California tech transplants unhappy with exodus to Austin, report says
Outside of the obvious bias of a site with SF in it bashing Austin.<p>I&#x27;m going to tell the tale of two people. One is a product manager for apple in Cupertino and the other is a product manager for some random non FAANG tech company in Austin.<p>Both of these guys make $200k which is a healthy salary. 
The one guy at Apple, who clearly has a job that has a lot of glory, lives in a 1k sq ft 2 bedroom apartment that cost him $500k. His wife and kid live in Cleveland (to be close to family). He spends 5 days a week in San Francisco and flies back to Cleveland on the weekends to see his wife and kids. His commute is 5 minutes to Apple but he flies out of SFO Friday night (gets into Cleveland around 11pm) and then flies on Sunday after noon and gets back to San Francisco around 8pm. They also did this because his kids would have gone to abysmal Cupertino schools since he could afford a better place zoned for better schools.<p>The other PM lives in a 3k square foot 5 bedroom house in Austin where he gets to see his kids and wife every day. His daily commute is 20 minutes.<p>In case you didn&#x27;t pick up on it, I&#x27;m the PM that lives in Austin and my friend is the Apple PM.<p>I have him over right now for the holiday weekend and i&#x27;ve never seen him more miserable. He told when he sees his kids they change so much each and every week. He admitted that even with his salary, the travel, and paying 2 mortgages (one for San Francisco and one for Cleveland) him and his wife have nothing at the end of each month (thanks to CA taxes). He looks like he aged several years from this lifestyle. He won&#x27;t be able to take a real vacation back to his home in the UK to visit family because he can&#x27;t afford it.<p>My friend is trying to get Apple to let him work out of the campus here in Austin.<p>Look, I love San Francisco but it has long ceased to be a place where you can raise a family. If you&#x27;re young (or old and don&#x27;t care about having a family) and don&#x27;t mind the rat race, then treat it like you would any over priced metro area. Make your money and GTFO.<p>In the meantime, I absolutely love Austin. I&#x27;m loving the heat, my commute, my house (owning a house in either LA or SF, haha funny), and more importantly spending time with my family in my backyard with the sprinkler.<p>There&#x27;s more to life than this rat race and the chill atmosphere of this town is a dream. I wish I never moved to California after my stint abroad.