restaurants, museums, etc, etc. And if you're into the outdoors at all, this is the place to be.

As a transplant from Washington D.C. (been here 8 years) I can tell you you'd have a very hard time dragging me away.

Basically, you'll get paid almost as much as you would on the coasts, and your cost of living is half. No, it's not as cheap as but it's still a great bargain for a real metro IMHO.

Find where you love to live

[Timmy D Programmer]

And the rest becomes minimally important.

Re:Find where you love to live

[evilviper]

Find where you love to live
And the rest becomes minimally important.

Like food and shelter... Who needs jobs?

Actually, after 15 years, either you're doing it wrong, or you should already have enough money saved to semi-retire in a low-rent area.

Re:Find where you love to live

[Lumpy]

Where I love to live I need to be making $550,000 a year to live there.... unless I am OK with living in the dumpster behind work.

Re:Find where you love to live

[nanter]

There is not a single place in the U.S. that requires that income.

Re:Find where you love to live

[phantomfive]

There is not a single place in the U.S. that requires that income.

Atherton.

Re:Find where you love to live

[bagofbeans]

Presidio of San Francisco, perhaps?

It's the property tax that bites.

Re:Find where you love to live

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Where I love to live I need to be making $550,000 a year to live there.... unless I am OK with living in the dumpster behind work.

But is it a nice dumpster, or one of those icky ones?

Re:Find where you love to live

[Jack Griffin]

Actually, after 15 years, either you're doing it wrong, or you should already have enough money saved to semi-retire in a low-rent area.

What if where I want to live has no low-rent areas?

Re:Find where you love to live

[evilviper]

What if where I want to live has no low-rent areas?

Then you haven't looked around nearly enough...

Nashville

[ae4ax]

Plenty of jobs in healthcare and other industries. Traffic is getting to be out of control in certain areas (Green Hills, downtown), but not everywhere.

Re:Nashville

[im_thatoneguy]

Warning, Nashville was just featured on NPR as the place everyone was going now. It won't be long now. :D

Re:Nashville

[ksheff]

Why does it have to be "cool", involved with research or a start up as long as it's an IT job that you find interesting?

You also left out the best things about Nashville: no state income taxes and it's not Memphis.

Re:Nashville

[painandgreed]

Why does it have to be "cool", involved with research or a start up as long as it's an IT job that you find interesting?

You also left out the best things about Nashville: no state income taxes and it's not Memphis.

I read and article a few years ago exactly about that subject and Nashville. Simply put, as Nashville could encourage high tech companies to move to Nashville, the companies found that there wasn't enough suitable employees to make it worth their while no matter what the tax benefits. While some people follow the jobs, most people move to where they want to live and then look for a job. As it turned out, Nashville's research showed that getting those high paying jobs into the community was much more a function of encouraging young college grads to remain in the community than encouraging companies to move there. This involves making the city attractive, i.e. "cool", to said young college grads who are not yet worried about families, mortgages, and other stuff but will be after they have already settled down.

Charlotte NC

[ganjadude]

I looked at atlanta for a while but i decided just in the past 2 weeks Charlotte is where im going. great cost of living, modern, and fairly safe place to live

Re:Charlotte NC

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I've had a few people tell me that Cedar Rapids is a pretty livable "techy" place, but I've never been there myself.

Also mentioned was Scottsdale AZ and places like the Beaverton / Aloha area in OR.

Re:Charlotte NC

[Anonymous Coward]

Charlotte is starting to have massive Chimp-Out problems with its local black population. Crime and murder rates are at all time highs. Do not recommend.

This guy knows what he is talking about.

I live in Charlotte and I am leaving as soon as possible.

Whatever advantages Charlotte has, the disadvantages of being proximate to a bunch of people who think that being a thug is a lifestyle choice makes leaving the only intelligent option. I've lived in SFO, PDX, BOS, and LAX, and I'd never advise a friend to move to Charlotte or Raleigh.

Re:Charlotte NC

[ganjadude]

I was down there this past weekend, stayed in huntersville and spend the weekend in charlotte proper and i didnt really see any of it. I was warned of places to avoid but nothing crazy, even compared to where I live now it was tame.

Re:Charlotte NC

[pepty]

It's a good sized city with plenty of city things to do

Yes, cities are generic that way. Go to city, go to House Of Blues, catch a travelling broadway show, leave city. Seriously - if you can't name 5 amazing and important (to you) things about where you live you aren't living there - you're stuck there.

Re:Charlotte NC

[grimmjeeper]

I grew up there too. Dad was a Collins man for 40 years. I spent a few years there myself before moving on.

You're pretty spot on in your summary of the town. It's a nice, cheap, quiet place to raise kids in quality school districts. But it's boring as hell. There's an old joke that sums up the town pretty well.

What's the difference between Cedar Rapids and yogurt? Yogurt has culture.

The NewBo district is an attempt to manufacture culture but, like everywhere you try to manufacture culture, it misses the mark. The closest thing to real culture is ~25 miles south in Iowa City. Even so, it's still Iowa. Though weekend road trips to Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, or St. Louis are easy to do. Beyond that, there's really not a whole lot to do but get together with friends and drink while you watch Hawkeye games or minor league sports. Or maybe go drinking in a boat on Coralville reservoir.

The other major drawback is that, from a tech perspective, it's a one horse town. Sure, there are a few tech companies but Rockwell is about 90% or more of the tech scene in Cedar Rapids. And it's as bad as any of the other major corporations out there. And when they have layoffs, you really only have two alternatives. You leave to go somewhere else or you change careers entirely.

For being a flyover state that's mostly flat, there's still a bunch of decent bike trails. There's no mountains, but the rolling hills make it more challenging than a real prairie.

If you like a quiet place to raise a family, you could do worse than Cedar Rapids. But if you like places with a lot of fun things to do, you'll be bored out of your mind.

Re: Charlotte NC

[ganjadude]

really? i dreamed it all???

Oh wait..... http://www.huntersville.org/

Re:Charlotte NC

[GTRacer]

Jacksonville, FL. 1. My family (nuclear & extended) 2. The beach (with family). 3. Movies & dining (with family). 4. Umm...

Re:Charlotte NC

[Applehu Akbar]

Not Scottsdale so much as a tech area, but the eastern suburbs of Tempe, Chandler and Gilbert. Scottsdale is where you send your glib but no-good brother to sell sure-fire investment schemes to old ladies with memory loss.

Cedar Rapids? Try it if you are okay with the seasons being Preparing For Winter, Winter, Still Winter and Construction.

Re:Charlotte NC

[einsteinbutthole]

a fellow once gave me some good advice/insight. he was in a band from canada that had just totaled their van (because of some asshat - legit not this band's fault) so i would imagine that HE would be the guy freaking out. but we talked for awhile and he pulled my neuroses from me like a surgeon and then said "a lot of poeple complain about the cities they live in, but really, their lives are stuck in a rut. it usually has nothing to do with the cities they live in, but the patterns they've established for themselves."
goddamnit some kid in a canadian grind band with a wicked mullet just laid it out straight.

Re:Charlotte NC

[HornWumpus]

Better than Decatur Ill. That whole town smells like a Tofu eater puked in the corner of every room.

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[ShakaUVM]

>I'm in SF working in tech (of course) and I've been thinking about moving south... Irvine seems like a pretty decent destination.

Or you could move east. Fresno is very affordable, and in the last five years has really started building a good tech scene. Lots of companies, ranging from startups to incubators to established firms like Decipher.

It sounds weird to say, but there really is a tech renaissance going on in Fresno these days.

Philadelphia area

[chromaexcursion]

There's a fair amount of tech in the area. Prices aren't sky high, though not on the cheaper end.

Re:Philadelphia area

[User0x45]

Yeah, but you know, it's in Philly. :)

Re:Philadelphia area

[FooAtWFU]

If you're up for a slightly longer commute, you could also live somewhere in/near Philadelphia and commute down to Murder Town USA (Wilmington, DE) to work at any number of corporate headquarters, especially if your'e willing to put up with the financial industry. (Philadelphia's University City area seems to be pretty fancy these days, there's an Amtrak station a stone's throw away, and there's plenty of museums/culture to be had in the city on the weekends.)

Reno Nevada

[Anonymous Coward]

Below average cost of living, no income taxes, 3.5 hours from silicon valley, tons of skiing. It is increasingly becoming a tech town with the Gigafactory and lots of drone manufacturers.

Re:Reno Nevada

[Tough Love]

,,,increasingly becoming a tech town with the Gigafactory and lots of drone manufacturers.

Drone wars, cool.

Re:Reno Nevada

[Chris Johnson]

I shot a drone in Reno.

Re:Reno Nevada

[Kohath]

Just to clear the sky?

Re:Reno Nevada

[rmdingler]

When I hear those damn twin rotors, I hang my head and cry.

Re:Reno Nevada

[FooAtWFU]

Geez. Reno? I mean, sure, there's more there than gambling there, but you'd better be able to appreciate the blinkenlights aesthetic advertising it everywhere. Personally, though, having slot machines in the men's bathroom would bother me.

(I exxagerate. slightly.)

Boulder/Denver, CO; Lincoln, NE & Bozeman, MT

[im_thatoneguy]

I was really surprised by Lincoln, NE. I wouldn't live there but it really is at its heart a college town and has everything that generally goes along with that.

Boulder/Denver has everything Lincoln, NE doesn't have in the way of mountains and outdoor activities while also doing pretty well on the tech and lifestyle front.

Bozeman I hear is doing pretty well right now as well. Again, Big Sky is nearby so lots of outdoor goodness.

Huntsville, Ala.

[KiranWolf]

We have lots of engineering jobs in Huntsville, Ala. Most are with government contractors (the Army and NASA are very prominent in this town, along with every defense and space contractor you can think of), but there is a growing non-government tech sector here, too. Most of the contractors are in Research Park, while many of the non-tech companies are moving to or already are downtown. Downtown is quickly starting to become a really neat area.

Cost of living is extremely reasonable (I live in a 3,500 sqft house in a nice neighborhood and it runs me about $1,250 a month). Taxes are low, utilities are cheap, my commute is 15 minutes to and from the office. Great place to raise a family, too.

As far as things to do, we're never short of entertainment. If you like outdoors stuff, plenty of hiking, caving and water sports opportunities are nearby. And if you ever do get bored, Nashville and Birmingham are 1.5 hours in either direction. The beach is about a half-day drive too.

Re:Huntsville, Ala.

[CMU_Ken]

Just to add to this, there are a couple of gotchas and bonuses that come with Huntsville: Gotchas: 1. If you're not a very religious person, the culture in the South can feel a little bit insular. 2. Huntsville's airport is one of the most expensive to fly out of in the nation. 3. There is not really a good direct path to drive to Atlanta. You can either take the backroads or go south through Birmingham. 4. If you're single and male and an engineer of any sort, the dating scene isn't going to do you any favors. Bonuses: 1. If you're a US Citizen and you can get a security clearance, government work or defense contracting in Huntsville can have high job security while still being lucrative. It's not necessarily because they're paying a lot, it's because the Huntsville metro area costs so little to live in. But as it is anywhere, if you're talented, you can make serious money, too. 2. The Lowe Mill is the the largest independent arts center in America and it's in Huntsville. 3. The US Space and Rocket Center is in Huntsville. You can't miss it driving down I-565. If you've ever heard of Space Camp, that's where it is. 4. Huntsville has one of the highest percentages of engineers per capita anywhere, if you like that kind of statistic. 5. If you like rocket scientist jokes, Huntsville is the place for you.

Re:This is 2015/2016 Fuck living in california.

[nanter]

That's only if you measure quality of life by size of house you can live in. For many people, living in the middle of Iowa would represent a 500% quality of life decrease, as some people value other qualities of cities.

look at job postings

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Presumably, you'll want to move to somewhere where you can get a job. So... look at job listings, eliminate the ones that are in places you don't want to live, and then look into the places that you might want to live.

