It might "feel" sketchier but Oakland's crime rate in some of its nicest areas is on par without SFs rougher areas. Oakland is awesome but the per capita crime (even in areas like Lake Merritt) is not nice.

How does either compare with insane like south Chicago or st. Louis, or insane the other way like Seattle?

I worked in Oakland and had friends their. The vibe is much lighter than Saint Louis (where I’m from also) or Chicago. It’s more laid back but more crazy than SF (which is already a crazy city). All of Oakland has an artist vibe, the magic that has flowed of SF exist there for a short time. Lake Merrit, Jack London, Piedmont areas are pretty nice and a must visit, but definitely avoid East Oakland, Colesium BART area

They probably use delivery services for groceries or don't cook. The point of blue apron was it was an easy way for people intimidated by cooking to start doing it.

That's a very narrow view of how people get around. Is it based on a rural experience? I've never been outside of walking distance of a small shop for food shopping.

> I've never been outside of walking distance of a small shop for food shopping

I'd be interested to know whether a typical person's idea of what "walking distance" is has decreased or not over recent years.

I live near downtown LA and the closest grocery store is 2 miles from me.

In New York, yes. In LA, absolutely not. When I lived in LA, the closest shop was 3 miles down a canyon.

That's one point of Blue Apron. For me, the point is that I can spend 100% of my cooking time cooking, instead of planning or shopping. As a result, I cook a lot more, and I like that.

Or use a bike and pick up stuff on the way home from work.

I'm really surprised about the physician comment. My gf works in the largest medical system in the Bay Area and her "perks" (discounted cafeteria food) are drastically below what I've had at any company in the tech industry for the last decade. They don't even pay for flights for residency or fellowship interviews so doctors have to pay thousands during these times while they are huge debt. She actually has to rotate between hospitals and they don't even subsidize her parking. They don't even support pregnancy for fellows, you have to take state disability.

Which hospital / medical systems give great perks to doctors ?

Once the doctor starts writing prescriptions.

Certainly none that I've worked at or had friends at. Best perk I've ever seen was free knock-off k-cup coffee, and that was a cut above the norm.

I finished AppAcademy about 2.5 years ago. It took me about 4 months to find a job and I've been working as a full stack engineer since. I mostly work in Java & Typescript (Angular) now.

My trajectory has been pretty solid - we had several people join when I started and I've been at the top of my cohort. I've been promoted and given a raise while my company went through layoffs and perform well even compared to the CS grads from Stanford & Berkeley who joined at the same time.

I expect to be promoted to the senior title in 1-2 years, but I will probably job hop somewhere else in the next year so I can get exposed to tougher cs areas (distributed systems, scaling, information retrieval, etc)

My close friends at the bootcamp work at companies like Pivotal Labs, Pinterest, Yammer, etc. it's definitely a biased sample but I've seen many people do well. Many fail as well, but that's expected.

My anecodatal experience is they don't because I had friends in South Africa, DRC, and Nigeria who came from more privileged middle class backgrounds and still struggled due to a lack of education. They were never recruited by tech firms due to the issues the author faced. One asked me to refer them into some of the firms here but I was unable to get them in.

I don't know if it would have been cheaper to recruit them but I do know they had no chance here in America. They have hustled their way to a living but have worked 10x harder than me because I have an American citizenship and degree.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to graft a form of certification by huge companies on a MOOC curriculum for countries like CAR/CDR/etc. After all big companies do something close in IT (CISCO/Microsoft certifications). Indeed there are some eDx professional certificates but they that are really costly as they are aimed at a western audience.

What about a similar certificate at $100 (one month revenue in Kivu) but in Kinyarwanda (for targeting the right students)?

Can you talk about engineering benefits for working on this team besides "you will get to network with hot startups and stuff"? Maybe a bit more color on the technical challenges / culture ?

I think the greatest engineering benefit is being able to take advantage of YC's reach to have a lot of influence.

For example, the YC startup school MOOC was built by one engineer in 2 months. It's now had a major effect on over 10,000 companies who participated. That's pretty cool.

As a Bengali, I was hoping for more detail and context here.

If you are on a developer salary this makes no sense

The Bay Area is the most expensive place in the US for no real reason except for regulation.

It's kinda like everyone cheering for Uber and Lyft because medallion rules in SF prevented ever having enough cabs.

There's no real reason and that's the problem.

Also maybe they had those kids in the 1990s when things were a bit more affordable ? The Bay Area wasn't always the most expensive place in the US

> The Bay Area is the most expensive place in the US for no real reason except for regulation.

Isn't it more about supply and demand? There are many people here making big salaries at the tech companies, so there is not a shortage of people who can pony up $1-1.5M for a 1200 sq. ft. house. If the demand wasn't there, the prices would come down to meet it.

Exactly. Singles and DINKs moving in, chasing the gold rush, willing to pay whatever it takes to be part of the action. The market adjusts itself accordingly. Nothing new here.

Where did you go?