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I moved to Austin in 2008 when I was working at IBM. I was working at the IBM site in Dallas at the time, and my team was moved to Austin. I nearly didn't go. I

I moved to Austin in 2008 when I was working at IBM. I was working at the IBM site in Dallas at the time, and my team was moved to Austin. I nearly didn't go. I knew I didn't want to stay at IBM forever and figured it would be harder to get a tech job in Austin since it is a smaller city. Well I was wrong. I left IBM in 2012 and have had no problems finding jobs since them. In fact I was laid off at the end of last year. I wasn't even really looking as I wanted to take some timeoff, when a recruiter called me for my current position. Overall I like Austin. It is more expensive that other Texas cities, but not ridiculously so. The winters are a bit warmer than Dallas so I like that, and the summers are about the same. Lots of stuff to do in the cites. Lots of smaller bands play here and you can get into those shows for not much. However we are also big enough to draw some of the larger acts to. We have a minor league Hockey, Basketball, and Baseball team. Which is nice because the tickets are still affordable. UT College football is a bit of a religion here, if you like football. A couple of the things I don't like. Our public transportation is terrible. The population is growing faster than the infrastructure can handle. Any new roads that get built or expanded are toll roads, because the state refuses to raise taxes so it doesn't have money to pay for them. Lastly people in this town drink a lot, and I mean a lot. It is pretty much a sport. DUI is a big problem here. Thankfully Uber and Lyft came back after the city ran them off.

save_ferris 8y ago
> Thankfully Uber and Lyft came back after the city ran them off. Uber and Lyft voluntarily left after refusing to comply with new background check policies that the city passed, and the citizens confirmed. They spent $7M (a record on a local election in TX, btw) on a failed referendum campaign that the citizens of Austin voted on, and then they acted like children and left. In the meantime, new companies sprang up to fill the void.
- stuntkite 8y ago
  The companies and facebook groups that sprang up were an interesting experiment. Also your comment leaves out that they came back. Why the city can't figure out public transport is still pretty baffling though.
  - abawany 8y ago
    Lyft/Uber came back after the state legislature passed a law that nullified Austin's background check requirement. The same thing happened with Austin's plastic bag ban, btw - some say the state legislature exists just to punch Austin government. I use the bus service (Capital Metro) occasionally and I have to defend them a bit: they try and they keep getting better. They have 1 rail service that runs from the NW parts of town to downtown, and it runs full during commute times, taking a few hundred drivers off the road in the process. They created dedicated commuter buses for remote neighborhoods (e.g. the 980 and 985 service) to enable office workers and students avoid the traffic; these also are quite full every day and help keep traffic saner - the park-and-ride that I use is full of hundreds of cars daily. In addition, the Metro Rapid service and the Every 15 initiatives have looked like improvements to me for the few occasions that I used them. I haven't tried the public transportation in Dallas or Houston so I can't say they are better but Austin Capital Metro I think has tried to do a reasonable job.
    - stuntkite 8y ago
      I haven’t tried Houston, but it looks ok for such a sprawled Texas city. DFW’s is a joke. That area lives and dies by the very Texan belief that you should get where you are going in your own truck by yourself while sipping a beer and also the poor are poor because they are lazy.
    - stevespang 8y ago
      Yes, that State legislature keeps all the liberal deviants in check, Austin has a high percentage of liberals from Western states that can sway the vote, our State legislature solves that problem.
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    They came back after the state nullified the regulation that the city passed. The city is trying to improve transit, but it's a very chicken-and-egg problem. Critics of public transit spending point to the relatively low usage of certain aspects of the bus system as wasteful and would rather see continuous infrastructure improvements that help them because they drive. It's strange logic IMO because better public transit should theoretically reduce congestion on the roads. The other major problem with public transit adoption is ridesharing. Wealthier people who seek out better public transit often choose to rideshare instead because its easier, leaving the poor to remain the biggest users of public transit. Transportation professionals have started sounding the alarm on ridesharing undermining mass transit development.[0] [0] https://prospect.org/article/ridesharing-versus-public-transit https://prospect.org/article/ridesharing-versus-public-trans...
- pickle-wizard 8y ago
  A better to phrase it would have be to say they left after they got into a spat with the city of Austin. I did try the new companies that popped up but never had much luck with them. Had problems with the apps or took too long to get a ride.
rurban 8y ago
> Our public transportation is terrible Cannot agree with that. It has one of the cheapest public transportation fees in the country. And one of the most diverse, on par only with NYC, where everybody commutes by train and subway. Of course it's crowded because everybody takes the bus, compared to cities where nobody but the poorest takes the bus. Compared to Dallas, Dallas is still much more like Silicon Valley. Austin is doing the catchup lately. Houston and San Antonio are bigger and have a bigger market for specialized SW development, Austin is more for the Berlin-like hipster culture, ruby on rails and Javascript mostly. Android/iOS apps.