Huntsville, AL

[Gre7g]

Huntsville is a great town -- an island of technology in what would otherwise be a very... rural... state. Our tech sector has a lot of military but there are commercial opportunities as well. Cost of living is very reasonable, commutes are short, and there are a wide variety of housing options. The heat and humidity take a year to get used to, but once you do, you'll never want to leave!

Dallas Texas

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area is affordable, has a strong economy (incl. tech). Plenty of sports and culture (arts) options too.

Boise Idaho

[Camel Pilot]

More than famous potatoes...

http://www.hcn.org/wotr/boise-...

Outdoor town also with skiing close by, climbing, mountain biking, Sawtooths, etc.

Re:Boise Idaho

[Thelasko]

When I was reading this article, I was surprised how wired Idaho seems to be.

Value to you, not undervalued.

[Aquitaine]

You don't want an 'undervalued' city - you want a city whose value is in line with your willingness to pay it. Raleigh and Ann Arbor are not inexpensive cities, for instance, even though they're cheap compared to the Bay Area. Austin (where I live) is heinously expensive compared to many parts of Texas, but even with the tremendous growth and increase in cost of living, it doesn't begin to approach the Bay Area. The brand new 3000sq ft house we just bought fairly close to downtown Austin would have cost north of of 2 million in San Francisco.

city-data.com is a great place to start for cost of living comparisons and questions about specific towns. Ask this question on the Raleigh board, the Omaha board, or the Austin board. Findyourspot.com is also an interesting exercise though not necessarily conclusive.

nope/not saying

[turkeydance]

too many have found out already.

Re:nope/not saying

[JoeMerchant]

Exactly my sentiment, I don't need my town to become known as a mecca for low cost of living high wage jobs. So: I recommend Houston - try it, you'll love it! Plenty of jobs, high pay, good benefits, world class cancer treatment center in town (because they need it), it's a great place, and plenty of wonderful neighborhoods with low priced houses - as long as you don't need to breathe the air.

Denver area

[rock_climbing_guy]

I've lived in the Denver area for about two years now. I live in the suburbs on the south side of town. The traffic downtown is abyssmal, but there is one thing that really stands out for a town this size besides the number of tech jobs (check Dice, there are lots!)

There is an area about 10 minutes south of downtown known as the "Denver Tech Center". This area is HQ for a number of tech companies and it's extremely convenient because you can get a decent tech job there, live in the 'burbs, and not have to drive downtown every day.

The skiing and other mountain activities nearby are phenomenal. There is a lifetime supply of camping, hiking, and mountain climbing opportunities. I'm told that the nearby town of Evergreen has America's largest outdoor ice-skating park, as well.

Re:Denver area

[Brett Buck]

And drug addicts walking the streets with impunity. Neo-hippie paradise.

Re:Denver area

[rock_climbing_guy]

The hippies probably wouldn't want to share with someone with your attitude.

Have a nice day.

Re:Denver area

[CaptainLard]

Actually, I heard that Denver was full. Its probably a bad idea for anyone else to move there...

Re:Denver area

[CaptainLard]

Thats the spirit! Its a well known fact that since pot was legalized, Colorado has really gone into the shitter. All the bad things everyone said were going to happen came true so you should probably take it off your list of places to move to.

Re:Denver area

[SuperKendall]

There are some homeless people wandering around downtown Denver, but I'd happily hang out with any of them for a day compared to the batshit insane homeless people SF or NYC has.

Re:Denver area

[Zero__Kelvin]

Try to be serious. Most of them are too busy smoking pot to have time to screw with drugs.

RTP, NC

[duckintheface]

Research Triangle .... Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill... is the best mix of tech jobs and Southern living. If you like the fine food, art, music, politeness and gentle culture of the liberal South, this is the place to be. Best weather in the eastern US, a culturally diverse society. Right now we have a backwards Republican Governor and General Assembly but that won't last for long.

Re:RTP, NC

[pecosdave]

Seems to be a trend. During the past year the number of New York and New Jersey plates I've seen in Houston has increased exponentially.

Re:RTP, NC

[h33t l4x0r]

Your name is ganjadude and you have a problem with liberals? What are they not legalizing pot fast enough?

Re:RTP, NC

[Aighearach]

He's just too high to figure out the teams.

Re:RTP, NC

[ganjadude]

im not a single issue voter. people who vote on a single issue are dumb

Re:RTP, NC

[ganjadude]

its too expensive up here it really is that simple

Re:RTP, NC

[h33t l4x0r]

Do you really vote? In state/city elections? Be honest. Because it would be surprising if someone named ganjadude voted in those.

Re:RTP, NC

[ganjadude]

I vote every chance I get. I vote school board, local elections etc.

I feel I cant complain if i dont vote. People who dont vote are pretty much voting yes to the status quo

long story short, its not a good idea to judge someone by a screen name they made over a decade ago when they were 16 or 17

Re:RTP, NC

[h33t l4x0r]

Hmm, I think anyone would assume that someone named ganjadude gets high a lot. If you don't like that, it's easy to sign up for a new account.

Re:RTP, NC

[ganjadude]

even if thats true ( im not saying its not) but that has almost nothing to do with voting

in other words it would be like if someone had a screenname of oh i dont know oldtimeybeardman and you assume he lives in the mountains and does nothing but old timey beard stuff.

Re:RTP, NC

[Atryn]

If you don't like that, it's easy to sign up for a new account.

But then he would lose that sub-one-million UID!

Re:RTP, NC

[h33t l4x0r]

So you think the % of pot smokers at NPR is the same % as at Fox News? I'm calling BS, sorry.

Re:RTP, NC

[umafuckit]

It's just pot. Loads of people from various walks of life smoke pot. You can't extrapolate anything from it, even if the person decided to use a reference to it in the Slashdot user ID.

Re:RTP, NC

[h33t l4x0r]

You can extrapolate *something* from smoking pot. But from a name like ganjadude? You can extrapolate dreadlocks from that I think.

Re:RTP, NC

[umafuckit]

You *think* you can extrapolate, but you often can't. You're just projecting your biases onto others. The biggest weed smoker I know is a clean shaven articulate professional with a very responsible job. If you didn't know him well you'd never know he had a full-scale breeding program taking place in the spare room.

Re: RTP, NC

[cthulhu11]

There is no fine food in RTP, and "southern living" is an oxymoron.

Re:RTP, NC

[ganjadude]

you would be surprised what people do

Re:RTP, NC

[tigersha]

True. The biggest pot smoker I know is a very shy cut girl with a PhD in Economics. You would NEVER expect it from her.

Re:RTP, NC

[pupsocket]

Do you really vote? In state/city elections? Be honest. Because it would be surprising if someone named ganjadude voted in those.

Why?

Re:RTP, NC

[HornWumpus]

I know you IRL?

Twin Cities

[Cyrano de Maniac]

The Minneapolis/St. Paul area has a relatively high-tech (depending on your area of tech) employment base, with headquarters or significant offices for 3M, Medtronic, Cray, Silicon Graphics, Ceridian, Toro, Thomson Reuters, Target, Best Buy, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, St. Jude Medical, Polaris, Digi, Imation, CHS, Shutterfly, General Mills, Cargill, Seagate (though I think that operation was purchased by someone else), and Digital River. There's plenty of small tech-oriented business around here as well.

Come for the low unemployment and reasonable standard of living. Stay because your car won't start all winter.

Re:Twin Cities

[Kohath]

Stay because your car won't start all winter.

Which starts in October and ends in May.

Re:Twin Cities

[Kohath]

Occasionally. Remember this post when it's rainy and 44 degrees on Memorial Day.

Re:Twin Cities

[vovin]

Seagate is still here ... (Bloomington and Shakopee AFAIK).

In exchange for a few bad weeks in winter you get a food and arts scene that is at least competitive with the coasts. A generally heath conscious population and a lot of outdoor activities year round. Cost of living is pretty reasonable.

Did I mention the food scene? Minneapolis' best restaurants don't have Michelin stars but they are aren't far off the mark. Lots of award winning chefs doing interesting stuff here.

Re:Twin Cities

[Doctor Device]

Stay because your car won't start all winter.

Which starts in October and ends in May.

I'm confused... are you saying that's a bad thing?

Re:Twin Cities

[chappel]

Complain about MN winters all you want, but the onset of global warming is making it nicer every year.

Pittsburgh, PA

[mepperpint]

Carnegie Mellon has attracted a lot of major tech companies to Pittsburgh where they hope to pick up CMU graduates who are a looking to stay. It additionally is a significant source of start ups. Companies with offices in Pittsburgh include:

Google
Apple
IBM
Uber
Duolingo
Shoefitr
Dynamics
Safaba
etc.

Re:Pittsburgh, PA

[grahamsaa]

I live and work in Pittsburgh, for one of the companies you listed above, and can attest that the tech community here is vibrant, the cost of living is low (but rising), and there's a ton of great stuff going on here.

Re:Pittsburgh, PA

[touretzky]

Another good thing about Pittsburgh is that it's easy to reach the New York or Washington metro areas when you want to enjoy some "big city" amenities like a Broadway show or a visit to the Smithsonian, but far enough away that the cost of living is ridiculously cheap. Grad students buy houses here. And Pittsburgh has had a TechShop for years. Also, the local government is actually supportive of Uber, which might explain why Uber built their Advanced Technology Center here for self-driving car research.

Re:Pittsburgh, PA

[KC0A]

Grew up there, attended CMU. Some negatives about Pittsburgh: it rains from November to June. It's cloudier than Seattle. Winters are not terribly cold, but they are wet and gray. Clear days in the winter are rare enough that you feel like taking the day off. The state still controls all wine and beer sales. Consequently the selection sucks. Pittsburgh is an island of civility in the middle of what is basically Appalachia. The counties between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are not called Pensyltucky for nothing.

Metro Atlanta

[jhaygood86]

It's a large metro area with lots of suburbs -- and many tech companies in the area -- in both downtown/Buckhead for the urbanites as well as many of the suburbs. And housing is affordable -- you can rent a house for under $1000/mo and own a big house for under $200k (with very big houses just above $200k -- mine is a 6 bed / 4 bath brand new build at $211k)

Re:Pittsburgh?

[ArchieBunker]

The city is going down the shitter and has been for years. Don't do it.

SLC, UT

[Anonymous Coward]

Salt Lake City. It has the nickname 'Silicon Slopes'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_slopes

Lots of great out door activities, low cost of living, and the SLC area isn't heavily Mormon.

Re:SLC, UT

[bjdevil66]

and the SLC area isn't heavily Mormon.

Come on - Are us Mormons REALLY bad neighbors? :)

Re:SLC, UT

[FooAtWFU]

Come on - Are us Mormons REALLY bad neighbors? :)

The Mormons are really nice people and ways they've been finding balance on issues like tolerating (and welcoming!) homosexuals while still preserving their core religious values and teachings on the matter are pretty good. Even the (in)famous Orson Scott Card treated the matter with exquisite nuance in his fiction, decades ago in the pre-dawn of our current culture war. If there is hope for real pluralism in our nation and harmony between groups with fundamentally different world-views (instead of just one group bludgeoning the other into compliance) then this and things like the "Utah Compromise" provide a foundation. (A flawed foundation, to be sure, and, Orson Scott Card himself undermined a lot of that with his notorious expression of shock that homosexuals and their political allies are afforded political representation -- this was not so open-minded -- but a good sight better foundation than the oft-proposed alternative of compliance or implicit cultural extermination which is directed at other parts of the Christian right.)

But if you're a non-Mormon and hope to move there, there will still be plenty of people who look at you real funny for purchasing coffee at Starbucks. (gasp! caffeine!) Being in a cultural minority might be a very different experience than you're used to; it takes some real maturity to navigate, and risks leaving you angry and resentful.

Re:SLC, UT

[HornWumpus]

I've got a meeting hall across the street. It took me about 5 years to train them to tell the missionaries not to preach at me.

