Was in the Bay Area for a decade (SF for a few years and then Oakland), and been in Austin for just over three years now. It's been a broadly interesting experiment and I don't regret trying it out here, but I'm looking at leaving around EOY (probably back to the East Bay but contemplating NYC too, depending on how the job hunt goes.) ## Austin pros vis a vis the Bay Area: + Folks are genuinely _friendly_ here. The whole "southern hospitality" stereotype has absolutely rung true for me. On a related note, people are cool but not pretentious; I've never once gotten a "cooler than thou" sense from anyone here. + Being a B-tier tech center (sorry but it's true), it's far easier to build a community with folks who are not total career climbers and who do not have opinions on Javascript frameworks. Some of my best friends down here are coffee roasters, filmmakers, parole officers, and retired bus drivers; I've never had a wider array of friends than I've made here, and that rules. + Food and bev tends to be far cheaper for the quality; my local cocktail bar has most of its drinks in the $10-13 range, which feels like 40% lower than what I'd get back in the Bay. If you're into fine dining, the Bay Area is strictly better (just like how NYC is strictly better than the Bay Area) but the quality for what you pay is far better here. (For instance, I came out of Hestia paying less than $200/head for a meal better than the last time I went to Lazy Bear, which was double the price.) + With the caveat that I'm a tall dude who might appear like he could defend himself in a fight: Austin feels completely safe to me; I've been out on my own well past 1:00 AM and never have I felt concerned about my safety walking around town. By contrast, I wouldn't do the same out in my corner of Oakland for sure. Austin has homeless encampments but not nearly to the same extent that Cali does, so it is easier to do the "out of sight, out of mind" thing. ## Austin neutrals: * Drivers are bad here, too, but differently so. I see less hairy 80+MPH insanity here than I ever did on 580, but people are way more casual about stuff I'd consider completely insane, like just blowing red lights and stop signs. I'm absolutely more concerned about my safety on the road here than I ever was in the Bay Area, and anecdotally I know _so_ many more people who've been in bad accidents here than I have living anywhere else. * Similarly, public transportation sucks. CapMetro's timing is basically randomly distributed, you get just as many wackadoodles on the bus as you do on Muni or BART, but with worse connectivity and latency. It's clearly not a municipal priority (we gotta expand that freeway, though!). * Don't believe the "live music capitol of the world" hype; culturally it's a one-horse town. Bands don't typically tour through here unless it's festival season; this makes sense when you consider a cross-country tour would go from coast to coast through the NORTH. The symphony is amateurish, and I had to sit through the worst theater production of my life here. Now, the _upshot_ here is that the _local_ music scene is pretty great - lots of local bands, the jazz scene is actually quite good - but it's weirdly hard to find the good stuff in my experience. Once you do, though, there's probably a scene here for you, just don't expect it to be a band on tour. * Rent _is_ of course cheaper than the Bay Area but by less than you might expect. For instance, I pay $1900 for a fake 1bdrm in newish construction; I can see equivalently big and nice places in simialrly-new construction around Lake Merritt for $2300-$2500. * Austin old-timers will look down at you for being a transplant, just like Californians often do, but the difference is is that I can appreciate that people might be nostalgic for how SF used to be or whatever, whereas here it's rarely more nuanced or interesting than "I liked the skyline before the skyscrapers came in, and that restaurant I liked has closed down". ## Austin cons: - The summer sucks. Someone else here said you acclimatize to the heat, and that's true but only to a certain extent. I'm definitely doing better in the 107F heat today than I did two years ago, but let's face it, nobody's spending a moment outdoors here longer than they absolutely must, so I'm trapped in a motor vehicle to get around far more than I ever was in the Bay Area. - Similarily, the winter sucks too - you surely heard about the 2021 Snowpocalypse but every year I've been here has been bad; I think every winter has had a period where I've lost power for 5+ days after a minor storm. Totally unacceptable by the standards that I'm used to. - I'm way less physically active; when I go back to visit my watch informs me I burn 1000+ calories trivially just by going about my day; here unless I go to the gym I'm barely cracking a third of that because i'm always sitting in a car. Anyone who tells you about "the hiking" here is fooling themselves. - I listed Austin as a B-tier tech city as a pro but it's also a con; the median conversation with another techie down here is way less technical than what you would come to have expected in the Bay. I get the real sense that down here people are skating to where the puck is ("crypto!!!" "NFTs!!!!" and now of course "Agentic GenAI!!!!!!!!!") as opposed to looking ahead to where it's going to be. That's a bit of a bummer sometimes. - Food is not very diverse: of course we got all the BBQ and Tex-Mex you can eat, but there's like two good Chinese restaurants, maybe a few good Japanese restaurants, but no good Indian that I've found (short of driving to Plugerville, but if I'm getting into a car to drive 50 miles for Asian food I may as well be 50 miles away from Fremont) - Austin's the liberal bubble of the state, it's true, but you remain in Texas. So, a wildly-corrupt executive branch, no abortions (and the state can sicc Dog The Bounty Hunter on you if you cross state lines for one), your tax dollars are paying for wackadoodles' private schools and home schooling, every business has to have a "no guns" sign, that Cybertruck that just cut you off has a peeling AR-15 decal on the tonneau, and God help you if your kid turns out to be trans. Gov. Abbott has turned into a dollar store DeSantis; it's all stupid culture war stuff. (Maybe all this stuff is a strict positive for you, in which case you probably didn't read to the end here because you're already relocating to your Round Rock McMansion anyway)

This is very accurate and you don't see that often. I left TX for the cons + traffic is getting close to LA nowadays which is hilarious because it's TX and that's not supposed to be a thing in a state priding itself in car transportation.