save_ferris 8y ago

> Thankfully Uber and Lyft came back after the city ran them off. Uber and Lyft voluntarily left after refusing to comply with new background check policies that the city passed, and the citizens confirmed. They spent $7M (a record on a local election in TX, btw) on a failed referendum campaign that the citizens of Austin voted on, and then they acted like children and left. In the meantime, new companies sprang up to fill the void.

stuntkite 8y ago
The companies and facebook groups that sprang up were an interesting experiment. Also your comment leaves out that they came back. Why the city can't figure out public transport is still pretty baffling though.
- abawany 8y ago
  Lyft/Uber came back after the state legislature passed a law that nullified Austin's background check requirement. The same thing happened with Austin's plastic bag ban, btw - some say the state legislature exists just to punch Austin government. I use the bus service (Capital Metro) occasionally and I have to defend them a bit: they try and they keep getting better. They have 1 rail service that runs from the NW parts of town to downtown, and it runs full during commute times, taking a few hundred drivers off the road in the process. They created dedicated commuter buses for remote neighborhoods (e.g. the 980 and 985 service) to enable office workers and students avoid the traffic; these also are quite full every day and help keep traffic saner - the park-and-ride that I use is full of hundreds of cars daily. In addition, the Metro Rapid service and the Every 15 initiatives have looked like improvements to me for the few occasions that I used them. I haven't tried the public transportation in Dallas or Houston so I can't say they are better but Austin Capital Metro I think has tried to do a reasonable job.
  - stuntkite 8y ago
    I haven’t tried Houston, but it looks ok for such a sprawled Texas city. DFW’s is a joke. That area lives and dies by the very Texan belief that you should get where you are going in your own truck by yourself while sipping a beer and also the poor are poor because they are lazy.
  - stevespang 8y ago
    Yes, that State legislature keeps all the liberal deviants in check, Austin has a high percentage of liberals from Western states that can sway the vote, our State legislature solves that problem.
- save_ferris 8y ago
  They came back after the state nullified the regulation that the city passed. The city is trying to improve transit, but it's a very chicken-and-egg problem. Critics of public transit spending point to the relatively low usage of certain aspects of the bus system as wasteful and would rather see continuous infrastructure improvements that help them because they drive. It's strange logic IMO because better public transit should theoretically reduce congestion on the roads. The other major problem with public transit adoption is ridesharing. Wealthier people who seek out better public transit often choose to rideshare instead because its easier, leaving the poor to remain the biggest users of public transit. Transportation professionals have started sounding the alarm on ridesharing undermining mass transit development.[0] [0] https://prospect.org/article/ridesharing-versus-public-transit https://prospect.org/article/ridesharing-versus-public-trans...
pickle-wizard 8y ago
A better to phrase it would have be to say they left after they got into a spat with the city of Austin. I did try the new companies that popped up but never had much luck with them. Had problems with the apps or took too long to get a ride.

rurban 8y ago

> Our public transportation is terrible Cannot agree with that. It has one of the cheapest public transportation fees in the country. And one of the most diverse, on par only with NYC, where everybody commutes by train and subway. Of course it's crowded because everybody takes the bus, compared to cities where nobody but the poorest takes the bus. Compared to Dallas, Dallas is still much more like Silicon Valley. Austin is doing the catchup lately. Houston and San Antonio are bigger and have a bigger market for specialized SW development, Austin is more for the Berlin-like hipster culture, ruby on rails and Javascript mostly. Android/iOS apps.