Because if you preach at me, I will give you an honest opinion of your religion (which you don't want to hear). Otherwise I will just smile and let you go about your foolishness.

I'd never move to Utah though.

Baltimore, MD

[jpyeron]

I am a software/technology business owner and I have been in Baltimore since the mid 90's.

I can say that the tech industry is growing and maturing in the area and the cost of living is quite low for the proximity to urban lifestyles.

A nice summary is here: https://michaelochurch.wordpre...

Re:Baltimore, MD

[ventsyv]

There is a ton of high tech government contracting in the Baltimore-Washington metro area. Everything from defence, to space exploration, to basic research. While prices in the DC proper and northern Virginia are kind of high, it's nowhere near west coast prices and the closer you get to Baltimore the lower they get. It's a good place to live too, world class amenities, nightlife etc.

Re:Baltimore, MD

[jpyeron]

...there should be places that don't cost 52% of my monthly income to live in...

Not sure what to say, but nice houses near the train station rent for as low as $0.50/sqft/month

Re:Bangalore

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Bangalore is pretty good. You can literally live like a king on tech money.

This is probably true for very small values of "king".

Re:Alpharetta, GA

[PopeRatzo]

Alpharetta, GA

https://youtu.be/VYakrSp9DqM

Roll your own

[quintessencesluglord]

I am consistently surprised that more of the entrepreneurial types don't drag a bunch of their friends to the South or Mid-West to set up shop. There is little benefit I can see to joining established markets except for the "Me too!"-ism and paying inflated costs.

Especially as far as tech is concerned, that can be done almost anywhere. I remember when Austin was little more than flyover country, and it still would have been except a few decided to make the first strike.

Re:Roll your own

[jeff4747]

Presumably you will have to recruit new employees at some point.

Being in "the middle of nowhere" makes that really, really, really hard. And yes, I've had to do it.

Re:Roll your own

[drinkypoo]

I am consistently surprised that more of the entrepreneurial types don't drag a bunch of their friends to the South or Mid-West to set up shop.

Wild whores couldn't drag most nerds to the South or to the flyover states.

Re:Roll your own

[quintessencesluglord]

Then let them tell themselves that the traffic, diminished purchasing potential, and degraded quality of life is worth it.

Place I live has a pop. of about 50,000, has a performing arts center that can attract acts like the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, is 1.5 hours out from a major city in any direction, has several good universities nearby, and what I use to pay in rent can get a house.

I would expect especially nerds to do a cost-benefit analysis and figure it out.

Re:Roll your own

[Gavagai80]

Most people want to live where their family and friends are, where they've lived their whole life and know their way around and feel comfortable and secure and don't have to start from scratch. Almost nothing will move them. People who like to move around, while increasingly common, are still the exception rather than the rule.

Re:Roll your own

[Magnus Pym]

There are a few major downsides to working in a "Tier-2" or "undiscovered" city if you are a tech guy.

1. You are very unlikely to find high-quality or cutting edge work. Like it or not the movers and shakers of tech are in the bay are these days. They may have remote offices elsewhere, but the work that is parcelled out to these areas is mostly "non-criticial". This is due to both political and practical reasons. This will severely limit your ability to `move up' in the world and is a serious consideration if you are an ambitious type. Unfortunately this has become true even for formerly Tier-1 cities like Boston, and there are so many folks who have been forced to move to the bay area just to find interesting work.

2. There are not too many potential acquirers in Tier-2 cities. So even if you do join a start-up and make a successful product, it would be hard to get to a remunerative exit, and the value of your exit is likely to be much lower than it would be if your company was located in the valley. This very real "exit cost" is well known to VCs and accounts for why they don't invest much outside major cities. Locating in a Tier-2 also makes it very hard for your company to change direction or pivot, because your options will be severely limited by the talent pool in the area.

3. The number of employers is likely to be small. If you are affected by a layoff, it would be very difficult to find another job in the area, especially if you are a bit on the older side. Of course the lower cost of living may mean you can potentially survive for longer during a job hunt.

4. Frankly, if you are not white, Christian and conservative, you are unlikely to have a pleasant time in Tier-2 cities, especially those in the South. Even if the local schools are good, your kids are not likely to have a great time of it, what with being surrounded by peers coming from homes where Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are the primary sources of information, and who think that being informed about other parts of the world immediately makes you a potential terrorist. Being mocked and insulted about your culture & heritage would be fact of life for your kids. I know many folks who have moved to the bay area explicitly to save their kids from roving bands of teenage proselitizers and culture bullies.

Time machine

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

If you have access to a time machine then Seattle WA is a pretty nice place to live, as long as it's in the early 1980s or so.

Re:Time machine

[Dutch Gun]

There are lots of nice suburbs and smaller cities just outside of Seattle. That way, on the occasions you want to go do something in Seattle ("culture"), you have the option, but you don't have to put up with all the negatives (higher living costs, non-existent broadband, higher crime rates, homeless problem, etc).

Of course, the area has a huge tech scene, including Microsoft, Amazon, and thousands of smaller companies surrounding them in the same way medical and dental offices tend to cluster around a big hospital. Still, it's hardly "undervalued" at this point, and the traffic is a nightmare throughout the entire greater Seattle region.

Re:Time machine

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I know, I live outside Seattle and overall I like it quite a bit. But not as much as I did 10 or 20 years ago. :)

Still, all in all, the Pacific Northwest is a pretty good place to live.

Re:Time machine

[KC0A]

Just moved there, amazing energy in Seattle, great food about everywhere. I think it's the most beautiful city in the lower 48. Housing is about half as much as San Francisco, or twice as much as Dallas where I came from. The fashionable parts of Seattle (Capitol Hill, Fremont, Ballard, South Lake Union, Belltown) are about $500/sq. ft. Traffic is congested but not impossible. It's compact and if you live in one of the neighborhoods previously listed you can walk everywhere you need to go. Other good things: we have legal poker and marijuana, it's hiking and sailing paradise, there is decent skiing two hours away and Whistler-Blackcomb with 5000 vert is four hours away.

Re:Time machine

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Yep, I like it here too, even though I grumble about it sometimes. :)

St Louis

[Anonymous Coward]

Super low rent here and lots of jobs to go around. Tech scene is definitely on the up and up with more venture capital and outside equity starting to pour in. Uber and Square are opening offices here and there is a current initiative to get 1000 more tech companies/startups and 10,000 more tech jobs within 10 years.

Re:St Louis

[Thumper_SVX]

I don't have mod points or I'd mod you up despite being an AC.

I've lived in St. Louis for almost 20 years at this point and it's been really good to me. I earn good money, own a gorgeous 3000 square foot house in the South City area and am constantly surprised more people don't move here. It's not hard to find a tech job - no, you're not going to be working for Google or Apple or even Microsoft as a general rule (though the latter does have an office here for sales and consultant services) but there are plenty of programming and infrastructure jobs available. We have a very large engineering footprint, surprisingly so. Boeing has a huge engineering office up near the airport, and world-renowned engineering companies like Hunter, MiTek and Mark Andy are all headquartered here. Yes, they're not tech companies in the traditional sense, but they're all growing companies with pretty significant programmer and infrastructure teams that have to grow with the company.

I'm not going to say St. Louis is perfect; there's a lot of weirdness here from the segregation of county and city governments, and there's a definite segregation of population as well that tends to exacerbate the crime situation in certain areas. However, I love where I live and don't have much of an issue with crime. I also love the nightlife in town, the weather is actually quite reasonable with only a few weeks of real winter every year (yes, it gets cold but we don't get a lot of snow except in January usually) and there's always something going on that is cool and enjoyable. We have incredible parks (Forest Park is an amazing city park that's actually twice the size of Central Park) and a completely free science center and museums. There are also wonderful neighbourhoods to walk in and explore, and traffic is really almost a non-issue for anyone who's seen Denver or Austin traffic.

I will also say it's a great place to raise a family; reasonable cost of living and decent schools... mostly so long as you stay out of the city itself. But there are still some private schools that the tuition really isn't too bad, but it's worth noting most of them are religious schools if you have an issue with that.

Re:St Louis

[aaarrrgggh]

St. Louis has a lot of good things going for it, but it is still a city in decline. The suburbs isolate you from some of the issues, if you live and work close by, but you lose out on all the things that the city really has to offer, and there are a lot of non-functioning aspects to deal with. General unemployment is also pretty high, although I can't speak to Tech.

Re:St Louis

[dbIII]

That's one thing that has truly amazed me about the USA, with an extreme being Detroit. Having a tiny in world standards area administered by local government results in a starved city surrounded by "I'm all right Jack" prosperous suburbs, as well as a shitload of unnecessary politicians fattening on taxpayers money in charge of postage stamp sized suburbs.
Once the decline got going businesses moved out, tax revenue fell, services dropped, more businesses moved out etc.
Removing the idiocy of a CBD not being able to support itself from the taxes of the people who work there would prevent such an obvious fuckup - plus governing over a larger area means less petty fiefdoms with pretend lords fattening themselves on the public purse while responsible for less territory than a single public park in some cities.

Re:St Louis

[HornWumpus]

People moved out, in part, to get out of the reach of the central city government.

The 'burbs will never give up their autonomy now. Have you seen how broken most 'inner city' governments are.

Re:St Louis

[dbIII]

You are missing the point. Leaving a central city to support itself meant that it had to rely on what it had and try to get a lot of money out of the people on it's turf - so after being preyed upon they moved out to the suburbs that owed their existence to the resources expended by the central city in the first place. A desperate central city then tried a lot of things that now look utterly stupid in hindsight to try to claw it's way back. Monorail? Casino? Weird social engineering games to try to bring in rich white people as if it was 1970s South Africa, resulting in an obvious backlash? Taxing the shit out of any business that looked productive? All kinds of desperate get rich quick stuff due to being a CBD and thus not many residents to pay tax.

Have you seen how broken most 'inner city' governments are.

That is my point - the US model of small local governments and all of them having to fend for themselves is very fragile, so there are plenty of "broken" communities. Utterly ridiculous wealth within a few minutes drive of something that looks like immediate post-Katrina New Orleans simply due to arbitrary political boundaries. There's nothing wrong with the utterly ridiculous wealth, what's wrong is the taxes collected on it are spent on a tiny area that doesn't need that much revenue and especially doesn't need a flock of expensive politicians paid as if they are in Washington. Why does a suburb of 22,000 need an entire city council full of elected officials paid a fortune each? Due to such fragmentation what used to be the fifth largest city in the USA is an international shame.
Maybe I should point Detroit out to any Libertarians that get a bit loud. There is plenty in that place that should be a bit of a reality check for their ideas if they think about it seriously. "Every man for himself" kind of sucks as a way to run a city.

Boston?

[neurophys]

Nice town. Just an observation from Scandinavia

Re:Boston?

[Anonymous Coward]

Boston has a lot going for it, in my view, but affordability in housing is not one of them. This article discusses some of the issues:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/11/12/boston-area-housing-costs-hitting-extreme-levels/GqZU6MDkAI4poEw8EHwIoL/story.html

Re:Boston?

[movdqa]

Boston has a vibrant tech scene but it's quite an expensive place to live. It's not as expensive as San Francisco or New York but it's not cheap and it appears to be getting more expensive. There's a small city called Nashua just over the border in New Hampshire. Houses aren't too bad, traffic isn't too bad, no income tax, no sales tax but property taxes are relatively high. There is some high-tech in Nashua itself up to Manchester (city to the north) and there's a fair amount of high-tech companies south to Burlington, MA (you can commute to jobs in MA down about 20 miles - you don't really want to commute into Boston). The biggest downside is likely the cold, snow and ice. The Southern NH area is mostly a family area - not a big singles scene - younger adults prefer to live and work in Boston - this area is a nice place to raise a family.

Re:Boston?

