One year in San Francisco as a Software Engineer

In 2017 the company I worked for in Toronto got acquired by Yelp. The software engineers in my company (including myself) were asked to move to San Francisco. At the end of 2017 we moved, and I spent most of 2018 there. With the year coming to an end, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on my time there.

As a software engineer, it’s often suggested that you haven’t really made it to the top, unless you work in the Bay Area. I disagree with this idea, but it’s easy to see why some people feel this way.

On my first trip to SF, it was already quite telling. Flying from Toronto airport I noticed a higher than usual technology themed tees, stickers on laptops and black terminals. Pretty exciting! By chance My Uber driver to downtown told me he was applying to a free machine learning course ran by Google. On the way I noticed that the billboards next to the highways were directly targeting developers.

SF felt like the Mecca of tech, but also the center of capitalism. There is a lot of money, but not a lot of wealth. Salaries are the highest I’ve personally seen, but so is the cost of living.

As a software engineer this more or less evens out (compared to Toronto, where I’ve lived and worked for a long time), but if you’re not in the business it’s rough.

Before I moved to SF I never had the intention to move to the Bay. It just wasn’t a goal for me. But when the opportunity arose, we felt that for the trip to be worth it, we didn’t really want to lower our qualtity of living standard, and we wanted a 2-bedroom apartment and a reasonable commute. Ultimately this meant that our rent was $4250 USD per month, and a larger portion of our salary going towards rent. Had we stayed longer, we would definitely have tried to find a cheaper place to live and save more.

You can imagine that at those prices, it’s very difficult for many people to live in San Francisco. The cost of living has exploded in the last 30 years, and many people blame the tech industry for this.

Every now and then you’re confronted by this fact that there’s people who ‘hate us’. Take for instance the attacks on the Google commuter bus.

Personally I can emphathize with the sentiment. Even though I don’t think that 20-something programmers in Google buses are personally responsible for the disparity, but the brandless tinted Google buses are a powerful symbol for new class system.

I’ve never seen so much poverty and homelessness before. There’s many major streets where wearing open shoes would be a big no-no, because of used needles lying around in plain sight. Seeing people shooting up on Market Street is pretty normal.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. I imagine in many cities this addiction and poverty might be more contained to certain neighbourhoods. It’s much easier that way to pretend it doesn’t exist if you don’t see it. One of the silver linings in SF is that there were lots of places to safely do drugs.

But it’s a weird juxtaposition. There are times where our engineering team would have lunch in Yerba Buena Gardens, and if you looked one way you would see electric scooters and onewheels zooming by, and I was actually reminded of Star Trek episodes that feature Starfleet Academy. I’m not a cynic and it felt like a futuristic place to be. But, look the other way and you might see someone defecating on the street. This is absolutely not hyperbole. San Francisco has a

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