In January 2015, my dear wife and I moved from Maryland on the East Coast, where snow was falling heavily at the time, to the sunny San Francisco Bay Area in California. Four years flew by. We went from Bay Area newcomers to people who more or less know how life works here, including the unwritten rules of the workplace. Everyone has their dreams and fantasies about Silicon Valley, and I was no exception back then. I hoped to find my footing in the world’s tech capital, to compete and work alongside top engineers from every country, and to help build products that change the world. Four years on, as an engineer who came in at the entry level, I have found my footing and had some modest success. This post is my look back, and what I have taken from it.

Arriving in San Francisco

In January 2015, we boarded our flight at Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) wearing heavy winter coats, coming from a place where it was below freezing and still snowing. The moment we landed, we found San Francisco in the evening, a little over 10 degrees Celsius and wonderfully warm. Coats off, we then had to wrestle with two large suitcases, three small ones, our backpacks, and the heavy coats, which kept us busy for a while. We had booked an Airbnb near Glen Park, and to get there from SFO we picked the largest option, an Uber XL. The driver showed up in a big SUV, and once all our things were stuffed in, there was almost no space left. Forty minutes later we arrived at the house. We knew our host worked the night shift, and her 90-year-old mother would let us in. We rang the doorbell, and after a long while a light came on in the house. An old lady appeared at a second-floor window and waved to let us know she had heard us. We waited at the front door on the first floor. We waited and waited, nearly five minutes with no sign of movement, and started to wonder if something had happened to her. Just as we were about to call the host, the old lady shuffled to the door and opened it. She was fine, just slow on her feet. When we got up to our room on the third floor, we found it held a bed and a small table, with almost no space left over. Our luggage simply did not fit in the room. We took out only the valuables and what we needed that night, and left the rest in their garage for the time being.

Before moving to San Francisco, we had rented a one-bedroom elevator apartment in Rockville, Maryland, with good natural light. It was 850 square feet, utilities included, at $1,350 a month. Our San Francisco room was one of four rooms in a single-family house, roughly 200 square feet, sharing a bathroom with the tenant of another room, in a house that held nine people and three dogs in total, for $1,700 a month. We knew San Francisco housing and rent were expensive, and that short-term rentals were especially hard to find, so we just had to accept a place that was not very comfortable. I hoped everything would settle down once I finished my three-month coding bootcamp (see my earlier post, Coding bootcamp: the shortcut from not knowing how to code to being hired by a Silicon Valley tech company in 3 months?).

We had a few free days before classes started. Uber and Lyft had just launched their carpool services, and an Uber Pool or Lyft Line ride cost only $5 to anywhere in San Francisco, and you could bring another person along. Meanwhile, a basic fare on Muni, the city’s bus system, was $2.25 per person, and getting where you wanted to go could mean several transfers and much more money. The matching algorithms were probably not very mature yet, so often, after we got in the car, the driver picked up no one else on the way to our destination. The ride took about the same time as a regular Uber or Lyft, but cost much less. That was the first time we felt how great it is to try new products in Silicon Valley.

San Francisco in early 2015 was not cold. Daytime temperatures reached over 20 degrees Celsius, and when we went out to Dolores Park we basically wore T-shirts and a thin jacket. After a few years on the East Coast, we truly enjoyed soaking up the sun in a park in the middle of winter.

The Bay Area also has a huge variety of restaurants. Chinese, Japanese, whatever cuisine you want, you can find places that are not too expensive and genuinely good. We know Los Angeles may still have an edge on food, but we were really moved by the choice and quality here.

When I was taking classes in downtown San Francisco, the thing I could least stand was the homeless population around Market Street. Sometimes you would turn a corner and find 30 to 40 homeless people gathered on the street you needed to walk down. Having heard plenty of stories about people being cursed at, or even assaulted, I usually took a detour around them. But there are so many homeless people in San Francisco, and there is often human waste on the streets, so you have to watch your step. Even now in 2019, every time we go to San Francisco, walking past them is still a frightening experience.

Back then I studied from 9 in the morning to 9 at night. On my way home there were few people around, five minutes from class to the BART station, then a 15-minute walk from Glen Park station to the house. Every day I was afraid of being robbed or attacked. I carried a spare wallet with a little cash in it, and wore running shoes, hoping that if it really happened, I could throw the spare wallet in the opposite direction and run for it. Fortunately, nothing ever happened before we moved away from San Francisco.