[erp_consultant]

Lived there for 3 years...couldn't wait to get out of there. Long cold winters and humid in the summer. All the apartments were those triple decker shit holes that are about 100 years old with no insulation and generally falling apart...and expensive. Landlords there have no incentive to fix the places up because of the abundance of schools with their endless supply of snot nosed Ivy league rich kids. Nowhere to park.

I have been all over the US and Boston has got to be the most provincial place I have ever seen. I met several people that were born there and had never even left the state for a vacation - ever - in their entire life. If you were not born in Boston you will always be an outsider. They continue, even to this day, to have terrible racial issues.

On the bright side, there is a lot of interesting historical stuff. But that contributes to the terrible traffic since those old buildings can't be knocked down and thus the streets cannot be widened.

Re:Boston?

[cerberusss]

There's a small city called Nashua just over the border in New Hampshire. Houses aren't too bad, traffic isn't too bad, no income tax, no sales tax but property taxes are relatively high

For us non-USians, what range constitutes "relatively high"?

Here in Utrecht (~25 miles from Amsterdam, The Netherlands), property taxes are about 120 euros (US$ 130), and a software engineer earns about 45.000 pre-tax.

Re:Boston?

[NicBenjamin]

What kind of property tax are you talking about? Property tax is levied on your house in the US. Other kinds exist (Missouri, for example, taxes the value of your car), but they're not what we mean when we talk about property taxes.

We use property taxes to pay for local school districts, and numerous other municipally-funded things (for example, lots of American cities do not have enough money to pay for police, which means people move out, which means that house prices go down, which means there's even less money for police, etc. This is what happened to Detroit). In extreme cases (such as the aforementioned Detroit) your annual property tax payment will be more then your house payment. But in other places (such as the deep South, where they are morally oppose to using taxation to pay for anything) it can be as low as $1 per $300 of a home's value.

Here's a CNN Story on it. The map can flip between dollar costs and costs as a percent of your house's value. In most places lots of people live it's 1.5-2.5%, but Cali is lower because of Proposition 13, which sets a maximum rate of 1% of your home's assessed value. It's a bit old (2011), but it should give an interested non-American some clue has to how the US Property tax system functions.

As you can imagine, the "assessed value" bit means that there's a lot of gamesmanship in when the City reassesses your home. If you can get it to happen during the bottom of a down market you do, and if they try to do it during an upswing you fight it. A second bit of Prop 13 actually made it very difficult for a City to reassess a home's value (and thus jack up the property tax bill) except when you sell or you build a new house on the lot. When it was passed the Silicon Valley property price boom was in full swing, and cities were notorious for pricing Senior citizens out of their homes by reassessing the property values, which brought the tax bill above what they could afford to pay.

Re:Boston?

[NicBenjamin]

How often do you talk to the working class in your current town? Because that actually sounds like pretty standard behavior from the working class.

I ended up in retail, and the number of 20-somethings I met who think a road trip to the state capital would be AMAZING because they've never left the County is far from non-zero. Especially since most of them have cars, and could easily schedule a four-day break. Road trips are simply not on their RADAR. Many others do a) family reunions (it's a black area, so these are mostly down in the Deep South, but occasionally they happen up here), b) Vegas, or c) a cruise. d) does not exist (altho if we were closer to the border, trips to Ontario where 18-year-olds can legally buy beer would probably not be uncommon). The culture towards travel is very different.

Racial/ethnic stuff is also much closer to the surface then when you're talking to the Middle Class. A guy actually walked up to me and said "You wanna know why Aspirin is white? Because it works."

Re:Boston?

[movdqa]

The property taxes in my town are $25/$1000 of property valuation so that would be $6,250 on a $250K home. I'd say that salaries run $75K - $130K for software engineers in this area depending on experience, skills, the company and your job title. I live in a smaller home, and paid off the mortgage around 2000 and my property taxes run about $4,000/year. In the US, we have Federal Income Taxes, State Taxes and Local Taxes. State Taxes mainly come in the form of income and sales taxes though there can be state property taxes as well. Local taxes mainly come in the form of property taxes though they can also come in the form of sales and income taxes. You can't really do anything about Federal Income Taxes because they apply to the whole country. In New Hampshire, the main tax is property taxes; so if you have a high income and low property value, then you don't pay much in state and local taxes. If you want a really expensive house, then you are going to pay proportionately more in state and local taxes. Better school districts tend to have higher property taxes so that's a consideration if you plan to put your kids in public schools. One approach to saving money is to live in a weaker district but to use private schools, charter schools or home schooling.

Re:Boston?

[movdqa]

Boston does have a lot of old triple-deckers but it has a lot of new-construction apartments and condos as well. There is a lot coming online in the Seaport District and in Cambridge and Charlestown. There's a huge new construction project next to the TD Garden that just started that will build condos/apartments and a lot more retail. I would disagree on Boston being provincial as you do have a lot of students that come in for the universities and stay here after they graduate with BS, MS and Phds. Boston is a city of neighborhoods and their characters vary widely from place to place. Those universities cost a fortune to attend and I'd guess that parents that can afford those universities can also afford to travel.

Re:Boston?

[erp_consultant]

Well, the new construction is badly needed. When I was there is seemed like the town was falling apart.

"I would disagree on Boston being provincial as you do have a lot of students that come in for the universities and stay here after they graduate with BS, MS and Phds. Boston is a city of neighborhoods and their characters vary widely from place to place." - I'm sure that some stay but a lot more leave. That makes it a very transient town. The locals know this. From my experience, I was treated very differently that someone born there. I found the people there to be very insular and not particularly friendly. I lived next door to someone for 2 years and not once did they even say hello to me. I tried once or twice and then gave up on them.

Now I live in the Southwest and I find people here to be much warmer. Maybe it has something to do with the warmer weather or the fact that things are more spread out than the Northeast.

Re:Boston?

[movdqa]

> I'm sure that some stay but a lot more leave. That makes it a very transient town. The locals know this. I think that some do come and go but there are a lot that stay. But they move to the suburbs when they want to start a family as the schools in Boston aren't the best even though Massachusetts is typically in the top two or three in K-12 education in the country. People do move to other areas of the country which are cheaper than Boston too. I think that there has been decent migration to the triangle area. > From my experience, I was treated very differently that someone born there. I found the people there to be very insular > and not particularly friendly. I lived next door to someone for 2 years and not once did they even say hello to me. I tried > once or twice and then gave up on them. Why do you think that you were treated differently? I think that the distance thing is something that's part of New England's character. Many other areas of the country [and world] are more welcoming. You have to be willing to break the ice and be somewhat socially outgoing to build relationships here.

Re:Boston?

[erp_consultant]

"People do move to other areas of the country which are cheaper than Boston too. I think that there has been decent migration to the triangle area." - Part of the reason for that is cost of living, as you mentioned. Better weather too.

"Why do you think that you were treated differently? I think that the distance thing is something that's part of New England's character. Many other areas of the country [and world] are more welcoming. You have to be willing to break the ice and be somewhat socially outgoing to build relationships here." - I wish I knew why. Perhaps I could have tried harder - who knows. After about the first year I had made up my mind that Boston was not the place for me so I kind of had one foot out the door so to speak. What others have told me is that it's harder to make friends in Boston but once you do you have a true friend. That's not such a bad thing :-)

Re: Flip side of this?

[tchdab1]

Easily 1/3 of that 150 will be simple, adequate, acceptable housing: apartment rental.

Utah

[SecretSquirrel33]

Utah has a rather low cost of living with a very vibrant and active tech community. Driving down the main highway through the state you will see billboards every few miles for developer related hiring. There are dozens of established tech companies as well as many many smaller startups. A few are:
Qualtrics
Pluralsight
Novell
Adobe
DOMO
WorkFront
MX
InsideSales
FusionIO
Instructure
L3 Communications
Boeing
Oracle
Microsoft
Overstock.com
HireVue

See more at http://siliconslopes.com/deal-...

There is also a vibrant tech community in Utah with a variety of meetups including:
AngularJS Utah ~1400 members
Utah Java Users Group ~1100 members

There are also Python, Elixir, Elm, Haskell, ReactJS, Go, Lambda Lounge, Ionic, F#, Big Data, DevOps, Drupal, C++ and BitCoin meetups.

Also the most common profession currently in Utah is Software Developer - http://apps.npr.org/dailygraph...

Utah is also a great place to live: http://siliconslopes.com/about...

Re:Utah

[Ryan McLaughlin]

Have you actually been to Utah? I live here and have lived here for 15 years. Almost everything you said is false.

But it is full of Mormons

Utah is about 62% Mormon, but that is mostly in Utah county. SLC I would say is more like 40%

and the Beer Sucks

I have no idea about this, but I see a sorts of alcoholic drinks in stores and restaurants. In fact I have a friend that works for Backcountry and he says they hand out beer to everyone several times a day to celebrate wins.

SLC also gets China levels of smog

SLC does get inversion, but it is no where near China levels. However this even happened when the area was inhabited by Native Americans. https://www.ksl.com/?sid=23668... "Utah were between 60 and 80 micrograms". "Hong Kong measures 152 micrograms"

Everything is closed on a Sunday or after 8PM

I wish, but this is far from true. Very little is closed on Sunday, and my wife and I often go out to eat well after 8PM

The traffic is also VERY bad, I-15 comes to a complete halt everyday at about 8 AM and 4 PM

Traffic is not so bad unless you are in a construction zone and for obvious reasons it is worse. I live in Utah county and I can't remember the last time traffic stopped. When I travel up north it gets worse, but currently the only time traffic stops is at Point of the Mountain where they are widening the road.

Good Mexican food there is Taco Bell

False, Mexican food is probably my favorite style of food. Utah has some really good Mexican Restaurants like Cafe Rio, El Azteca, Brassas Mexican Grill and more. I have never been to Taco Bell since I have lived here.

Austin is different

[foreverdisillusioned]

eh, Austin isn't quite like the rest of Texas. I mean, it's consistently favored Democratic politicians, often by a 2:1 margin. Also has a decent music/art scene. And there's a nudist park on the edge of a lake, supposedly the only one in all of TX.

I'm not quite sure how it happened this way but, I think the soundest the theory is all of the smart/sane people in TX banded together in one city to make their last stand, Alamo-ish style.

Re:Austin is different

[pthisis]

eh, Austin isn't quite like the rest of Texas. I mean, it's consistently favored Democratic politicians, often by a 2:1 margin.

That's got more to do with the general American rural/urban divide than Austin's particular weirdness. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and El Paso all went for Obama over Romney, as well.

Re:Austin is different

[drinkypoo]

Everything you say is true, and it's true also that there are a lot of good people distributed around Texas as well. But it's also a toxic cesspit of racism and religion. When you venture out of Austin, things go downhill quickly. Also, Austin is subject to the same crap weather as the rest of the state, and it's truly miserable.

Re:Austin is different

[Kohath]

All of the people who refuse to live near someone with different politics should really just band together and live in a compound anyway. If the walls are thick enough, they'll keep the strange ideas out -- for a while at least. They can have nightly groupthink rallies in the common areas to reinforce the political orthodoxy.

Re:Austin is different

[AK Marc]

Houston is still very red. They gerrymandered the Democrats, so there are a number of Democratic areas, but they are concentrated and separate. This makes for a very very redneck feel if you are in west Houston (like Katy), and other places, and less red around Clear Lake.

Re:Austin is different

[Type44Q]

Sorry; I should have mentioned my awareness of the fact that Austin is indeed a mecca of "normality" (even if the rest of TX calls it weirdness), albeit one surrounded by a sea of blase Americana and mediocrity...

Re:Austin is different

[drinkypoo]

That's rather bigoted of you to say that.

No, it's rather experienced of me to say that. I lived in Austin for a year and eight months, and visited every major city and many minor cities in Texas at least once. Now I'm sharing my opinion. I note that you, however, are willing to talk shit without logging in, like the little bitch you are. That means that you're probably not a Texan, since Texans will usually open up their mouth and let you know just what they think without being such a pathetic coward about it.

