Advice/Resources for Someone Moving to San Fran

As far as working at a startup, don't worry. If you're halfway decent, people will be falling over themselves to hire you. Of course some skills will stand you in better stead than others; a GitHub full of Ruby/Python/Javascript is a lot more attractive in SF than a resume full of C# jobs.

The real worry right now is housing. You state that you'd like a convenient place to live. Given that a great many startups these days are in San Francisco, that means paying SF rents, or sacrificing convenience. You can afford SF rents by taking a roommate and living cheaply for surprisingly little - I know people doing it on $50-60K, but they have partners who earn significantly more.

If you want to do it solo, shoot for at least $130K or above. You're in a fiercely competitive rental market, and as someone without friends or connections should expect to pay $2-5k/mo just on rent, depending on your area. If that sounds extravagant, consider the numbers. At the high end of the range (and that's something like a good-sized one-bedroom apartment in SOMA), you're potentially spending $60K per year just on housing, in one of the highest-tax areas of the country.

The good news is that, if you're halfway decent, that's a very achievable salary. If you're good, you can earn far more, but generally that requires moving south.

As far as finding friends and jobs, I had good luck hanging out at hacker spaces like Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, Noisebridge in SF, Sudo Room in Oakland, and a host of others. You'll find like-minded friends, housing connections, and jobs there. Programming meetups are a great way to connect professionally. Dolores Park in the Mission is a glorious place to spend the spring and summer, and it's always full of people on nice days.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that my company is hiring for Android, iOS, and JVM/Python backend roles - if that's up your alley, we'd love to talk to you, my username at Google's fine webmail service.