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Ask HN: How is the tech scene in LA?

• 999900000999 1y ago
  It's ok. But LA has high rent and public transportation isn't really usable. People are mean. I wouldn't suggest LA to anyone. The city definitely has tech jobs, but you might have a job in the valley now, get laid off and have to drive to Culver City. Super commutes of 1 hour each way are common.
  • VirusNewbie 1y ago
    yes, the biggest problem I see with the LA tech scene is desirable places to live are often ~90 minutes from most of the tech jobs.
    • 999900000999 1y ago
      The city has no real "center" if you will. Back in Chicago when I switched jobs I basically just rode the metro for an extra 5 minutes. If I really wanted to I could of gotten off at the same train station, went to the cafe I liked, and walked 10 minutes to my new office. In LA you can easily have one job in Santa Monica or Venice and end up needing to switch to a job in the valley. Your commute can go from 20 minutes to 60 or 70 each way. As is car ownership is a horrible burden( particularly in high traffic areas, living in a suburb/ slightly rural area and coasting to work could be nice). Driving is really dangerous and stressful too. I'd rather read comics on a nice train ride into the office.
  • popalchemist 1y ago
    LA is a truly incredible place, as the center of the world's creative and cultural output (food, fashion, music, film, art). But it is not suitable for every personality type. If you struggle to make friends, you will struggle more in LA. If you work in tech, you are likely of a certain social persuasion (though not necessarily). In which case this advice holds. But you shouldn't frame it as an absolute. It is personality dependent.
    • 999900000999 1y ago
      You're still going to spend an unholy amount of money to have a decent standard of living. It's just math. Chicago, no need for a car, rent is 1600$ within walking distance of a metro station. A monthly metro pass is about 100$. 1700$. In LA, 2700$ for an apartment. 500$ car payment, 300$ insurance, 200$ for gas. About 100$ a month on stuff like parking and basic maintenance. 3800$. If you have an extra 2100$ a month to tell everyone you live in LA, that's great. But the next problem is most people in LA are struggling. It's complex, but this factors into the quality of people you meet. Personally it's the difference between driving around a 30 year old Instagram model who has no real interest in you, but expects you to pay for stuff vs dating an amazing 30 year old with a solid career. Outside of dating, in LA you have "friends" who will beg you for money and then resent when you help them out. This weird interiority complex develops. I've lived in about 3 major metros for any real period of time. LA is by far the worst. Concerts are fun, the food is good, but it's just a really hard place to live. Now 20 years ago, you still had 500,600$ apartments for working class people. It USED to be an affordable city. But that's gone now. I miss that Los Angeles. I miss my 600$ Ktown apartment, 4$ tortas, 3$ bottles of Soju. It was an amazing place once. Doesn't really matter if it's completely unaffordable now.
      • popalchemist 1y ago
        Not a compelling argument. Your opinion says more about you than the city. Yes, it is expensive. But pay is higher too. If you are middle of the road earner, you will have to live in the valley or another suburb, yes. But even those are among the most prized places to live in the USA. Your quantitative approach intrinsically flattens the qualitative dimension out of the lived experience. Where else can you find Mexican, Korean, Japanese, Armenian, and Thai culture alive and well within their own neighborhoods in a 5 mile radius? Or even all on the same block? NYC is the closest, but LA arguably has the better food and culture (people are more liberal and accepting in LA). LA is also ground zero for the resistance against the rise of Trump's fascist reich. For many people those things are invaluable, especially if they are non-white (which perhaps you're not, so that may be lost on you.) It's fine if LA does not offer anything of worth to you, but that isn't going to be the case for everybody. Source: the 20 million or so people that live in LA County must like something, because they stay there (and that number is always growing) despite being the most expensive place in the US. And for the record, I moved to LA 20 years ago. I remember the $600 apartments - I had one by UCLA. I am sensitive to the rising cost of housing (though the new state law about zoning should ameliorate that in the coming years). But the reason you move to LA isn't for affordable housing. Assuming you are good at what you do, you should not be making the same financial calculations today as you made 20 years ago.
• superconduct123 1y ago
  Not sure about regular tech jobs but it has the most game studios of any area
• VirusNewbie 1y ago
  So, most of the big companies have offices in LA (FAANG, unicorns/decacorns) but- they're often in a really hard to get to place that is insanely overpriced. Google is in Playa Vist and Venice, Amazon has a big office in Santa Monica, SNAP is on the west side of LA, etc. A SFH in any of those cities is 4M or more, and the more popular places for families to live is easily an hour and twenty minutes away (burbank, pasadena, the valley). Orange County has fewer big tech companies but they do have a larger Google and Amazon office (~1k each I belive?), but the cost of living is quite a bit lower. Less options though if the job situation changes.
• mylaaccount 1y ago
  Tech people I meet in LA are much less careerist in general compared to the Bay Area (where I used to live). They work for either big tech, smaller not household name companies, or remote. Pay is on average less than the bay. Tech people in LA live in LA for the lifestyle and use the job to fund their lifestyle. Personally (and contrary to the other comment about LA) it’s been the best place I have lived. It’s a polarizing city, understandably. But I think if you can make enough money and are ok with driving there’s endless amounts of things to do and passionate people to meet.
  • frizzlebox 1y ago
    > if you…are ok with driving there’s endless amounts of things to do and passionate people to meet. I’m someone who is currently struggling to find these people; what has worked for you? It often feels that everyone cool is trapped in their car, and we are destined to never cross paths.
    • mylaaccount 1y ago
      For me: 1. Neighborhood matters a lot. This determines the kinds of events you’ll go to and people you see regularly. I explored a lot before I settled some place that felt like home. I live some place with good walkability and being able to walk to a coffee shop or park has been very important. 2. Hobbies. Outdoor fitness, DIY/underground music, and board games for me. It took some digging to find groups I liked (some of which I found out about online and some by asking people I met), but now I participate in at least one event/meetup pertaining to these hobbies every week (more if I can). Ex helping out at a DIY show, run clubs, hiking groups, board game meetups. 3. Having a dog. I’m outside regularly bumping into people. Having a dog often sparks a conversation and helped me to know my neighbors. You don’t really need a dog though any way you can open a conversation is good. Compliment someone’s shirt, ask a question, etc So TL;DR walkable neighborhood that suits you, find something related to your hobbies and do it as much as you can, start conversations. Good luck, it took me years before I got into a rhythm.
      • timhigins 1y ago
• achillesheels 1y ago
  Echoing the difficulty in making friends - it is a horridly transient city with no real intentions for newcomers to establish roots - and the techies are less ambitious compared to the Bay Area or NYC. RSUs are silver-cuff links, as earning 3-5x the Guatemalan Hotel Office Manager puts one on a different cultural experience. (It’s America’s Brazil) But weather is incontestable, food culture exciting, if you have a creative itch to scratch you can bump into a major creative professional accidentally at a bar (like a TV animator or music recording producer/engineer who works for one of the major labels) and before you know it you have a pilot episode or album you’re ready to pitch. shrugs LAX will get you anywhere in the world non-stop and is easier to make compared to JFK.
• lamroger 1y ago
  Been in LA for 2 years now and went to college in LA 10 years ago so have some data points to compare. Startups in LA are interesting. Back in the day, there was a lot of Ad Tech / advent of big data. This is when Snapchat and Hulu were coming up. I’d go on Angellist and see who was hiring and who’d be down to meet. Now, especially post covid, I feel sparks of excitement. I missed the crypto hype in LA so that was probably wild and weird. a16z opened an office in Santa Monica and do their speedrun accelerator. Focused on games and media it seems. upfront hosted some cool cowork and mingle events too. Two meetups I regularly go to is AI Tinkerers and MLOps. Generally it’s the same small crowd. I went to a Ruby meetup which was cool too. Less of a young startup crowd. Maybe people got older and rich and retired early.
  • yamatokaneko 1y ago
    I also went to college in LA about 10 years ago, though I haven't been back since. Most of my business travel takes me to SF. I really enjoyed my time there and would love to hear, what surprised you most about how LA has changed?
    • lamroger 1y ago
      I stay mostly on the westside but id say more density of shops but at the same time less busy? if i had to guess, things were really going well before covid. then add delivery app and now a bunch of coco delivery robots really slowed down foot traffic. things still go viral - pop ups are very popular with the young crowd. owalla was giving out water bottles and the line was around the block and i didnt see the end of the line The tech scene is not doing so well imo. people say gaming is cyclical but idk tbh. AI adoption in graphic design and coding is really going to squeeze an already stressed gaming labor pool. entertainment industry is much the same. i cant name one young rising startup that was hot like snapchat. so that was disappointing when i was job hunting. traffic is still bad. smog is less bad.
      • yamatokaneko 1y ago
        Tech seems to have reduced foot traffic but not car traffic. Kind of ironic... > i cant name one young rising startup that was hot like snapchat. so that was disappointing when i was job hunting. I’ve had the same thought. Maybe Tinder or Oculus (pre-acquisition), but those feel like they were a while ago now.
• dgunay 1y ago
  It doesn't have as big of a pure software startup scene. I have worked for a couple, but the bulk of my career has been either in the local defense industry, or working remote for a startup in another state. A lot of people are responding with complaints or praise for life in general in LA. That wasn't part of your question so I'll just keep it brief; on the whole, I dislike living here and feel it is one of America's most mismanaged cities but cannot just pack up and leave for various social reasons.