Re:Austin is different

[sbaker]

House prices *IN* Austin are pretty bad - but most of the Tech firms are north of downtown Austin - and an easy 20 minute commute (DO NOT TAKE Hwy 35!!) will get you out into gorgeous countryside with a decent 4 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood coming out at $300k, and a really stunning 4000 sq.ft palace with to-die-for views for $500k. Median 3 bed houses are around $240 outside of Austin itself. Apartment rentals are generally in the sub-$1000/mo range. There are a ton of jobs here for techies - and we have pretty decent restaurants, music, parks, museums, etc. No city or state income tax is nice - property taxes are higher than some places as a result - but it's not going to be horrendous. But if you insist on living downtown...the sky is the limit on house prices and rent.

As for Texas politics: When the NPR comedy/news show "Wait-wait...don't tell me" came here, they described Austin as "Texas Adjacent" - and that's a good description. We're the capital of Texas - and about the least Texan place in the state. As a tech-geek living out of downtown, it's rare to meet an actual Texan here.

Austin has an increasingly good environmental record - with initiatives to rent Smart cars downtown, EV rebates, we have a policy to have carbon-free electricity by 2030...we were at 23% renewable power (wind) last year and we're on-track to meet that target with the addition of biomass and solar plants.

I guess our biggest problem is traffic (did I mention the "DON'T TAKE 35" thing?) and to get around quickly means taking tollways, so get a toll-tag. I probably spend $100/mo on tolls. :-(

Weather consists of four seasons: Summer - crazy hot, stay near Freon at all times! Spring/Fall - nice weather, rain comes in brief horrendous downpours, the rest of the time it's really nice. Winter - totally random weather, hot/gorgeous/cold every day is crazily different...most places get snow roughl once a year, it hangs around long enough for the obligatory one snowball fight/one snow-angel/one snowman with the kids, one snow-day off school/work - and all of the snow melts by lunchtime. Tornadoes, floods and wildfires add excitement - but the probability of getting affected by one in any way is very, very close to zero.

Re:Austin is different

[Applehu Akbar]

We did the same thing with Tucson. We think of it as a kind of theme park, "Democratland."

Re:Austin is different

[ksheff]

But you have to venture out of Austin to hit the Texas BBQ Trail.

Re:Austin is different

[el_chicano]

eh, Austin isn't quite like the rest of Texas. I mean, it's consistently favored Democratic politicians, often by a 2:1 margin...

Hispanic South Texas also votes blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Texas,_2012

I'm not quite sure how it happened this way but, I think the soundest the theory is all of the smart/sane people in TX banded together in one city to make their last stand, Alamo-ish style.

A large part of it is because of the Hispanic influence. The only parts of Texas that are cool are from Austin south to the Rio Grande Valley and west to El Paso, basically where there is a heavy Mexican influence.

Currently there is some conservative lunacy going on but it should not last too long as the White people are getting old and Hispanics are out-reproducing the Whites.

San Antonio is actually a pretty good tech town also if you are into computer security area due to all the government/military jobs around here. San Antonio is a lot cheaper than Austin and there is a lot going on around here. Austin is pretty close by so you can take a quick trip there on an as-needed basis.

Re:Austin is different

[el_chicano]

No, it's rather experienced of me to say that. I lived in Austin for a year and eight months, and visited every major city and many minor cities in Texas at least once.

Then you must not have spent a lot of time in South Texas. Austin is cool but San Antonio and Corpus Christi also rock. Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley are nice too but then again I am Hispanic and speak Spanish pretty well.

The rest of Texas is as you described, either rural White redneck or multi-cultural urban areas. I spent 30 years in Houston, parts of it are OK but during the period I lived there it just got too damn big.

San Antonio today reminds me of Houston when I first moved there, a small big city. It is growing great guns right now but the cost of living is still pretty low and you can get a decent house for $125K.

Re:Austin is different

[HornWumpus]

N. Cal. The most Granola (fruits, nuts and flakes) place in the world.

Re:Austin is different

[pthisis]

Houston is still very red. They gerrymandered the Democrats, so there are a number of Democratic areas, but they are concentrated and separate

It's no longer "very" red. Harris County as a whole went just slightly more for Obama than Romney and had only a 1.5% edge for Cruz over Sadler. Neither of those depends on the gerrymandered districts used in House races.

Texas as a whole was a 16% landslide for both Cruz and Romney, because the rural areas are in fact very red.

Re:This is 2015/2016 Fuck living in california.

[Kohath]

Plus you can't even eat lunch at the local diner without Presidential candidates coming and sitting at your table and talking to you about your corn harvest.

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[The Good Reverend]

Absolutely. Irvine/Newport Beach/Aliso Viejo and many other Orange County cities have very large and growing tech scenes. And unlike other tech cities, there's still relatively (for coastal California) affordable housing to be found nearby.

Plus the weather and culture and food choices are amazing.

North East Ohio

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, Ohio has a huge demand for tech talent. While the top industries in Ohio may be manufacturing and financial, technology is expanding rapidly to support these industries, including medical, and there's not enough local talent. The cost of living is among the lowest in the nation, and the bargains for decent and even luxurious rentals and homes are plentiful. It just requires dealing with all 4 seasons each year and under-performing sports teams if that matters to you.

Outlying towns near Orlando and Columbus, OH

[Theovon]

I worked for many years in Altamonte Springs, FL, which is realtively quiet and not too far from Orlando. Lake Mary also has some tech businesses too and is a but further west.

In addition to Michigan, Ohio also has a low cost of living, with plenty of good tech jobs in Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Cleveland, etc.

Re:Outlying towns near Orlando and Columbus, OH

[NigelTheFrog]

Second this. Columbus is dirt-cheap compared to the coasts and the fastest-growing city in Ohio. It also has a bunch of tech startups and established tech companies. Full disclosure: I live in Columbus.

Chattanooga, TN: municipal fiber and startups

[fruitbane]

Thanks to the municipal power utility rolling out gigabit speeds to Chattanooga and the surrounding communities, the Tennessee river valley is starting to become a good place for tech. There have also been local efforts to attract and develop startups to take advantage of that broadband speed. Furthermore, though the average salary for employees is below national average, the cost of living is even lower, meaning people can get by on less. The local natural environs are great, too. If you want to work for a big company doing tech it might not be the place for you, but if you want to do your own thing and form, or be part of, a small team doing innovative stuff, it's a great environment to work in. That and you can always take your startup team for a hike in the nearby mountains with only a 15-30 minute drive. Talk about a break to clear the cruft out of a cluttered mind!

Re:Pittsburgh?

[samkass]

I second Pittsburgh. I moved away to be closer to family but miss it. You can buy a house outright for the down payment in many other tech locations, and there's a good diverse tech scene including CMU startups, biotech, and small labs connected to big companies. Museums, arts, short drive to the country, etc. It's not a "night life" town, but if your pace is a little slower it's a very comfortable place to live.

First, make a list of areas you'd like to live

[jeff4747]

Because there's "fixed" things about every place in the country that will not be changing.

For example, if you can't stand heat and humidity, you can eliminate the South. If you can't stand snow or cold winters, you can eliminate much of the Northern parts of the country. If you can't stand commie liberal bastards running everything, that's going to eliminate some places. If you can't stand conservative religious nutjobs running everything, that's going to eliminate other places.

Once you have your list, go to a big-name job site and look at the count of job postings in the last two weeks for your kind of work.

If the place has 5 listings, you better REALLY love the companies, and be ready to move if there's downsizing. If the place has one thousand job listings, you'll have your choice of employers.

From that quick search, cross off any place that doesn't fit well. That should leave you with a relatively small number of places, which you can more thoroughly research and possibly visit.

Grand Rapids area

[Anonymous Coward]

North of Grand Rapids MI you can find good housing at reasonable prices in the Rockford and Sparta areas. Tech employers in GR have been strong for a while and the rest of the economy (mostly manufacturing) has recovered nicely in the last few years. G. R. Ford Airport is expanding so no driving into the Detroit area for flights. Four legitimate seasons, effectively unlimited water supply and lately the place is competently governed.

The DMV clerks mentioned to both my wife and I there has been a steady flow of "returnees" (former Michiganders coming back from the West.) People cashing in on crazy home prices and using the windfall to buy (as opposed to mortagage) nice homes on large properties.

Re:Grand Rapids area

[Kreigh]

My wife and I both work in IT and found Grand Rapids to be a wonderful place to raise a family. The place has been voted Beer City with over 30 craft breweries. Very strong medical community. Art Prize and a Festival of the Arts every year. We also have a local TEDx. And it is only a half hour drive to Lake Michigan beaches in the summer. Well worth a second look.

St. Louis

[jfultz]

Since I moved to St. Louis, I've had several recruiters reach out to me for local development/management positions over LinkedIn and Stack Overflow. I was surprised how many companies there are in the area doing interesting things. Not to mention that St. Louis is home to one of the premier software development conferences (Strange Loop, which pulls in international attendees and speakers), and one of the biggest gaming cons (Geekway to the West). It's very affordable, and tons of family-friendly attractions in the area, including the incredibly awesome City Museum.

Re:St. Louis

[King_TJ]

Really? I was born and raised in St. Louis. Spent almost 40 years of my life there working in tech. And I'm really glad I got out. Same sentiment many of my tech-savvy friends had too when they left.

I'll grant you that for a city its size, it does have affordable housing, and it's VERY good at offering family-friendly attractions.

But beyond that, it's in decline in many ways. First, you have only a few major employers there who employ the bulk of the I.T. workers there. One is the Busch brewery, who ever since getting taken over by InBev, let go of a whole bunch of full-time I.T. workers, preferring to use contractors (often of the H1B variety). Before that, they scaled back much of the advertising/marketing they used to do. (I had friends who lost good jobs there as graphics artists and the like, when they eliminated the "creative services" division.)

Another is Boeing, who IMO really just took over McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis so they could eliminate them as a competitor. There's been a slow shuttering of buildings on that campus ever since the takeover. They still employ a lot of people, but I'd say Boeing is much more interested in work they're doing in places like Seattle at this point.

It also has the HQ for Emerson Corporation, although it happens to be located right next to Ferguson. Luckily for them, they've always been walled in like a fortress, so I doubt the rioters ever had a chance of damaging anything of value in there. But needless to say, a job there means you're traveling through questionable neighborhoods every day for work. Not a lot of pleasant places to go out to lunch or what-not, out there, either.

If you remember the "glory days" of St. Louis, you'll also note that the riverfront is TERRIBLE compared to what it used to be. Ever since the casino went in on the landing and started buying up adjacent properties, it killed the nightlife down there. The riverfront used to be a popular destination that had moored ships and barges of all types, including a floating McDonalds riverboat, an old aircraft carrier you could walk around on, and riverboats (Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn) that actually did riverboat cruises/tours daily. One place let you take helicopter rides too. It also had a wax museum, a coin-op arcade game museum, a cool magic store, and many other neat shops that are all gone today.

I'm sure there are a lot of random opportunities out there, but my experience is, many are tough to find and fleeting. Many I.T. people wind up working in manufacturing for a struggling business someplace in the city for wages below the average, or working in medical I.T. - which is kind of its own beast, with a unique set of challenges and problems. It's not for everybody....

Re:St. Louis

[Thumper_SVX]

Interesting. I live in St. Louis now (have done for about 20 years) and can't say enough good things about the job market here. No, you're not going to find tech jobs in any of the big tech companies, but there are a surprising amount of programming and infrastructure jobs always available around here.

Engineering companies seem to exist all over the place here, and while yes healthcare IT is its own beast there are definitely plenty of jobs around here for that. And you'd be surprised the number (and pay) of tech jobs at some of the manufacturing firms around town.

Yes, you've got some shady neighbourhoods, but they are the exception rather than the rule. It's worth bearing in mind that St. Louis county also has the richest township per-capita in the entire country (Ladue), and many of the neighbouring towns have benefitted greatly from this. Chesterfield, Creve Couer and Des Peres spring to mind as areas that have had a sort of renaissance during the last 5-10 years.

