Obligatory Golden Gate shot ;)

If you didn’t know, I’m currently enrolled in the Computer Engineering Program at the University of Waterloo. It requires that I do 4-month internships (AKA co-ops) usually alternated between schools. For my last co-op term (Winter 2012), I was fortunate enough to work in San Francisco at a Y-Combinator startup called PagerDuty.

For posts on travel (namely co-op), I like to separate the content in to two parts: Work and Living. So I’ll start off with work, as I did with my New York Post:

Working in a San Francisco Startup

My past internships have been at relatively large companies so it was a good change to work at a startup. I had some expectations coming in that are pretty ridiculous now that I think about it. Largely, I was expecting that things would be blowing up everywhere, the world would be on fire, and I’d be working crazy hours to fix them and ship out new things at the same time.

…and well, really nobody actually does that. If you’re working like that, you’re definitely doing something wrong. Working like that doesn’t really scale, and I definitely felt that when I was working as a consultant in New York.

I’ll try and summarize with a few bullet points about how working at a startup felt like in San Francisco:

Work Content

When you work at a startup, you’re guaranteed to have an impact due to the nature of small organizations. While at first it might be intimidating, it’s also something that you learn to love and will definitely miss in larger organizations.

Personally, I love work that directly impacts customers and clients. I chose this job at a startup and a job as a consultant last term for that reason. It’s great to be a good engineer, and it’s even better when you can apply those engineering skills to directly impact the business. Larger companies tend to give employees, ESPECIALLY interns, projects that might be cool, but tend to be “nice-to-have’s”. To me, that’s just saying that:

1. They don’t really trust you and your abilities
2. It wouldn’t really matter if you did anything or finished that project

While working at a startup, worse comes to worse, even if they felt number 1 in the list above (which doesn’t really make sense for a startup), the 2nd part would definitely be there. Startups don’t have the resources of larger companies to let employees do whatever they want, and that simply means you’ll be getting work that will have a direct impact to the business.

The result of this is that:

1. You get a lot of ownership
2. You learn more from more responsibilities
3. You get treated like another fellow full-time employee
4. Your opinions do matter and help shape up the solutions you design
5. You’re also responsible when **** hits the fan

These are all aspects that will shape you in to a good engineer. More importantly, it gives you a lot of insight on to product development, and the business side of things. Those are the aspects that make an engineer well-suited not just for entrepreneurship, but also for developing products that keep clients and customers in mind. That’s a key and fundamental basis for determining success in a product; being customer-oriented.

PagerDuty to the Rescue!

Having said this, there are definitely aspects that aren’t as great. Obviously, having a lot of ownership means that when things break, you’ll be the one to take care of them. Additionally, you’ll find that a lot of work that you end up doing is work that needs to be done. This could potentially mean that the things you have to do may not be as glorious, but that shouldn’t stop you.

Naturally, there are a TON of things that need to get done at a small company and you’ll find that there’s a backlog of cool things you can get around to working on if you decide to take initiatitive to do it. In fact, one of the best ways to do this is through Hackathons at your company. One of the things that I felt would be cool to see for PagerDuty was internationalizing the site and seeing how it would affect conversions, so I migrated the Marketing site to support i18n and voila I won the Hack-day trophy. :)

Celebrated my Internationalization hack winning with my name in Japanese!

So to sum it up, if you don’t like to be in a fast-moving environment where the things you do are directly your responsibility, then a startup might not be the ideal place to work. I’d like to think of it as a high-risk, high-reward sort of job.

Work Culture

Another large aspect I look for in a company is its culture. Although engineering ability is an incredibly important indicator of success at a technical position in a startup, culture is probably just as important. You’re going to be working with a select few engineers day-to-day with a ton of stuff to do. You’d better make sure that when things start breaking, your team will come out strong.

A strong culture is the thing that determines success through stressful situations, and having ever-present technical risks day-to-day definitely makes hiring for culture almost, if not as equally important, as hiring for technical ability in engineering. A good team is one that collaborates, communicates, and is transparent from top-down.

Hanging out on the PagerDuty Roof!

For my case, PagerDuty was awesome, because we were such a small team that we’d hang out after work. It’s not just that your co-workers are your co-workers, but they’re your friends. This is something you’d definitely want to encourage in any organization. It’s kind of like a team sport; just as you wouldn’t want to let down your team, you’d feel the same way with your startup buddies. Ultimately, that leads to happier, more productive output from your team.

Living in San Francisco

I’m assuming most of you guys have skipped to this section, as the question in everybody’s mind is: What’s it like to live in San Francisco?

Golden Gate’s little Brother, the Bay Bridge!

Culture

As one of the “big cities”, San Francisco still has some night life and a few nice restaurants, but definitely pales in comparison to New York in terms of number of city-ish things to do (i.e. - bars/restaurants/etc). However, it’s definitely unique for having the Bay and has a lot of awesome things in that aspect.