  • askafriend 1y ago
    Doesn't every city feel mismanaged though? If you asked people from SF, Seattle or NYC - they might all say the same. They'd think they were the most mismanaged in America. I'm genuinely just curious what makes you think LA is uniquely mismanaged in a way that other tier-1 cities in America are not. I don't have too much experience with LA but am familiar enough.
    • dgunay 1y ago
      Maybe "mismanaged" is too harsh. LA's patchwork governmental structure generally inhibits progress and keeps wealth and development concentrated in small areas instead of benefiting the broader metropolitan area. That's part of why you can go a few blocks in LA and your surroundings will change dramatically, often for the worse. LA is top 1-5 in US cities by GDP (and to be fair so are the others you mentioned except for Seattle), so I personally see it as a hugely negative mark on our local and national character to have large parts of it be dirty, choked to death by traffic, have insanely high rents, etc. I don't know if other cities have quite as many structural aberrations in their governance as LA despite seeing many of the same issues - I don't know whether it would relieve or horrify me to learn that they don't.
      • eitally 1y ago
        I think one of the biggest issues is just how big and sprawling LA is. For bay area folks, it would be roughly the same as if the entire metropolis surrounding the bay was one city (plus unincorporated areas). If that provides any sense of scale. Fwiw, SJ is bigger than SF and absolutely better managed, but definitely less vibrant. Personally, I would choose San Diego over LA, and if I wanted to keep a tech job there's lots if you're ok with biotech/healthcare or defense.
• VirusNewbie 1y ago
  I'll chime in and say just south of Los Angeles is Orange County that in a lot of ways a better place to live if you're in teech and also not going to be in the Bay or Seattle. There are fewer tech jobs than LA, but most of the FAANGs have offices here. There are a lot more options for housing than LA, and a lot less traffic. For instance, my ~5 bedroom house is worth around 2 million in a nice neighborhood and i'm a 10 minute drive from a huge Amazon office, a 10 minute drive from Blizzard HQ, and a 25 minute drive from a decent size Google office. A similarly priced and sized house in Los Angeles would be a 80 minute commute to either Amazon, Google or Meta in Santa Monica.
  • rcpt 1y ago
    Irvine is where all the tech is in orange county and tbh you might as well just live in the south bay if you want the Irvine lifestyle.
• simonw 1y ago
  We are hosting PyCon US - the annual Python conference - in Long Beach next year (in May). It's the first time the conference has been on the west coast in quite a while, and I'm hoping we can attract a bunch of Los Angeles area Pythonistas who didn't make the trek out to Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City or Cleveland. If you are part of the LA Python-adjacent tech scene I encourage you to consider coming along! It's a genuinely great community-led conference, attracting over 2,000 attendees. It would be really cool if we could attract enough entertainment industry people to get sessions on Python in film production, VFX, animation and other creative industries.
  • dmpayton 1y ago
    I'm so excited to find this out! I was a regular attendee of PyCon and DjangoCon for close to a decade, but haven't been to one since the pre-pandemic. times I now work at a nonprofit without much of a budget for extras and had basically written off attending for the foreseeable future -- but with PyCon only a four-hour drive away from Fresno, I might be able to pull this off on my own!
• timhigins 1y ago
  It’s known for deep tech/hard tech companies, especially in space, aviation, and energy. Many are in El Segundo or were founded by SpaceX/Tesla alumni. https://www.addtheegg.com/p/2024-la-hard-tech-50 https://www.addtheegg.com/p/2024-la-hard-tech-50 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/el-segundo-california-silicon-valley-hard-tech-hub https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/el-segundo-california-... https://bowoftheseus.substack.com/p/south-bay-la-is-ground-zero-for-the https://bowoftheseus.substack.com/p/south-bay-la-is-ground-z...
• Sikul 1y ago
  I haven't seen anyone mention video games/entertainment companies. LA is quite good if you're into those industries. I never really looked, but my gut says it has the highest concentration of video game companies. As far as the vibe goes, it's nothing like the bay when it comes to tech. LA is way more laid back and people are much less focused on tech. In the bay I constantly overheard people talking about tech or overheard people talking about VC/startups. Rarely ever in LA. The bay is really intense in that way. I lived in Seattle too. As far as tech scene/startups obsession goes, it was Bay > Seattle >> LA. With that said, there's a decent community. It's easy to find meetups, etc.
  • AStonesThrow 1y ago
    [dead]
• brcmthrowaway 1y ago
  Where do NASA/JPL alums work?
• rcpt 1y ago
  Easily 10x smaller than the Bay (unless you count defense contracting as tech). It's still California so all the usual things like NIMBY zoning and prop 13 ruin the built environment. That being said, a lot of LA was built before the 80s so it's not as sprawling as the Bay. There are almost no tech buses so you need to plan life around commuting.