And night life... yeah the night-life downtown isn't so hot. I agree that Laclede's Landing used to be amazing but has suffered greatly from that hulking great casino. I don't go down there... the casino itself is not nice inside (they rarely are anyway) and the area around it has become a bit of a crime cesspool despite significant police presence. The places to go in St. Louis on the weekends have moved out of the downtown area to places like South Grand and the previously scary Vandeventer / Forest Park Parkway stretch (location of the new Ikea). Not to mention places like The Grove that can be amazing for nightlife. These are all South of the city, somewhat... and I'm really pleased to see this place picking up like this.

Yes, you can also go out to the county for a very different feel... Chesterfield is still decent so long as you stay out of the Valley (the new outlet malls have really ruined it for me) and there's also some pretty decent night life around Clarkson and 40. South Lindbergh is also good for night life just as it always has been... Helen Fitzgerald's is always good for a laugh. And the CWE while not as upscale as it used to be still has a pretty popping nightlife. If you're out looking to just get laid, there's still Westport (not quite so good) or Old St. Charles (definitely high on the list of "yep, that'll work").

No, generally the wages aren't phenomenal here, but the cost of living is amazing. I have a 3000 square foot house with easy access to I-44 and I-40 in the South City area near South Grand and I paid less for it than I would've paid for a place half this size anywhere in Denver. It doesn't hurt that it's over a hundred years old and has gorgeous character. Yeah, old houses aren't for everyone but I love living in a place that has been through so much.

Re:St. Louis

[Cruxus]

there's also some pretty decent night life around Clarkson and 40. South Lindbergh is also good for night life just as it always has been... Helen Fitzgerald's is always good for a laugh.

Must be an age-difference thing. Olive/Clarkson and 40 to me means some meh restaurants, but I don't think of restaurants that close by 9:00 or Harpo's Chesterfield to be night life. Helen Fitzgerald's is just crap. Night life outside the City is limited to Maplewood and the Loop as far as I'm concerned.

Re:St. Louis

[Thumper_SVX]

That's fair, but I can name a couple of fun places around there like Scarecrow (nice pub, great food and drinks), Miller's Crossing (a bit further up Olive) and now there's Charlie Gitto's there too... though that's usually not one of my go-to's. There's also Clancy's a bit further down Clarkson (Kehr's Mill and Clayton) that is a fantastic little pub to go drink at and order enough pork to make you not want to eat for a week.

I do agree Maplewood is good too... love the Crow's Nest, but I prefer The Grove or South Grand most of the time. I have found the Loop lacking recently; it's had the heart ripped out of it by too-high rents resulting in most of the actually cool places shutting down and being replaced with strip-mall specials. Even some of the old buildings now have been razed for new multi-use ugly pieces of crap so even the architectural heart has been ripped out of it. A few mainstays remain like Blueberry Hill, but the last couple of times I've been there the food has declined a lot in quality and the place feels like it's on a slow decline to shuttering as well.

Salt Lake City, UT

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the Northwest, and if Seattle is too big for your tastes, Salt Lake City, UT has a decent tech scene at roughly the average US cost of living. It also doesn't take very long at all to get to farms and fields from the center of the city, so you don't have too much crowding.

Pittsburgh PA

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice, small city. Steeler's Nation! Pirates and Penguins. Google is here, Apple is here, Uber is here. CMU and Pitt plus RMU and other colleges. Weather can be a bit brutal, but lots to do: Casino's, culture, zoo. Mountains, lakes, rivers, lots to do. Cleveland, Cincinnati are close, and access to DC, Baltimore, Philly and NYC. I understand the "rat race" - been there (LA, Austin), done that. . . I hear RTP is nice, though they've been through ups and downs.

Who would want to live in Omaha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it is cheap, but there are better place to live that are just as cheap.

I know smaller towns than Omaha that have more tech industry, but those places suck more.

I live in a small town(~300,000 in the area) and there is lots of tech work: embedded gizmos, high end network gear, enterprise-y stuff, military-industrial crap, web development(lots of SaaS shops), software/network security firms, there is even a company that makes digital gambling machines.

It sucks here but is far better than Omaha(The Cleveland of small towns). Or is that Des Moines, IA?

We have 4 distinct seasons, lots of lakes, mountains and snow skiing. But it can get brutally cold in the winter(high's under 0 F) and hot in the summer(over 100 sometimes 110). No earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes.

It is also a right wing hell hole with some of the worst street paving in America(if the street isn't full of potholes it is 100 year old brick), 80's of the area is nothing but run-down ancient buildings, a very corrupt police force that gets away with 5+ murders every year - this is what small government gets you. If you live outside the main town, it is much better on all counts.

There is very little culture or things to do, unless going to dive bars or really small local museums is your scene. We do get bands coming through that were relevant 20+ years ago.

Despite the great outdoor stuff and wide variety of programming work, almost every company has to pay Silicon Valley wages to get people to come here. On the plus side a $500,000 home in the SV area is under $200,000 here so you can live in a very nice house.

Young programmers hate it here but it is safe so if you are older or have a family it is more attractive so the tech companies don't mark down age as a negative.

Re:This is 2015/2016 Fuck living in california.

[brianwski]

Not just the quality of specific cities, but the climate of the area.

Personally, I'd rather not live where the average temperature is below freezing for a month at a time. I'd also prefer not to live where the average temperature goes over 90 deg F for over a month at a time. Iowa has cheap housing, but it's climate isn't what I am looking for.

I live in Silicon Valley (just south of San Francisco) and the housing prices are BRUTAL here, but the weather is pleasant. It's November and I'm wearing shorts today. :-) This isn't the only place with decent weather, but I grew up south of Portland, Oregon and I'm never moving back there. It is dreary and overcast like 90% of the time. It crushes my soul to spend a week up there now. I like to see sunshine and blue skies at least 250 days a year. That narrows it down to the tech scene in California, Austin Texas, maybe Colorado? Probably a few states on the east coast in that same latitude band, but I'm not that familiar with the east coast.

Portland? meh...

[r-diddly]

Until recently I would've said Portland OR, but it appears it has been "discovered" and there's no such thing as reasonable rent anymore.

Re:Boulder/Denver, CO; Lincoln, NE & Bozeman,

[Greyfox]

Doesn't snow get asshole deep on a camel in the winter, up in Bozeman?

Re:Boulder/Denver, CO; Lincoln, NE & Bozeman,

[Khomar]

Actually, no, Bozeman is technically a desert, so it doesn't get a lot of snow. It does, however, get cold in the winter. A typical winter has at least a couple weeks during which it never gets above 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Snow generally arrives around October, and while not a huge amount, it usually sticks around until March or April. However, the summers are absolutely awesome with lots of outdoor activities to do. There are also two really good ski resorts near town for the winter.

All that being said, Bozeman is starting to become an expensive place to live. But you are less than thirty minutes from being outside of civilization. (I went to school at Montana State in Bozeman, though I currently live in Kalispell, MT. It is a much better place to live, in my opinion, but it doesn't have the same job opportunities as Bozeman.)

Re:Silicon Slopes

[rock_climbing_guy]

I've been to Utah on vacation several times. It is perhaps the most beautiful state in the US, scenery-wise. (5 national parks!) My brother says that his wife briefly lived in Utah as a child and discrimination against non-Mormons was a serious problem for her.

If you're out in Utah, I would suggest taking a walk around Ancient Art sometime, near the town of Moab. It really looks like a landscape straight out of a "Dr. Seuss" book. Canyonlands is amazing, too!

That being said, last time I checked, there are a fraction of tech jobs in Utah that there are in Colorado.

Nevada City, CA

[MpVpRb]

Absolutely beautiful! I love living here!

We are 90 miles from Sacramento, and have a great community!

Our local ISP is in the final stages of approval for a gigabit fiber network. Once we have internet, we will have it all

Yes, new tech business are welcomed here. Our economic development council is active in encouraging tech businesses to come here

We have a strong tech history. The Grass Valley Group has been producing top of the line video equipment for decades

I just hope that we don't get overwhelmed. Part of the magic of this place is its smallness and lack of density

It's a difficult balance..more businesses will provide jobs and help the area.. or OH SHIT!, here comes the avalanche

So yeah, I strongly encourage a VERY FEW tech companies to locate here

Answers Not In Existing Cities

[rtb61]

There are similar problems within every city in the world. The real answer is in an Agropolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... because that basically enables you to build a town within a city. A separate town with it's own internal focus and cultural orientation. So a university town inside a single structure, with a focus on adult education and research, it own live, work and play population. A place design to function based around walk ability and social accessibility. Although build one and likely more will follow in close support for example a medical services orientated Agropolis or other industry sector Agropolis. A lot of design work still remains especially with regard to fire control, sound, fresh air movement as well as the movement of people (very low commute numbers, basically working in an Agropolis means living in it, which promotes that cultural distinctness to each structure).

Rather than building new cities or trying to rebuild existing ones, you build a new one within the existing one, a gated city with an internal democracy, only taking up a small portion of the existing whilst adding enormously to the existing (services and support).

Re: Tampa, Florida USA

[floridatampadotdot]

Tampa, Florida but only for the hermits and the older crowds who work remotely. hermit kingdom. or isolated.

Re:San Antonio, TX

[rock_climbing_guy]

I'll second that! I used to live there, but I thought about moving to Austin. I had a development job at "Fort Sam Houston" (which confuses people, because Fort Sam Houston is in San Antonio, not Houston). For several years, I rented a 1/1 apartment with my wife for less than $700 per month in a fairly nice area.

The funny story is that one day it looked like my dream was coming true; I was brought on as a temp-to-hire for a company in Austin. I was asked to spend the first two months on-site with a client in Denver, at company expense, which was awesome because I had no rent payment for two months! I was placed on a dysfunctional team and let go after a few months. After that, I decided to just take another job in Denver since I had already vacated my apartment and I love mountain sports so much.

The best part of the story is that I had a chance encounter with someone I regularly saw at the client site. He said that the project crashed and burned, so I think you could say that getting fired from that job would be like getting ejected from the Titanic before it left port.

Re:This is 2015/2016 Fuck living in california.

[k6mfw]

There was some program about presidential campaigns, they were interviewing this guy from New Hampshire or Iowa or one of those small states where voters get choices. His comment was he got to shake hands with every president since Kennedy. Here in Calif you need at least $50K to simply attend a fundraiser with a Party nominee.

Re:Boulder/Denver, CO; Lincoln, NE & Bozeman,

[Nethead]

I have to support a small office of two dozen aerospace engineers in Belgrade, MT and travel there a few times a year. I was quite surprised to find a very decent selection of places to go in downtown Bozeman. Good food and drink, friendly people too. A bit right leaning for me but growing up in Yakima I know how to deal with that. It was that one trip when it was -20 degrees that would keep me from moving there. But if you like the outdoors and four real seasons a year, it's a place to put on the list.

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[R3d M3rcury]

Orange County Culture? Sounds like an oxymoron to me.

You're right about the other two, though. Especially the weather.

ask slashdot for whom?

[retchdog]

It's cute that Dice Holdings is so desperate to squeeze some value out of this lemon of an investment, that they'd ask us to shore up their market research. It's funny in so many ways.

Re:This is 2015/2016 Fuck living in california.

[sensei moreh]

I like to see sunshine and blue skies at least 250 days a year.

I think you'd like Yuma, AZ

Waltham, MA

[Xel]

Waltham, MA is a lovely town, very affordable, loaded with tech companies, and a stone's throw form Cambridge/Boston.

Spring, Texas

[Tony Isaac]

It's part of the Houston metro area, with access to just about everything. It's home to Exxon Mobil, which has its own cadre of oil-related tech companies. It's next door to The Woodlands, which has a major biotech hub, and is within commuting distance to tech companies in banking, e-commerce, and medical industries. Median home prices are only $160K.

