I interned there in 2012. My roommate and I got super lucky his family friend hooked us up with $1200/month for a condo at the top of Lombard St in Russian Hill

I interned there in 2012. My roommate and I got super lucky his family friend hooked us up with $1200/month for a condo at the top of Lombard St in Russian Hill. So my experience is slightly biased since I miraculously avoided the ludicrous rent. I don’t know what we would have done had we not secured that place. In general, I really liked it. My favorite part was feeling like I was living in the future, since every new app launches in SF first. For example, back then Uber was quite new and I used it for the first time there. My least favorite part was the monoculture of tech (that’s not even considering the political monoculture). While there are a lot of interesting non-tech people in SF, you have to go out of your way to meet them. Otherwise the default is to be surrounded 24/7 by clones of yourself. I interned in SF, Seattle and Houston. After school I lived in NYC for a year. Now I’m in the UK, but if I had to choose between those cities I would pick New York every time. New York has plenty of problems but a monoculture is not one of them; it’s still fairly homogenous, but far less than SF simply because the NYC economy is more diversified. In SF, tech is the dominant and basically only industry. In NYC, tech is one of many industries in a city dominated by finance and law. Put another way, of all my friends in college, 100% of them living in SF are in tech. But many of them live in NYC, and of those people, only some are in tech and the rest are in finance/law/school (nyc has top schools in the city proper unlike SF). I much prefer living near friends in other fields, because the last thing I want to talk about when I get home from work is work.