Quirky

Being on the west coast, it also means there’s a significant Asian presence there. San Francisco has both a Chinatown and Japantown. Chinatown is a pretty standard Chinatown, with its fair share of sketchy old asian men gambling and relatively cheap food. You can get pound of Dim Sum and still pay less than $10 for take out. :)

It might look sketchy, but that’s how you know the Dim Sum is good! (..and cheap ;) )

However, after being in New York and San Francisco, I still feel that Asian cuisine in Toronto still trumps both, all at a cheaper cost, too. Thai food in San Francisco is pretty excellent and would be the exception. Japantown is quite a bit more unique since there really aren’t a lot of them in North America, and you can definitely see it when you’re there. All in all, it’s really just one large mall in San Francisco, but nonetheless there are quite a lot of unique things in there. The restaurants are largely run by Koreans, so technically it’s not so much Japantown, but regardless, it’s a nice illusion :P

Japantown during the Cherry Blossom Festival

People in San Francisco are generally really laid back and liberal. People aren’t quite as materialistic as in New York, but they’re also a little quirky sometimes. They’re really accepting and you can find great conversations with people randomly, and you’ll find that people are generally helpful and nice. Of course there are always exceptions, but this is what I’ve felt in general.

Unfortunately, New York Burgers still trump Bay area ones. Shake Shack FTW!

Also, as much as I’d like to think that everything in Hacker News is true, if you tell most people you’re working at a startup, they probably won’t be impressed and won’t have any idea what you’re talking about. San Francisco is a hotbed for tech startups, but it also has more normal people than what seems to be hyped about online. (this is supposed to be a good thing :P) I took a Japanese class while I was there and expected everybody to be an engineer, but it was a refreshing change that nobody was. That’s an incredibly important aspect to have in an area full of engineers - a non-tech perspective, since you’ll find more problems outside of engineering that can be solved with tech (and likely more relevant to ‘normal’ people).

In general, the age median of San Francisco is actually quite old. There aren’t a whole lot of families and kids running around and it totally makes sense considering the rent costs there. That also meant that while I was working there, there weren’t a lot of people quite at my age. Luckily, a bunch of people from Waterloo were doing their co-ops there so I just ended up hanging out with them :)

Pho Challenge - the worst and best idea ever.

Like any big city, San Francisco has its ghetto parts. Not nearly as bad as New York, but the Tenderloin is pretty unique in some sense. I feel like any big city has its own characteristics for ghettos. Of course, San Francisco rent is unreasonably high, so naturally there will be a pretty large ghetto. Some unique aspects that I found wandering the Tenderloin include:

1. Realizing that the dog crap left on the ground.. usually didn’t belong to dogs
2. People stand around at 3 AM standing at street-corners and literally do NOTHING except stare. They don’t talk or anything or act ghetto like in the movies or Harlem, they just stand there on street corners. Kind of strange. Hm.
3. One exception to number 2 is that everybody in the neighbourhood runs out to the streets and gets rowdy when there’s a fight going on. If there’s a fight, it literally changes from two people on the corner of the street to the whole neighbourhood in the next 5 seconds. I saw this when I saw a crazed crack-lady fight some homeless dude. Of course, the crack-lady won, but I didn’t stay too long fearing for my safety.
4. Pho tastes the best when you fear for your life. (i.e. - the Pho in the Tenderloin is REALLY good)

Maybe the owner just left their keys in the car…

My timing was good enough that I managed to get a position in San Francisco for the Winter. Of course, all my friends and family from Toronto were jealous saying things like “Oh, you’re not going to have to deal with snow etc etc etc”. Getting down there, I realized it wasn’t as warm as I had thought and, really, it’s quite misleading what some people tell you. If you want warm - head further south to San Diego :) The bay area is quite nice in the sense that it’s not TOO hot and not TOO cold. Summers are like spring and winters are like falls, if you know what I mean. I actually like that sort of weather since it means the only thing you really need to worry about is wearing a jacket or not and planning for rain.

There are a ton of beaches within driving distance of San Fran

Now the question is - would I go there again? Would I live there for full-time? San Francisco is great because it’s not as hectic and fast-paced as New York which can get nerve-wracking sometimes. It’s a really ‘nice’ city in the sense that you’ll find there’s both a night life and there’s also a touch of nature not too far. Really, the only thing that kills it for me is the ghastly rent costs (though New York is arguably more expensive… but Infusion paid it all for me anyways, hehe).

Bar that, it’s an awesome place to get your career started and also to network with people. All the tech companies you see online are basically here and are probably a block away if you’re working in the SOMA area. Plus, geeks love to party and there’s always something going on in the area (i.e. - plenty of booze to go around). :) You also get the latest tech perks since everyone’s starting up here (i.e. - Google Wallet, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Square etc etc). Non-techwise, San Francisco has a really healthy culture and I could definitely see myself living there long-term over New York.

Google Campus is about a 30-minute drive away, there are a ton of tech companies just driving down the bay

So that’s it - I really love the Bay area, so I’m going back there for another co-op term. This time at a cool company called Inkling where I’ll be working on Platform and Backend Infrastructure… and yes, I’ll make sure to blog about that, too!

Want to connect or chat? Follow me on Twitter and tweet me! @j_ckao.