It's not Silicon Valley, by any means. But the cost of living is low, and there are plenty of tech jobs to go around.

Re: Flip side of this?

[junk]

+1

I recently moved from San Jose to Austin. What you get for your dollar is a lot less in San Jose but far better than the rest of the bay area. There are a couple Google his stops, so you can avoid the commute. The further south in SJ you are, the better (to a point). When I was working at Google, I rode the bus from Silver Creek or the light rails station on Santa Theresa. (I moved a few times.) If you're set on the bay area and don't want to spend all your money on rent, San Jose is a good place.

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[dave562]

FWIW - I am leaving Irvine and moving to the Pacific Northwest after having grown up in southern California. I recently started a family and have no interest in raising my kids around here.

If you are okay with being house poor, you can probably afford to buy a house in Orange County. If schools are important, you better be willing to spend nearly a million dollars for a track home somewhere in Irvine, or set aside a significant chunk of money for private school tuition. Just took a look at Redfin or Zillow to get some idea of what you are going to have to spend. Where I am looking to move, I can get ~2000 sq/ft (3 bed, 2 bath) on a 5000+ sq/ft lot with good schools for $300-400K. The same in Orange County is going to cost close to $1 million.

The food here is pretty amazing and I am going to miss it. Southern California is an ethnic melting pot and you can get cuisine from all over the world here.

I am also going to miss the car culture. With so much disposable income in the area, and no moisture to destroy them, there are awesome cars all over the
place.

The weather sucks. The temperate climate that I grew up with as a kid is gone. Blame it global warming or whatever, but now it is just hot.. getting hotter, and the humidity is increasing. Plan on having to run the air conditioning for a good portion of the year, even close to the beach. The much hyped "ocean breeze" is non-existent if you are more than half a mile inland. The change in weather is the primary reason that I am leaving. Southern California is a DESERT. There are major drought problems and they are only getting worse. Maybe climate change is going to prove to be a load of crap and I will be wrong, but I cannot imagine anyone with any sort of long term vision making a conscious decision to settle down in a desert that has to import its water to survive.

Ignoring the above, there is a good tech scene here. There are a wide variety of industries represented from straight tech like Google, to health care, to manufacturing, legal, literally any industry that you can think of has some sort of representation in southern California in general, and Orange County specifically.

If I was in my twenties and wanted to live in a house with a couple of guys and just ball out, this is a decent place to do it. There is always something going on. Or if I was still single and could spend half a million dollars on a condo, it might be worth sticking around here. But there are better cities to be single in, like Chicago.

Kansas City

[CymorC]

• Cheap living
• Lots of tech startups and world headquarters
• Excellent food
• Gigabit Fiber
• World class Art and Venues
• You can get anywhere within 45min
• Cheap Flights
• Friendly People

Nashville...

[eWarz]

Just don't come to Nashville. It's an absolutely HORRIBLE place to move to. STAY AWAY! Seriously. No jobs here. Oh and we southerners are the rudest people...we don't want you... ;)

Re:Nashville...

[ThatsMyNick]

Or Chattanooga. We dont have cheap gigabit fiber, stay away.

Re:Nashville...

[TheGratefulNet]

well, "bless your heart"

Re:Nashville...

[cshark]

Or Kansas City. It sucks.
Seriously. Stay at home.

Re:Nashville...

[cshark]

I was just in Nashville. Honestly some of the worst traffic I've ever seen. Especially around Brentwood.

Idaho Falls or Logan, UT

[Verity_Crux]

Idaho Falls, ID, and Logan, UT, both have plenty of tech job openings, plenty of rural living, relatively low housing cost, all the amenities, etc. I work near Logan. Every month at our valley Software Craftsmanship Club meeting people come asking "anyone want to switch companies this month?"

Re:Leave the USA and come to Malaysia

[vovin]

I've been in KL but I have no idea what kind of income you could make doing software there.
You would probably be better off getting a paid in Singapore and living in Malaysia.
I know Malaysia has been getting some high tech fab work and contact mfg.

I suspect there is more software work in India ... where hardware fabrication is pretty rare (I suspect that is changing?)

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[evilviper]

And unlike other tech cities, there's still relatively (for coastal California) affordable housing to be found nearby.

Median price for just a 2-BR in Irvine is $535,000 (And let's not get started on HOA fees)... Not as terrible as the Bay Area, but I wouldn't exactly call it affordable. http://www.trulia.com/real_est...

And if you include "nearby" cities, then prepare to spend 1+ hour every day stuck in traffic, because the roads are backed-up during rush-hour(s), and you can forget about any form of public transit. A lot of people commute nearly 200-miles/day, just for more affordable housing locales.

The recreation options are pretty limited by the sprawl... Hours on the roads to get away from the urban locales and hordes of people overwhelming the all-to-few public spaces. Beaches all locked-up by property developers. The pervasive exclusionary behavior can be observed at public parks, which, upon closer inspection, you'll see lack ANY parking spaces... They're clearly meant for sole use of residents of the immediate area, with others entirely unwelcome.

Where the hell is Jacobs Well

[bigtreeman]

Where the hell is Jacobs Well ????????????

Between Brisbane and Gold Coast Australia
Under 1,000 people, on the bay, friendly town
best boating and fishing
1/2 hour to the surf
2 great pubs
rural, sugar cane area, tank water
good real estate prices
commute to city or coast
but I work from home
between 2 international airports, 2 casinos .......

Re:Bangalore

[Jack Griffin]

Bangalore is pretty good. You can literally live like a king on tech money.

This is probably true for very small values of "king".

And large ones too. That's the thing with the 1%, it is all realitve.

Re: Flip side of this?

[jellomizer]

Well it is personal preference however... I think this way.
For an upper middle class life: Where 6 figures should afford you. All calculations are AFTER TAXES and Work Benefits (Health Care,401k etc...)
1. Home: One bedroom for each occupant, 1 full bathroom for every 2 occupants. If multi-story should have a half bath. Services, Hot and cold water, electricity, internet, television, heating and cooling. For upper middle class you should be able to afford to live in a quite safe neighbourhood, with at least modest amount of greenery. This should take up 1/2 of your pay.
2. Travel: You should be able get to work in a timely manner, be able to go to the store(s) food, clothing, hardware... be able to attend official functions from be able to attend jury duty, and vote, go to weddings and funerals. This should be multiplied by 1.5 for each member of the household (round up) This should take up about 1/4 of your pay.
3. Food: Healthy food, where you are not starving. For every member of your house hold. This should take up about 1/8 of your pay.
That leaves you with 1/8th of your salary to save or spend.

I live in an area with lower cost of living. If I made 175 or 200k a year I would be living a very wealthy life style, People who live a few hundred miles away in the major cities who make much more then me are living like when I started working decades ago.

Now I will get a bunch of hate responses from a lot of city people or people who prefer a more modest living, which I am not knocking them down, but for my personal happiness those are the percentages that makes me feel good.

Columbus, OH

[Mufasa3245]

Columbus, OH. Right in the middle of the Midwest. Very reasonable living expenses. Lots of national company HQs are there. Most of those aren't tech companies, but they all need some kind of tech solutions. Mass transit doesn't really exist, so you need a car. But the traffic is actually pretty good. Weather is fairly moderate for a northern state. 90 peaks in summer, winter rarely goes below 20 at the coldest.

Re:Pittsburgh?

[Improv]

Agreed. Pittsburgh has really come around from what older generations remember it as; it once was a smoggy industrial town without much to recommend it. A tech boom that started in the late 90s has picked up a lot of steam recently (having great universities eventually pays off) and it's affordable, livable, and has good public transit while still being car friendly. I lived there from 2002 to 2011 and was very happy there.

(It does have bitterly cold winters and transit to other cities is lacking, but those are the only faults I see)

Cincinnati

[datavirtue]

In the Cincinnati area it is very difficult to find IT talent. You can find people who went to school for programming, and/or who have been writing C# their whole life but most are not good by any stretch of the imagination (they actually do more harm than good). It is especially hard to find people for database work--BI, DBA, report writer. You can often settle for report writers or use offshore but that work always needs revisited/fixed.

The weather is decent most of the year, the houses for people in our line of work are cheap, and there is no shortage of jobs or houses in nice areas. All of Ohio is in need actually. Where I live I can actually bike to thousands of jobs safely, and my house in a nice-ish neighborhood, cost me less than $120k.

Work Remotely

[Fished]

For the vast bulk of my career, I've worked remotely. This lets me get paid in Northern VA dollars without paying Northern VA prices. Effectively it's a 25% income boost. The only extended job search I had was when I worked on-site for a company as a contractor for 4 months while I looked for a permanent position working remotely. I actually live about 90 minutes from Northern VA (Fredericksburg, VA) so I can go in if I have to, but the houses are still half the price.

Re: Flip side of this?

[iamacat]

East bay, somewhere close to company bus stop or BART. Realistically you are looking at 3 hours daily commute for a relatively affordable house in a good school district. Better spend it watching movies in a bus then risking your life daily in traffic.

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[Gavagai80]

Fresno is hardly what I'd call livable. High crime, ugly and flat, hundreds of miles from anything interesting. If you're going inland in CA, Folsom would be a better choice (pretty and pleasant but not too expensive, has Intel etc and an easy commute to Sacramento for more options).

Ann Arbor

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone who has lived here in Ann Arbor their whole life, it's not a great place to live. The schools are horrible, so you wouldn't want to raise a family here. Inside the city, property is hugely expensive because of the university. Outside the city, the internet is really bad with no real prospects for improvement. There are almost no electronic shops left(as in you buy parts like resistors and such). The people are annoying, as they seem to the victims of the school system, and nearly devoid of sense. The winters are colder than hell, and snow clearing service outside the city leaves a lot to be desired. There are; however, plenty of robotics manufactures around here. Most of the tech companies aren't in Ann Arbor itself, but in the surrounding areas that the Ann Arborites keep trying to claim.

Re:Ann Arbor

[ClayDowling]

The winters are horrible if you are somebody who should live in the deep south. I've been to Traverse City and Marquette in the winter. Ann Arbor is nice. You don't even need chains.

Rochester, NY

[ericnils]

I left Rochester, NY early in my IT career to move to Boston when Kodak started falling apart and the job market was awash with experienced unemployed engineers with Masters degrees. The economy hurt for a number of years after that, but many of those engineers created small businesses and the availability of talent attracted some new employers to the area. After living in Boston for 12 years I decided to move back when my (now) wife and I decided to get married and have kids.

Rochester, NY has a lot going for it now. I'm an experienced Sysadmin and had little difficulty finding a job. I'm regularly contacted by recruiters for other positions so I know there is still demand. I know some people will scoff at that so I feel I must also say these are not crappy mass-mailing recruiters as was so often the case in Boston. Of the four jobs I entertained from these recruiters in the past three years I had reasonable offers from three and I now work in one of those positions.

The non-tech good:

Housing is very inexpensive and you can choose either urban or suburban living and expect a less than a 30 minute commute time either way. My commute is under 20 minutes as are the commutes of the majority of my coworkers. Want a house for $100,000 in a decent neighborhood? No problem. Want to live in the best school district (Pittsford) in upstate NY? Average house prices are currently $265,000. Want to live in the country? You can do that too and still get to most workplaces in what is considered a normal commute time in most tech cities.

There's lots to do in town and nearby. There are many nice museums: The Strong National Museum of Play, The Rochester Museum and Science Center, The George Eastman Museum and many others. Like music? The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra is spectacular. That and the George Eastman School of Music also attract a lot of travelling shows. I went to see Video Games Live and Final Fantasy: Distant Worlds play with the RPO in the past year at very reasonable prices. Like good beer and wine? There are a ton of local breweries and wineries. You can get to the finger lakes in 1-2 hours for recreation including wine and beer tours, spectacular waterfall hiking (there's an entire book dedicated to it with over 100 waterfalls), touring quaint towns and visiting seasonal festivals. Niagara Falls and Letchworth Park are also within 90 minutes. You may notice all of the water I keep mentioning. Rochester is on Lake Ontario, one of the great lakes and we get a lot of rain to fill our lakes and streams. I think this is a good thing. You won't ever need to water your lawn, should you choose to have one, and there will never be a water shortage here as is becoming common in many cities.

