I moved from CA (Palo Alto and San Diego) to Austin in August to start my PhD at UT. Austin is pretty good in the sense that it's probably the best possible city you could live in that's in middle America.
That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered. There is a lot of "get out of my way" attitude, both metaphorically in how people interact in conversation, and literally on the roadways. It's also landlocked, and I miss the ocean terribly.
I'm here purely because the CS department at UT Austin is the best in the world for my area of research (Evolutionary Algorithms and Neural Networks). However, in a couple of years when my class requirements are done, I'm planning on finishing my dissertation research remotely from a coastal city.
There really is nothing at all I can imagine Austin has to offer me that is worth staying here over SF, SD, or even the east coast like NYC or DC. Maybe I just don't get it.
"That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered."
No offense, but that might be the most backward thing I've ever heard. Have you seen LA or SF? I feel like you might live in a one or two person bubble. Honestly, where are you hanging out in Austin?
I agree. Austin is one of the most chill places in the world. As a matter of fact, the only thing people bitch about are all the self-centered Californians who moved to TX in order to escape high real estate prices.
I left Austin and even I know that Texas is in general much friendlier than the big metro areas in California. :-)
I agree, the OP needs to hang out with more Austinites. Unfortunately, the reason I left Austin was precisely because the ratio of "Austinites" to "Transplants" was headed in the wrong direction FAST. I've been gone almost 4 years now and I hear that it's only getting worse.
Austin still has pockets of cool left, but it's nothing like it was in the 80's, 90's and 00's. It's been on the steady decline for decades.
All that said, it's probably a much better choice than most anywhere else in Texas and probably the south/southwest.
There is often low level collective hostility toward transplants, or matter where you move to. High prices and congestion are blamed on the outsider/newcomers, rather than life just changing. This can affect a transplant's attitude a lot.
I'm a consultant from NJ and just got back from Austin a couple days ago, meeting with all my clients who live there and pay me to live and work from here. Anyway, the Texan version of rude and self-centered is pretty quaint by my personal standards...
Edit: If I were a Rails dev, I'd imagine I could be making $200/hr down there. The circles I move through are like desert-island desperate for Rails devs. (Started working through Rails 3 in Action on the plane home).
That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered. There is a lot of "get out of my way" attitude, both metaphorically in how people interact in conversation, and literally on the roadways. It's also landlocked, and I miss the ocean terribly.
I'm here purely because the CS department at UT Austin is the best in the world for my area of research (Evolutionary Algorithms and Neural Networks). However, in a couple of years when my class requirements are done, I'm planning on finishing my dissertation research remotely from a coastal city.
There really is nothing at all I can imagine Austin has to offer me that is worth staying here over SF, SD, or even the east coast like NYC or DC. Maybe I just don't get it.