Getting a job in a major metro area. I was very resistant to moving away from the smallish city/metro area I lived in until my late 20's. When I did, my career just took off.
I'm not even talking about Silicon Valley. I worked in Boston, Seattle, and Sydney, Australia. Never set foot in the valley as an employee of a local company. Made insane salaries, one company I worked for got acquired, another one went public, etc.
Define "medium-sized". Sydney has over 5m people in it and covers approximately 4750 sq mi. So maybe half the population of the LA metro area in about the same size?
> Define "medium-sized". Sydney has over 5m people in it and covers approximately 4750 sq mi
This reveals something many readers might not have noticed. It's a quirk of politics and history that "Sydney" is defined to include the entire urban agglomeration that surrounds its city core (all 4750 sq miles of it), but this isn't the case in most U.S. cities. For an apples-to-apples comparison, you should be looking at U.S. CSA (Combined Statistical Area) populations (not the populations of core cities).
That puts Sydney outside the top 10 U.S. metros -- considerably smaller than #11 Atlanta (6,555,956), and about the size of #12 Detroit (5,336,286) or #13 Seattle (4,764,736).
The Los Angeles CSA (since you brought it up) has ~18 million people in it. †
† In the spirit of fairness, it should be noted that CSAs sometimes cover extremely large areas. If we were to restrict Los Angeles to its MSA (which at 4,850 sq miles covers an area almost identical in size to Sydney), its population drops to about 13 million. The difference between CSA and MSA populations isn't usually so large, but the Los Angeles metro area contains an almost ridiculous amount of urban-ish sprawl, compared to most other cities.
As per your footnote, LA reminded most of Australian sprawl in how it’s all spread out. Brisbane, where I live, sounds big, but the actual city is rather small — and way less dense than central LA!
Quite surprising how closely it resembles some of the US, especially Southern California, in the sprawl, car culture, and surburbia. Then again, I hear Melbourne and Brisbane are quite livable with better public transit options.
Exactly, the structure and subdivision of local government is quite different. The ‘City of Sydney’ has only about 200,000 people in it [1] despite the population in the entire metropolitan areas being similar to that of Seattle’s.
Sydney felt an order of magnitude larger than Boston or Seattle. The population density was staggering compared to those cities. It took hours to get away from urban sprawl and feel like you were out of the city
I'm not even talking about Silicon Valley. I worked in Boston, Seattle, and Sydney, Australia. Never set foot in the valley as an employee of a local company. Made insane salaries, one company I worked for got acquired, another one went public, etc.