Ask HN: How does Austin, TX compare to other tech cities?

I'm actually native of Houston, but my girlfriend's folks live up in Round Rock, TX, just outside of Austin. Austin is a unique city, no doubt. I've spent many weekends up there and it's always a lot of fun-- the best food you'll ever have in my opinion. Especially the food truck scene! If you love craft beer, you're welcomed with open arms. The city itself is very active and lots of people love being outdoors/staying active.

Cost of living is very reasonable, and that's a good thing. No state income tax! As far as tech jobs are concerned, you'll find that you will make a pretty good living.

All in all, I think Austin is a great place to live, and I plan on moving up there myself in the next couple of years. You'll find lots to be happy about and proud of in Austin!

Lot of cool startups, hot over the summer, cheap living expenses.

Salary given with experience to taste.

I've lived in Austin for the last 13 years or so and worked on 6 startups. I love it and can't see myself anywhere else. I've spent a bit of time in SF over the years, and love it there, but just can't imagine living there.

* Heat: It's hot in the summer. Really hot. Over 100 most days. After some time, you just accept it and move on with life. You stay inside. You live later in the evening when it's dark and cooler. The flip side of this is that for 8 months out of the year, the weather is pretty incredible :)

* Startups: There are lots of startups here. But you'll find that Austin tends to not focus as much on the consumer oriented startups. So many of them you'll never really have heard of. Some success stories are Spiceworks, Indeed, HomeAway, BazaarVoice, and Mass Relevance. There are also lots of agencies based here that are always looking to hire. There's also a big VC here (Austin Ventures) and an incubator that's had some success (Capital Factory).

* Tech Community: The Javascript and Ruby/Rails communities are very active. Each hosts a conference each year that are well attended and respected. Again, SXSW is here each March which is also pretty incredible.

* City: Austin is awesome. Live Music, Lakes, Pools, Great Food, SXSW, ACL, F1... I could go on... seriously, it's pretty sweet.

* Restaurants: Yes. Awesome. In the last 5 years, it's really exploded. I'm constantly amazed by the amount of great food that's available now. A lot of it stems from the rise of trailers a few years back. The best ones have gone on to open brick and morder locations. Notable standouts: Uchi, Barley Swine, Perla's, Franklin BBQ, Homeslice Pizza, La Condessa, Sway, Torchy's Tacos. So much good food. And if you're willing to drive an hour outside of Austin, there are probably 50 authentic Texas BBQ places in the surrounding area. Also beer. A few incredible breweries have started over the last few years.

* $$: Definitely cheaper to live here than SF or NY :)

I'll add how I answered this question for someone who sent me an email once. Here goes:

I wrote a good Quora answer about just living in Austin in general start of with reading that.

http://www.quora.com/Austin-TX/What-should-someone-know-befo...

It doesn't really cover startup life though. I'll get to that.

Quora has a lot of other pretty accurate content about Austin so check that out too.

- First off let me warn you... sadly Southby is not Austin.

SXSW is a festival that happens to happen once an year in Austin but they are completely different things lol. Do not have that as you expectation of how Austin will be. Austin is much sleepier the rest of the year and even during southby you may have noticed that stuff pretty much closes down at 2am

- The Austin tech scene is mostly B2B startups, consultant shops, bigger more established tech (think IBM and Dell), the newer shiner (for lack of a better way to put it) companies mostly have smaller encampments here. (i.e Facebook has an office in one of the towers downtown. Apple has a fairly sizeable campus north of town and they are expanding but not much there yet.)

- Second checkout these quoras answers they say alot about it.

http://www.quora.com/Why-wont-Austin-TX-become-the-next-Sili...

http://www.quora.com/How-does-Austin-compare-to-Silicon-Vall...

- O and meetups in Austin...

Another thing about Austin is you will meet some genuinely smart people who are good and passonate about what they do... and you'll also run into the types who are "looking for a technical founder" alot too.

It sucks that you'll find alot of those at the meetups for more well known languages or frameworks. You'll have to dig deep into more esoteric or cutting edge topics if you really want to meet good technical people here and not just people looking for someone to do it for them.

Also just about all of the meetup groups have an online presence just google "[you favor subject] austin meetup"

i.e. Austin on Rails is a good one

http://austinonrails.org/

- You'll definitely also want to look up Capital factory

http://capitalfactory.com/

There are a metric ton of startups there.

They also have showcases and host a big portion of one of my two favorite Austin events. The Startup Crawl. As matter of fact if you can swing it figure out when the next one of those is and come then. You'll meet a bunch of people in the scene that way... its another big party event much like sxsw but it is much more local so you'll get a flavor of the people actually here.

Austin is hot, over 100°F for a long time in the summer, snowless 4 years out of 5. It has a deliberately bad highway system leading to a three-hour rush hour from 4 PM to 7 PM on weekdays. Granted, anyone from Los Angeles would probably laugh at this plaint, since even in rush hour, one will still make it home at some point here. There's a little light rail, and an unimpressive but functional bus system. Be warned that bicycling in Austin can be challenging in some areas. Austin's surrounded by bible-belt, republican Texas, but - in part due to the large university-derived community - has a diverse and surprisingly democratic/unaffiliated contingent in the city itself, including fringe religions and spiritualism (Wicca, etc), and a wealth of musicians, artists, and digerati. (We've likened it to West Berlin surrounded by East Germany before 1994) Restaurants are legion, we have Frys Electronics, Alamo Draughthouse (cinema + dining + local attitude) and lots of 3D cinemas, maker shops, etc. Consumer ISPs here are Time Warner, Uverse, etc, although getting both a static IP and good customer service from them is a faint dream, and Austin is not a mecca of cheap Internet, sadly, although offered speeds are pretty good. ISP options are a little wider along IH35, including Grande and possibly others. Google networking is coming in 2014. There are a lot of good options here for server colocation. Houses are easily available under the $200k mark for ~2k sqft in some fairly nice areas farther from the city center, with property taxes perhaps being around[ $4k/y on such - however, prices scale up substantially in some areas, especially deeper in town. There's a sales tax just over 8%, but no state income tax. There are a number of nice outdoor areas, some scenic views in the western, hillier side, parks, a (smallish) river through town, Lake Travis nearby (both are typified by rather murky green water), and so forth, although more popular in summer with those who can take the heat. The downtown area has scads of live music performers and dancing available. We have an active local faultline, the Balcones Fault, but the most notable earthquake on hit a 3.0 in Irving, TX, and Austinites aren't aware of any local earthquake activity. Burning Man isn't here, but we do have a Burning Flipside event popular with much of the same crowd.

Austin is rife with startups :-)

I moved from Austin, TX to Seattle, WA a year and a half ago after having lived there for 14 years.

I liked the first 10 years and couldn't stand the last four.

What ultimately forced me to move were seasonal allergies. Once you develop allergies to the cedar and oak pollen in the region, your life will be hell for five months out of the year. They also coincide with the months in the year that are actually tolerable to be outside.

Texas has been in a pretty severe drought for most of the last half decade. In the past, triple-digit days were concentrated in August and part of July. Recently, those triple-digit days start as soon as June, with 90s starting as early as late April. Summer doesn't end till around October.

Austin is the liberal oasis of Texas, but it's still in Texas. It's a lot easier to be a Republican in Austin than in San Francisco or New York City.

Public transportation in Austin SUCKS HARD. You will need a car.

That's my naysayer's perspective on the city. There are more than enough opinions out there about what's good, and I agree with them.

Sorry for the wall of text. I travel a lot on business, and am just moving to one of the outer suburbs of Austin from the inner core, so I happen to be very familiar at the moment with the comparison you are asking about.

Pull out a map of Austin. Locate West 45th Street which turns into East 45th Street, slide down along IH-35/290 until you hit West Oltorf St, cut across to South Lamar Blvd, then go up 360 and then up MoPac Expressway to the river until you close the loop back to around Mount Bonnell. Within this polygon, you will not find a 2500+sf 3BR/2BA for less than around $500K without some serious remodeling, and in some neighborhoods within this polygon like Tarrytown, listings are commonly in the $700K-$900K range. Pull out a bit to the suburbs in concentric rings around this area, and the prices start dropping. Your commute gets longer, too.

A lot of the appeal of Austin's Slacker'ish lifestyle meme comes from an era when house prices in this same area were in the $100-200K range in the late-80's. It was in retrospect very cheap to live here, a little disposable income went a long way, cheap gas in a beater car let you get just about anywhere, and the city was in a much more compact area so "anywhere" in Austin was only about 10 minutes away. There are a lot of residents who remember this era and resent the rapid rise in real estate prices that eliminated this lifestyle for most; this is where a lot of the "Welcome to Austin, now please leave" sentiment you see comes from. There are only a few use cases where this kind of lifestyle still holds true today.

One is student-level living in something like the ICC co-ops. There are the usual co-operative living drawbacks there. The other use case is if you have substantial (7-figure and up) liquid assets after paying off shelter costs. Both let you live in the more compactly-developed areas of the city, and pursue a relatively low-stress lifestyle that harkens to that meme. Even now, the real estate pricing and ownership dynamics are starting to edge out the former compactness of the city even in the downtown and campus areas, but if you are savvy or wealthy enough to live in these still-compact areas (for now), then you can still feasibly get around daily with a bike (and showers at your work destination).

For folks living in the concentric rings however, the already-familiar "go into the city" routine for night life and meeting urban friends that others know about from other cities has already become a feature of the culture here, and living outside that hip urban vibe commonly portrayed in national media is the reality for most, like young families or "only" $100-150K household incomes. Young professionals with your kind of salary will thrive in the core of the city, but I have no idea how they manage to save up any money with the kind of rents being charged, and IMHO it is much more imperative to save for the 20-30 year cohort now than when I was that age. Due to the car-centric nature of Austin's development, if you have to commute from the suburban rings to the center, it can easily take 45-90 minutes one-way at the height of a rush hour depending upon the specifics; there are some really bothersome bottlenecks scattered throughout the city that create this nightmare. An exception noted below.

Ignore what you hear about the "dangerous" East side. If you have had any experience with the rougher parts of the large tech cities, East Austin is tame by comparison. I served on a county grand jury that reviews and passes felony indictments, and from direct experience there I can tell you the most consistently roughest part of the city is around IH-35 and Rundberg. East Austin is mostly petty crimes; muggings and stranger-on-stranger rapes happen but are rare. Rundberg/IH-35 is where a lot of the drug-related and lower socioeconomic-associated crime is centered; you will see more violent crime in this area, but it is still nothing compared to East Palo Alto during the 198...

It's full of Californians, increasingly expensive, and, thanks to heavy subsidies from state and parent-based funding, kind of filled with kind of useless people.

Otherwise, it's great. The climate's a bit warm but not too humid, there's lots of hippie stuff to do and you can run away to the suburbs which are more like Houston, and if you like live music -- even though most of it is boring -- you'll love swiping that card all over sixth street.

As far as tech opportunities? * cough * I'd look to Houston or DFW.

I lived in Austin, and did not like it, that is why I moved to Silicon Valley. Austin seems cool in theory, but it still lacks a lot of what Silicon Valley has. They say that VC is the problem, but I doubt it. The culture is there too, but it seems to me that the main problem is talent.

UT does not even compare to Stanford. It is all about people; if you don't have the right talent, no matter how much effort you put into culture, resources, or investment, innovation will still not grow.

Housing is about the same if you know how to look in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley might be cheaper depending on where you live; I do not mean East Palo Alto, I heard prices ranging from 500-800 a month in places like Sunnyvale and San Jose, all the way to Menlo Park. My place in Menlo Park is 560/month. Use craigslist/peninsula.

What about Google, Apple and other hi-tech companies moving there? I suspect that they use it as satellite factories for blue collar workers, while all their white collar talent is in the Valley. Taxes are low, wages are lower, so why not outsource all the no-brainer labor to Austin? Creative and engineering talent is still in the Valley and you have to pay a high price for it.

I know because I looked for jobs there for a year with no luck, when I moved to Silicon Valley I got 3 jobs instantly. Do not listen to media, they often have ulterior motives like promoting the state. The weather in Austin is too hot. Again, the main problem stays the same: NOT ENOUGH TALENT. That is just my intuition though.

I moved there from SF in 2005. I had a job for a while until that company went under. I moved back to SF in 2010 because I could not find another job in Austin. Things have been great since then. Most people are nice but, others are not so friendly to people from CA. Most places I spoke to were a few years behind in tech.

Obligatory don't move here.

Lol just kidding it's pretty cool. But you'll hear that a lot. The place is getting overfilled and traffic has gone to shit so live close to work.

If you have problems with seasonal allergies, this place will be hell for you. I stay on a cocktail of three allergy medicines for most of the year.

Austin is a cool town, but the property taxes are between 2 and 3% (per year.)

That means if you buy a normal house worth about $400K, you will pay an additional 11K per year in property tax, which is a little less than a grand per month.

Hopefully they will eliminate this horrible system, which favors rich people. Some might say, "Well it's better than an income tax" but I think if you asked Thomas Jefferson about the matter he would say that neither is morally acceptable.