> did you consider living outside of Boulder to still get most of the things on your checklist, but not face the high housing prices or difficult political climate?
Yeah, but at that point, you're back to the whole car commute thing, or a really long bike ride. And you're significantly farther from the mountains by bike, too.
Fort Collins was something else that looked pretty interesting, but I didn't see many jobs there.
> there is no "outside of Bend"
Yeah, that's something we're nervous about, and definitely a point in favor of Boulder. OTOH, Bend does seem to be growing - they're building the new university now, which should help a little bit.
> the jobs that are there don't support the house prices
I got lucky from that point of view, I guess.
Speaking of stopping by, I'd be happy to meet up with people for beer or whatever as soon as we're slightly more settled in.
> Yeah, but at that point, you're back to the whole car commute thing, or a really long bike ride. And you're significantly farther from the mountains by bike, too.
Ahh, right, car-free commute is a good point.
> Fort Collins was something else that looked pretty interesting, but I didn't see many jobs there.
My reaction to Fort Collins was similar, really liked it too, but seemed more like Bend as far as lack of jobs/backup-plans go. I like smaller cities and I work remotely, so backup plans shouldn't matter as much as it does to me. I'm probably too risk-averse in that sense, as I also had the same fears when looking at a move to Corvallis before. I suppose I'll always need to be near a bigger city to compensate.
There's a small tech scene in Fort Collins, mostly focused on hardware. Intel, HP, AMD, Broadcom, Avago, LSI, and Microsoft come to mind. (Well, three of those are now one)
A small market like that is good and bad. There is no glut of engineers, so you aren't a cheap throwaway commodity, but options are fewer.
You could use Boulder/Denver/Longmont as your fallback. A sizeable commute, but that adds IBM, NASA, Western Digital, Xilinx, Avaya... and a host of startups.
The real startup scene in Fort Collins is probably microbreweries. Engineers of every type are starting microbreweries.
Yeah, but at that point, you're back to the whole car commute thing, or a really long bike ride. And you're significantly farther from the mountains by bike, too.
Fort Collins was something else that looked pretty interesting, but I didn't see many jobs there.
> there is no "outside of Bend"
Yeah, that's something we're nervous about, and definitely a point in favor of Boulder. OTOH, Bend does seem to be growing - they're building the new university now, which should help a little bit.
> the jobs that are there don't support the house prices
I got lucky from that point of view, I guess.
Speaking of stopping by, I'd be happy to meet up with people for beer or whatever as soon as we're slightly more settled in.