As I began my new grad job search, I had exactly one mission I needed to accomplish otherwise I would die: move to New York City. New York is exciting. It’s cool, there’s so much to do, it’s vibrant and so easy to meet people.
My entire recruiting process revolved around this vision, with a New York office being the primary prerequisite.
After ten or so months of bulldozing through the Lower East Side, Brooklyn Mirage, and Marquee, I realize I may move back to the bay sooner than I think.
Paul Graham wrote a great essay on Cities and Ambition. The summary is as follows: each great city sends a message. In New York City, the message is “you should make more money.” In the bay area, it is “you should be more powerful.”
After comparing my experiences on both coasts, my experiences have led me to believe this is incredibly true.
I spent two years at a private university in New York City, where student culture is heavily influenced by Manhattan’s culture. I remember standing outside the business school as I watched a herd of undergrads exit the building. The first thing I noticed was that all of them were extremely well dressed: students willingly displayed their wealth in terms of the designer clothes they wore. On Instagram stories, common posts were high end restaurants, Broadway shows, fancy bars, and shopping.
Status, in terms of fame and how well connected you are, is also a secondary value of New York City. Which makes sense, as oftentimes, status is a proxy for money. This also bleeds into the culture of this college: the student body has a non-trivial amount of Instagram models, TikTokkers, and YouTubers. Probably not as large of a proportion as UCLA, but much more prominent than UC Berkeley. This also explains the two respectable fields of study at this college: business and the arts. The business school places well into investment banking roles, a role centered on making money. The school of the arts produces significant amounts of notable alumni in entertainment. I’m sure a large motivator for entering the entertainment industry is fame and wealth, in addition to sharing art with the world.
I’m not too interested in business, and obviously I am not training to be the next Lady Gaga. My intuition told me to leave, but only now as I’ve matured can I really articulate why New York City was not the right place for me. Graham summarizes this quite concisely:
“No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.”
Ultimately, I think I sensed that my ambitions, values, and goals were different from the students around me. So I transferred to the University of California, Berkeley.
Upon arriving at Berkeley, the first most obvious difference I saw was how people dressed. Campus attire was a hoodie and sweatpants. Even on a night out at the college bars, you would see some students wearing this.
The second thing I sensed was that the student body was really…humming with a humble and quiet ambition. Students studied very hard and were open about how hard they worked, but I rarely encountered peers who would brag about their accomplishments. This was quite different from my experience in New York. In my freshman year, the topic of math courses came up in conversation, and I had a student directly tell me they were better at math than I was. I never encountered anything remotely similar at Berkeley.
The final thing I noticed was how extremely broken and dirty some of my peers’ cars were. My friend accidentally knocked off her rearview mirror from a parking mishap, and for the remainder of the school year, the mirror remained attached to the car via duct tape.
These observations are strongly indicative of how different UC Berkeley’s values are. Hard work and intellect are both extremely respected at Berkeley, whereas how much money you have, how nice your car is, how attractive you are, or how well you dress is not really valued. If UC Berkeley were to send a message, it would be “you should work harder.” If this college in New York were to send a message, it would be “you should be richer.”
I speak very highly of Berkeley because I genuinely think the environment pushed me to grow in the ways I wanted to. I will forever be grateful for my peers because of this.
Now that I’m in back in New York City working full time, this underlying message of “you should make more money” has crept back into my life.
I was curious to see if my shift in social circles would cause the message of money to be less apparent, as I mostly spend time with Berkeley alumni who also moved to New York City. After all, your friends are a significant part of your environment, so surely, by selecting the friends I surround myself with, I can self select my environment. Despite this, I think the overall culture of the city is hard to ignore.
To start off with an anecdote, my friend told me a funny story—she went on a date, and asked the date how his day was. He must’ve misheard, because he replied, “I work at Goldman Sachs.” There are also running jokes of which are the best bars or clubs to go to if you’re looking to date a “finance bro,” which is cool, but meeting professionals in finance is not something I am super interested in.
Additionally, I’ve noticed that an overwhelmingly popular activity amongst young professionals is going out to eat. There seems to be this mysterious obsession with getting reservations at certain restaurants, such as Don Angie. Curious about the hype, my friends and I attempted to run a Resy bot to secure a reservation at this extremely hot restaurant. However, the Resy bot failed to beat the army of 1000 secretaries refreshing the page at exactly 9:00 AM as well, and we gave up.
Eating at a Michelin star restaurant can be 40x the cost of eating at a normal restaurant. Does consuming Michelin star food provide 40x the utility of regular restaurant food in New York? I’m not convinced of this, so I don’t think restaurant culture is completely about the food itself, but what message eating at a restaurant sends. Eating at a prestigious restaurant signals you are connected enough to acquire that reservation, or you are rich enough to have a secretary to secure these reservations. Obviously, you are also rich enough to pay for the meal. It also puts you in an environment where you are probably dining with other wealthy people, so perhaps it makes you feel rich by association. To be honest though, I think this only applies to extreme fine dining. Eating at a regular restaurant with a group of friends is a vibe! It’s fun, it’s social.
As for nightlife, the big thing in New York seems to be nightclubs. This revolves heavily around who has a table, who knows a promoter, who’s on a guest list, and the ratio of women to men. Again, the underlying questions are how much money you have, how attractive you are, or who you know. In California, raves are a bigger thing, which doesn’t ask these questions. Everyone buys more or less the same festival ticket, bottle service is hardly visible (if it exists), and the ratio of men to women in your party is irrelevant. There are raves in New York, and interestingly but expectedly enough, these rave venues have begun to incorporate VIP table and bottle service.
I can argue that tables provide a good amount of utility. They provide a designated space for you and your friends, and a place to sit down. But the exorbitant bottle prices and the way bottles are brought to the table seem to send another message, which is that those seated at the table have a lot of money. Bottles are brought with sparklers, indicating to everyone in a 10 meter radius that several hundred dollars were dropped on alcohol.
Admittedly, my experience may be biased as my circle leans heavily towards professionals working in corporate: namely finance, consulting and tech. Maybe things would be different if I was a creative living in Brooklyn, or a dancer training for Broadway.
With this, my (maybe) controversial opinion is that New York City will never replace the Bay Area as the primary hub for tech talent. Thus, NYC will never be the best place for opportunities in tech. Some of my friends disagree, saying it is not so black and white: NYC is a better place for fintech, crypto, or quant firms. These niches in tech are quite money centric. For software engineers that are moving to NYC, they also claim “everyone is moving here”, given how exciting this place is. While yes, with remote work, there is an influx of talent moving towards New York, I don’t think this shift is significant enough. I notice a non-trivial proportion of top talent is not actually motivated by money, but rather a genuine curiosity or desire to build things. Graham touches on this briefly too, saying New Yorkers admire money more than power, so NYC is not really conducive to becoming a tech hub.
I do think we are subconsciously drawn to environments whose values align with ours, so this is really a self fulfilling cycle: talents in tech don’t resonate with the values of NYC, and thus they are more comfortable in the bay. As a result, the majority of opportunities in tech are inevitably going to remain in the bay, where the talent is.
Ultimately, New York is fun, but I feel out of place here. The bay feels like home. So who knows, my chapter in New York may close sooner than I think.
Notes/afterthoughts: