I was shocked, visibly, when I found out that no one at the first startup I worked at played tabletop RPGs. I was shocked again when they looked down on me because I did. In a city that prides itself on "weirdos", I was the wrong kind of weird.
In college I poured over Steven Levy's Hackers, hoping one day I would be able to meet the tech elite. I jumped at the first chance I got to work out here, hoping I'd finally find "my people" (substitute whatever pithy phrase you like). Hasn't worked out so far.
I'm in SF now and have been for a while. Where are you guys? All the meetups I've been to were fun (hard to turn down free pizza) but it seemed like everyone was more interested in collecting business cards than talking hacker-speak. Maybe I'm going to the wrong ones?
Yeah, that's SF. It's 80% posers, especially at meetups. The minority that are doing interesting things are, of course, not so easy to find. Work hard on your passions and eventually you'll meet likeminded people. (that's true no matter where you're located)
Just be glad you're there now, and not being forced by management to go to glitzy web parties in 1999. Those were insufferable.
SF has been 80% posers for decades. That's why the art and music scenes in SF are so bad. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In LA, if you suck they don't call you back. In SF, there's no judgment or criticism, and you can suck forever.
Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you, because I know plenty of people who play games in SF. They're all over -- seemingly every tech company out here has a game night. And I'm not someone who likes to play, so I have no particular reason to seek them out.
Make sure you're not falling into the comfortable, easy trap of Reverse Nerd Discrimination: these people don't fit comfortably within my own self-image as an outsider, so they must not be like me. There are a lot of True Nerds here who have outgrown the stereotypical image of what a nerd is supposed to look like.
If you want to meet people "talking hacker-speak" in the Bay Area, then I would suggest that you go to events that would only attract that sort of person. In general this will mean shying away from events about technological pop-culture and instead focusing on the events that cover very specific and "boring" topics.
In your particular case, I would suggest going to events that focus on building things ("project nights", etc), events that cover a specific "unpopular" languages (Haskell, Clojure, Erlang), or events that feature talks from people who aren't "popular" but should be (Fabrice Bellard, Jan Hubicka, etc).
We need a meetup group dedicated to strategies for writing parsers. There is nothing 'hip' about that so it should flush out the standard meetup cruft (e.g. "my name is X, i'm a non-technical person looking for a technical cofounder").
Do something like a board game meetup, comics store events, play MTG at channel fireball, try to make friends at burning man. Or art things in oakland. There is also the SF Bay Area Reddit group too. Weird nerds don't necessarily code.
Same here. I moved to the bay area when SF was starting to put on suits and ties, I guess. For what it's worth the north bay is nice. Go to Sausalito, look at the houseboat marina. Some of the people there are fascinating.
Like everywhere else, though, two thirds of the people here made money and moved somewhere interesting and made it less interesting.
I'm in San Rafael fwiw. Nice quiet neighborhood, peek into people's back yards and you'll see a lot of arts and crafts.
People were shocked , visibly, at my current job when I told them I didn't really do a lot of programming in my spare time. I made sure to not mention it anymore to someone I don't know / trust very well there, they looked like I had breached some kind of unwritten rule or requirement to work for that company - an unvoiced "You have no passion for your job and you do not belong here", of sorts.
That wouldn't be something they could fire me over though, what I do in my spare time is my business, and we have laws that protect that kinda thing.
Sorry to hear that this has been the case. I've definitely experienced this as well. One of the things I've learned is that the best people in startups are the best at playing the game, not necessarily the smartest or most talented.
If you ever plan on putting together a board game meetup or something along those lines, shoot me an email. Would love to try and make it. Been wanting to try DnD recently as well. My email's zach@hackedu.us.
If you cannot find the right meetup or hacker space, why not create your own? If I were in SF I'd probably visit Noisebridge. That would be nerdy enough for me, I guess :-)
In college I poured over Steven Levy's Hackers, hoping one day I would be able to meet the tech elite. I jumped at the first chance I got to work out here, hoping I'd finally find "my people" (substitute whatever pithy phrase you like). Hasn't worked out so far.
I'm in SF now and have been for a while. Where are you guys? All the meetups I've been to were fun (hard to turn down free pizza) but it seemed like everyone was more interested in collecting business cards than talking hacker-speak. Maybe I'm going to the wrong ones?