The bad:

Weather: This is a good and a bad. Our late spring, summer and early fall are beautiful with temperatures that let you enjoy the outdoors when it is at its best, but it gets pretty cold here about six months of the year and below freezing for three to four of those every year. Oh, and we get snow. Nothing like the nightmare snowfall you may have heard about in Buffalo last year, but we get ~100 inches of fresh snowfall on average. That doesn't mean we have 100 inches of snow come spring though. Periodic melts and packing down usually give us a maximum depth of 2-3 feet of snow over the course of the winter.

Public Transportation: This is one of the things I miss most about Boston. You will need to own a car to do a lot of the above. We have a bus system, but it's a hub and spoke system and I would classify it as OK at best. It's not all bad though. We have a good road system that can handle the number of cars around so you'll rarely hit any real traffic.

I love living here. If you can put up with the winter weather and don't mind that you have to drive most places it is a great place to live.

Re:Bangalore

[FooAtWFU]

This is probably true for very small values of "king".

I've just racked my brain and bookmarks and Internet for the source for this figure and can't find it, so I'm probably messing it up a little, but, I seem to recall reading somewhere that the typical American lifestyle today relies on machines that exert approximately the same amount of effort as 60 human laborers. That doesn't account for nearly the same level of opulence as a major king would probably expect, but it's not a bad start either.

STL: local boosterism, or truth, or some of each

[eric_harris_76]

There's been chatter lately about St. Louis increasingly becoming an IT hub.

There's some basis for the claim. Universities, some of them pretty big deals. Washington University. (A friend with a Harvard boyfriend had a red sweatshirt with "Harvard" in big letters above its crest and a caption in small letters below: "The Washington University of New England") St. Louis University. My alma mater, MST (formerly UMR formerly MSM), just a hundred miles down I-44.

Employers that do a lot of IT. MasterCard. Emerson. Square's expanding their presence. Boeing. The IT market is pretty good.

IT user groups. You can find a bunch on meetup.

As a place to live? The cost of living is average to low. Despite the sprawl, I can get from South City ("Dutchtown") to NW St. Louis County in 40 minutes, when it's not rush hour. Even rush hour is not all *that* bad; my co-worker in St. Peters (in St. Charles County) commutes to just a few blocks from the Arch after passing through St. Louis County and all of the City in about 40 minutes. The St. Louis Symphony is pretty damn good, as are the Art Museum and the St. Louis Zoo. Despite the recent problems in Ferguson and nearby communities and the problems all inner cities seem to have, the St. Louis metro area is not as portrayed or imagined. Interracial couples don't cause raised eyebrows, much less raised fists. "Dutchtown" is still an ethnic enclave, but Bosnian, not German. (The only US Bosnian-language newspaper is published here.) The Hindus and Muslims I work with get along just fine with everyone. You can even be a Cubs or Mets fan, and not get picked on. Much. (It's more condescension, I think.)

Reason to think it's hype: It's chatter. Some of it is from the same people that thought "business incubators" were a good idea, or that football team owners were too poor to build a stadium. And it could be I'm somewhat biased in my opinions and selective in what I choose to notice, or to mention.

Still, St. Louis is worth considering.

Re:Bangalore

[ahodgson]

appropriate references:

http://energyskeptic.com/2014/...

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[funwithBSD]

Sacramento has the central location so that almost anything you want to do it is 2 to 3 hrs away, or less:

Tahoe/Reno
Yosemite
Napa
San Fran
Lost Coast (Point Reyes/Ft. Bragg/Mendocino)
Shasta
Delta
Davis
Santa Cruz
etc...

Housing is pretty cheap here, you can find good housing for $2 to $3K a month for an older home, and newer homes are still reasonable.

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[Applehu Akbar]

Consider Reno for tech. It's almost surrounded by good parts of California, but you're on the Nevada economy and tax structure.

$150K is starting money

[itomato]

Wanna live alone in an efficiency apartment? 3BR apartments are available, but not in MTV.

I'd recommend Saratoga and a rate bump.

Notable additions:

[itomato]

Don't forget Terd Cruz and Don't McLeRoy!

Best Tech Scene and places to live?

[Veretax]

the New River/Roanoke valley of Virginia which includes the city/towns of: Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Radford, Salem and Roanoke. Multiple colleges, Industrial parks where software firms are located (Ex: Rackspace, Corvesta, Qualtrax, etc. Check out the Roanoke - Blacksburg Technology Council for some articles about the region here: The RBTC We moved here a few years ago and this area is a fantastic place to raise a family, there are plenty of tech jobs and the cost of living is fairly low compared to other technology hotbeds.

The problem with Lincoln

[billstewart]

They have this silly custom called "winter", but unlike Boulder they don't have mountains to make that any fun.

Re:Austin vs. Texas

[billstewart]

Back when the crazy right-wingers were petitioning whitehouse.gov to let Texas secede from the Union again, ex-Texan friends of mine and I agreed we should let them go, but they have to let us keep Austin, like West Berlin as an island surrounded by reds. The Congress St. Bridge will be the new Checkpoint Charlie.

I've only visited Austin once (for my uncle's funeral), but I've got cousins there, and friends who've lived there, and if you've got to be in Texas, and are politically or culturally anywhere left of Rick Perry, it's the place to be. San Antonio's not too bad either, though I'd probably get tired of it pretty fast. Parts of the culture are fun, there's a great arts scene, but I suspect it's small enough you'd see everything in the first year and then be bored.

Houston's weather and traffic are horrible enough that it's off my list even aside from the culture. Dallas? Meh, if I had to live in a big dirty ugly city, it'd be New York, or maybe LA, plus it's a lot more like Texas. I know some really wonderful Texans, but I don't talk politics with them except the family in Austin or the ones who've escaped to California because they had to get out of Texas.

One name immediately comes to mind:

[_0x783czar]

Provo, UT

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[HornWumpus]

Even better, work in Reno, live anyplace else close by. They are _all_ better than Reno.

Re:Kansas City

[HornWumpus]

Tax on gross income. Don't do it.

KC has insane anti business laws, has about 2 tech employers and is full of thumpers.

I couldn't wait to move away.

They also ban ugly and scary dog breeds.

Re:Kansas City

[cshark]

Shh.... nobody wants to live in Kansas City. Google fiber is a myth. Does not exist. The whole thing is a scam, wifi speeds still suck, and latency is high. We're next to Johnson county, which is hell on earth. Our drivers are terrible. Worse than Nashville or Boston. The place is land locked. Tons of fat stupid rednecks that hate nerds here. In other words, Walmarts everywhere. Worst sports teams in professional sports bar none here. The place is very "southy." You'll get made fun of. There are no tech jobs anywhere. You'll hate it. When you've spent some time in Kansas City, you'll wish you were never born. I'm telling you this for your own good. Stay away. If you're happy in San Francisco, please, stay in San Francisco. It's for the best. Seriously.

Re:Kansas City

[Kiyyik]

Yeah, and we're not just saying that because we're on to a good thing here and don't want it getting around!

I deny that completely!

Ann Arbor and Des Moines

[ClayDowling]

I live in Ann Arbor, and can attest that it's an amazing place. It's Michigan, so you really should have a car, but if you live in the city proper you can actually get by with a bicycle most of the time, and just rent when you need to get out of town. Excellent cultural scene, and as an added bonus many of the speak easys from prohibition are still open (although most under new management).

Des Moines IA is another place to consider. Many multinational and national corporations have big footprints there, and there are plenty of tech jobs. There's also quite a bit to do. I lived there for a year, and while I'm happy to be back in Ann Arbor, I enjoyed Des Moines itself. Low cost of living, low crime, and wide open spaces are its strengths.

Re:detroit

[ClayDowling]

Also a good place for startups. Cheap real estate, ready access to capitol and low cost of living. It also helps that it's a really beautiful city.

Re:Kansas City

[HornWumpus]

I'm from there. You aren't.

BBQ in KC is good. EVERY other kind of food is generally mediocre (occasional exceptions; Stroud's is good.) Don't even bother with the Chinese/Thai etc. Just terrible, almost as bad a CA BBQ.

Re:Louisville Is Unrivaled

[Corrado]

I agree! I've lived here all my life and Louisville just keeps getting better and better. Once Google Fiber comes to town (crosses fingers) we will be unstoppable. I like to say that we have a little bit of everything here. When it snows, we get a little bit not a full blown blizzard. When the earth shakes, it just rattles the bed and doesn't level the city. Traffic is not terrible and it takes about 30 minutes to get almost anywhere in the city. We have a river boat (cool!) with a calliope (super cool!) and a world class horse race. If you don't come here soon, you'll regret it. :)

Helen Fitz's, etc.

[King_TJ]

Yeah... that comment made me laugh. Naming Helen Fitz's as a good example of nightlife or even a "fun place to go" in St. Louis? Wow.... If that's the case, it just reaffirms why I left!

Seriously, I remember YEARS ago getting totally mistreated in that establishment. My buddies and I went in for some food and drinks, and this security guy on a power trip got mad because he thought my friend pushed somebody in a line that had formed, as you went past the front entrance. (The place always gets too crowded like that, so people are standing all over the place - instead of just occupying seats at the bar or at tables. People stand around uncomfortably, trying to watch whatever game is on an overhead TV until they can find a better place to stand or sit.) So anyway, this guard shoves the butt end of a Brinkman flashlight into my friend's back to get his attention, rather than just saying something first. My friend, reflexively, spins around, about to fight someone (wouldn't you?). He realizes, immediately, it was just a security guy at that point and tries to ask what's going on but the guard goes into "bad ass mode" as soon as my friend spun around quickly, and tries to throw us all out. We had words with the manager but were essentially told they don't care if we ever come back again or not, and they're not going to make any effort to make us happy.

There's really NOTHING special about that place anyway. Just another overcrowded sports bar with an Irish theme for the sake of having a theme.

I used to really like Lemmon's bar, further down on Watson Rd. as you got into S. City, but I see it closed not too long ago; a victim of all the Bosnians who took over that part of town and ruined it with street gangs.

Forget the market, get a real job!

[morgauxo]

So many tech workers are fixated on living somewhere with a great 'tech market'. You don't need a market! You need a job!

When I was in college studying CS during the internet bubble years I was told I should look forward to limitless short term jobs. I wouldn't be spending decades building seniority at the same place like my parents did. I wouldn't need to. I would make plenty of money to save for my own retirement and wouldn't need to acrue vacation time. I could take as long of breaks as I want in-between jobs.

BULL SHIT!

I bought that crap and thought it was going to be great!

After the burst you couldn't survive that way unless you moved to one of those 'great tech markets'. I almost did. Many of my friends did. I only stayed because of family. I'm so glad I did! My friends that left are constantly stressed out, looking for their next job. I suffered through a few shitty employers that I couldn't afford to leave until I found the next. Now I have a great job with great employers that aren't going anywhere! My friends who moved do make more than I do. They spend it all too. The cost of living is rediculous in those areas! I have far more spending power than they do AND I have stability!

Silicon Valley can shove it!

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[ShakaUVM]

Fresno used to be worse, but North Fresno especially is actually nice. Close to the mountains for skiing, and the people are a lot nicer than in most big cities in California.

Re:Kansas City

[HornWumpus]

The best Asian food in KC would go broke anywhere in CA, even Fresno (FYI that is a burn). I still have family there and visit regularly enough.

Your going to talk about fried Chicken and don't know the difference between deep and pan fried?

Re:How's Irvine, CA?

[funwithBSD]

Because you find snow here in cones, not on the ground.

Oh, and California girls. =)