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I agree that there are nice options in the US and you'll have a much more comfortable life. But if you want to learn as much as you can, if you want to have as

by tomaha 9y ago

I agree that there are nice options in the US and you'll have a much more comfortable life. But if you want to learn as much as you can, if you want to have as many options as you could possible have, and quiet frankly earn as much as you could, you'll likely should move to SV and no other place in the US will even come close to that. The bleeding edge of technology is and will be in SV and China (and China is not really an option for most people).

aaron-lebo 9y ago
You can learn an unbelievable amount sitting in your room in your underwear and work with and on world class projects. There are more free resources than ever before, location is not a constraint.
- tomaha 9y ago
  The resources you can have are so limited in comparison what you can do if you are on the right project with the right people at for example Google. You will not find a free or open project that will be able to compete with the data, resources, and knowledge you will find there. Besides that it's much faster to learn from someone who knows than finding the right material online. And in the end most world-class projects will have someone that works or worked in SV in them because that's where they got a lot of their experience.
  - rothbardrand 9y ago
    IF your goal is to work for google, facebook, Amazon or Microsoft, then yes, Google is a great place to be. But if your goal is to work for next decades google, Apple, etc, then no, Google is not the place to be. Start working on Bitcoin. Start working on Ethereum. Get to the cutting edge. Everything you do at google right now is about 10 years out of date (and I'm including machine learning and all their "cutting edge" AI stuff) and targeted at supporting their existing established business. Take this from someone who has been on the cutting edge for 30+ years-- the challenge for most people is that the cutting edge changes, and you have to be paying attention to follow it... by the time you learn mobile development, surprise, there's bitcoin! (as an example.)
    - tomaha 9y ago
      That's what I'm working on right now. It's just that I can use all this expertise around me to do it. Everything repeats in technology and what you learned can and will be applied to new trends like Ethereum. I don't recommend anyone to really go to Google to work on the future (besides perhaps if you want to get an edge in AI). It's just that SV has a lot of people that have accumulated experience while building Google, FB, etc and that helps a lot no matter what comes next. You get a lot of experience and people able and willing to take risks which is a nice basis to build something new.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  The difference is largely in the domain knowledge. You can learn just as much about web or mobile development on the web as you can at Google (more, probably, since Google's stack is largely proprietary and bound by lots of legacy code). You can learn as much about databases and programming languages. You can even learn all the machine-learning algorithms you'll need. But you won't learn as much about search as you would at Google, or about logistics as you would at Amazon, or about psychological manipulation as you would at Facebook. All that knowledge is locked up in the corporations that profit from it, and if all your software knowledge is based on what's publicly available, you probably wouldn't even know it exists. You might learn how deep learning works and how to apply it to MNIST digits from a web tutorial, but you won't learn anything about how to apply it to other problem domains or even what those other problem domains it can be applied to are from it. And economic returns are all based on supply & demand, so if you're supplying a service that everybody else can learn too, your economic returns are bounded by what all those other people are willing to work for. The big bucks accumulates to monopolies, those firms and the people who work within them who know things that nobody else does.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Coursea is a complement but not a substitute for actually working on significant systems, which you are much more likely to do in SV than a random remote contract or local small business.

by tomaha 9y ago

aaron-lebo 9y ago

You can learn an unbelievable amount sitting in your room in your underwear and work with and on world class projects. There are more free resources than ever before, location is not a constraint.

tomaha 9y ago
The resources you can have are so limited in comparison what you can do if you are on the right project with the right people at for example Google. You will not find a free or open project that will be able to compete with the data, resources, and knowledge you will find there. Besides that it's much faster to learn from someone who knows than finding the right material online. And in the end most world-class projects will have someone that works or worked in SV in them because that's where they got a lot of their experience.
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  IF your goal is to work for google, facebook, Amazon or Microsoft, then yes, Google is a great place to be. But if your goal is to work for next decades google, Apple, etc, then no, Google is not the place to be. Start working on Bitcoin. Start working on Ethereum. Get to the cutting edge. Everything you do at google right now is about 10 years out of date (and I'm including machine learning and all their "cutting edge" AI stuff) and targeted at supporting their existing established business. Take this from someone who has been on the cutting edge for 30+ years-- the challenge for most people is that the cutting edge changes, and you have to be paying attention to follow it... by the time you learn mobile development, surprise, there's bitcoin! (as an example.)
  - tomaha 9y ago
    That's what I'm working on right now. It's just that I can use all this expertise around me to do it. Everything repeats in technology and what you learned can and will be applied to new trends like Ethereum. I don't recommend anyone to really go to Google to work on the future (besides perhaps if you want to get an edge in AI). It's just that SV has a lot of people that have accumulated experience while building Google, FB, etc and that helps a lot no matter what comes next. You get a lot of experience and people able and willing to take risks which is a nice basis to build something new.
nostrademons 9y ago
The difference is largely in the domain knowledge. You can learn just as much about web or mobile development on the web as you can at Google (more, probably, since Google's stack is largely proprietary and bound by lots of legacy code). You can learn as much about databases and programming languages. You can even learn all the machine-learning algorithms you'll need. But you won't learn as much about search as you would at Google, or about logistics as you would at Amazon, or about psychological manipulation as you would at Facebook. All that knowledge is locked up in the corporations that profit from it, and if all your software knowledge is based on what's publicly available, you probably wouldn't even know it exists. You might learn how deep learning works and how to apply it to MNIST digits from a web tutorial, but you won't learn anything about how to apply it to other problem domains or even what those other problem domains it can be applied to are from it. And economic returns are all based on supply & demand, so if you're supplying a service that everybody else can learn too, your economic returns are bounded by what all those other people are willing to work for. The big bucks accumulates to monopolies, those firms and the people who work within them who know things that nobody else does.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Coursea is a complement but not a substitute for actually working on significant systems, which you are much more likely to do in SV than a random remote contract or local small business.