Jobs in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has plenty of job opportunities. For software engineers, companies of different sizes interview differently: big companies focus on algorithms, data structures, and system design, while small companies focus on practical experience and whether your skills can be used right away. In 2015, the dream companies everyone talked about were FLAG: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, with the A thrown in, some said, just to make the acronym sound better. Others said the A stood for Apple, and still others said Amazon. The FLG companies were relatively young, with similar pay and benefits, free meals, and so on, and many graduates wanted to join them. These days people talk more about FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet’s Google). Until the second half of last year, those companies’ stocks had risen a lot over the previous years, which made investors and job applicants alike flock to them.

When I was job hunting in 2015, I mostly relied on myself and on referrals from friends to apply for openings. After I started working at SolarCity, recruiters began emailing me and contacting me on LinkedIn from time to time, asking if I was interested in learning about their company or interviewing. After I joined Facebook, even more recruiters wrote to me. In Silicon Valley, changing jobs every year and a half to two years is perfectly normal. Articles like Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less and Why you should switch jobs every 2 to 3 years to boost your earnings encourage everyone to check the job market regularly to see what they are worth. And in the years when many unicorn companies were expanding aggressively and spending heavily to hire talent, plenty of FAANG employees flowed out to companies like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Slack.

Because there are so many opportunities, many of my friends also moved to Silicon Valley sooner or later to build their careers. Through gatherings with friends, I got to know people at many different tech companies. Here in Silicon Valley, of any three people you know, two may well work at a tech company. Software engineers are the largest group, but there are also plenty of product managers, designers, and other key roles at tech companies. Other regions do not lean toward the tech industry the way Silicon Valley does.

Parental Leave and Benefits for Parents

Parental leave in the United States lags far behind other developed countries, but California’s benefits for parents are relatively decent among US states. California allows expectant mothers to start maternity leave four weeks before the due date, with 12 weeks of paid maternity leave after the birth. Fathers also get six weeks of leave to use before the child’s first birthday. Tech companies, wanting employees to have children without worry, often go further and give parents more time at home with their babies. The most generous, Netflix, can offer up to a year of paid parental leave (though I wonder if anyone has actually seen a Netflix colleague take a full year). This article lists the parental leave benefits at major Silicon Valley tech companies: Netflix parents get a paid year off and Amazon pays for spouses’ parental leave. At Facebook, where I work, both fathers and mothers can take 17 weeks of parental leave, and the company and your team will encourage you to use it all before your child turns one, so you can spend more time at home with your baby.

The Pressure of Life Here, and Housing Prices

Life in Silicon Valley still comes with a lot of pressure at work. Your colleagues and friends are all smart people who have bet everything on making it here, and everyone works extremely hard to perform and to fight for their place. Because the number of homes built in the Bay Area cannot keep up with the number of people moving in, housing prices have soared. A million dollars in Silicon Valley buys you only a small old house, over 60 years old, in a less desirable area or school district. By comparison, homes in Potomac, Maryland’s best school district, rated 10, 10, 10 (elementary, middle, and high school scores, with 10 the highest), have two to three times the indoor and outdoor space and are much newer, and many cost less than a million dollars. Plenty of families with children, worn down by housing prices and school districts, have left Silicon Valley. Many of them chose Seattle. In my post from a year and a half ago, Is Seattle about to overtake Silicon Valley?, I wrote about Seattle’s rise and the flow of talent. A colleague of mine recently transferred to Seattle. With the same salary, no Washington state income tax, and a lower cost of living, his after-tax income each month went up noticeably. Apart from more rain in the winter, he is living very happily.

I know every city has its strengths and weaknesses. I am grateful for everything the Bay Area and Silicon Valley have given me. For me, Silicon Valley was willing to accept a career changer like me, and gave me the chance to prove myself. The climate, the food, the benefits, and the opportunities here are things many places do not have. My past four years were wonderful. I hope in the next four years in Silicon Valley I will feel even more at home, and shine brighter.

What is your Silicon Valley experience, or your experience of America, like? Feel free to share in the comments.

This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on January 19, 2019. The blog is now offline, and the full text is preserved by the Wayback Machine. It has been lightly edited for this site.