Processor time is increasingly fast enough to allow us the once-upon-a-time luxury of considering the programmer's time.
Interpreters make the inner loop of the programmer's life faster, making program development faster.
Once the program works, a profiler can be applied, and only the very slowest things recoded in lower-level language.
For many projects, optimization is not necessary at all.
Even in Donald Knuth's time, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil," was a common caution. Modern hardware makes this even more true today.
Not to say that you should go out of your way to code clumsily, but that shaving a cycle here and there anywhere but the innermost of loops is likely to be a waste of the only time that is really precious any more... your own time writing the code.
Given the amount of time code spends in maintenance, taking the time to write clear code will save the maintainer (possibly you!) time, so readability should be prized over raw execution speed in almost all cases. In six months, you won't remember how that tricky one-liner really works, and will waste reading time in minutes to hours that saved microseconds in execution.
Tenderloin is a district inside of San Francisco. Urban and probably higher crime than what you want. Rockridge is essentially Oakland.
Concord is safe but hot. Good BART commute to the city, tho (one train). Same with Walnut Creek, but more expensive than Concord. Another city like Concord would be Pleasant Hill. Many parts of Alameda are nice, but you might be pushing your budget, and some parts are like Oakland (to be fair, the Oakland hills are beautiful, but likely outside your price range).
I'd look at Fremont, which is in the South East Bay Area, is cooler than Concord, and at the end of another BART line that goes directly to The City. Fremont also has strong Asian and South Asian communities. There are a wide variety of ethnic markets for those otherwise-hard-to-find foods, utensils, and spices and a wonderful selection of restaurants that have great food but aren't too fancy for weeknight dining.
Public transportation in the Bay Area is concentrated in the larger cities and along the BART line, tho. If you are more than a few blocks away from BART in the East Bay, you can expect to need a car, and are likely to need a car to go grocery shopping as well, due to the sprawl of suburban living that also makes it lower crime and quieter than The City. Many suburbs are large enough that it might be easy for a wife to become practically housebound without access to a car. Every place she might want to go might easily be too far to reasonably walk.
If you look at a map, Sacramento is way too far, though I have seen some people try to car commute from there.
Oh, and don't expect to drive into the city! Parking is a nightmare and very expensive. It's really easy to get towed or have your car damaged (or stolen) there as well. Best to expect to ride BART to a downtown SF job coming from the East Bay, and to use a car to get to BART, because the more suburban parts of the East Bay have unreliable bus service that tends to be ~ once an hour and not on time enough to use for work commute.
The red flags that are going off for me are related to the possibility that what you're seeing is an Ivy League white male discounting you as a foreigner.
Management in large companies doesn't like complainers. Bringing a problem to management when you don't also have a good solution to offer risks you being labeled a complainer.
Going to HR should be a LAST RESORT. HR is not there to help you; it's there to keep management from getting sued.
You need to see if you can work with this guy or not. If he's going to continue to discount what you know while still depending on you, you may need to draw very clear boundaries between your work and his, making him responsible for his own compile errors.
It may just be that he's gotten off on the wrong foot. You may be able to teach him if his head isn't already full of his own importance, or if you are willing to take a secondary role to his "Ivy" leadership. If neither of these things look to be happening, I'd be looking for another job, not going to management with a complaint that effectively says, "This guy thinks he's better than me, but he isn't!" No management wants to have to deal with that kind of complaint, so will start making your life more difficult in small ways.
Your non-native English is going to cause people to underestimate your intelligence in many places in the U.S., however. May work better for you to find a job in a company with a strong international presence, which will be less likely to equate English fluency with intelligence.
Don't let the title of this link ("Discovering Python") fool you. It's about the sort of case you've set yourself up for by not paying this guy in full. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8
...and that's just the court case.
I'd be really surprised if the due diligence requirements of your funding contracts won't also require a similar discovery process to prove that not even a single line of code or hint of design work can be traced back to the original developer.
Not paying this guy risks your losing what you're thinking of as "committed" funding due to the loopholes in your funding contracts that likely protect the funders by requiring you to expose your code and that of the original coder to the funders' technical experts at your expense (as a part of the contractually-required "due diligence"), delaying your actually receiving further funding for at least the duration of the discovery process, but possibly forever, if the funder judges there might be a risk.
It also doesn't help that you originally advertized this work as a job in California, complete with "join our team" language. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NcKW-lnlOMSEzBEj7ywPF5nN.... Whatever contract language you are relying on to protect you in a labor contract dispute over monies owed for work performed is likely superseded by California labor law, something your funders are also likely aware of, and would likely consider a risk to their $$$.
Finally, don't you have enough stigma to deal with being a start-up (notoriously flaky), then adding the stigma of being an ex-con (notoriously untrustworthy), without adding the stigma of stiffing the coder you hired on contract (three strikes), practically cementing your start-up's status as among those most deserving to fail?
The startup life means there's a lot of legal and financial roiling going on at the management level that Employee #1 and below aren't allowed to see.
Probably a visa issue. Maybe a money issue (they don't dare admit that to any outsider, and employees are outsiders, so get the polite happy faced response management gives the rest of the world). Probably the all-too-typical inexperienced management issue most startups have.
When you choose to join a startup, you have to have a strong tolerance for surprises, some good, many bad. ALL of them are nice-seeming guys (nobody'd work for them otherwise). ALL of them have cool-sounding projects (will they work? Will they step on Big Legal's toes and die in deposition-induced agony? Will another 100 companies jump on the bandwagon before you can get it out there?)
Keep in mind that chasing startup dreams may not be healthy for family life, especially given that the failure rate for startups has been increasing, not decreasing.
Of course, it's always made to sound like success is just around the corner, but your most recent experience should give you a good idea whether your family's risk tolerance makes it worth it to you and those you love. The odds of dreaming turning from a bunch of extreme hidden hard work into extreme hidden burned-out failure are high. The startup world's only prescription for that is that you rest up a bit, then do it again.
There's a reason some people take the corporate jobs, save up, and only then follow their dreams.
Too many people are wasting their precious youth following the "fail early, fail often" mantra that is counterintuitive for a reason.
VCs make their money on the ones that succeed. The ones that fail don't cost VCs all that much, once you start counting actual funded startups that have passed all due dilligence and cashed the check. It's hard to filter out all those who are really only braging about funding on the way, because they've got to be convincing about already having it to have any chance of getting it.
But a steep price is being paid in wasted best years caused by startup failures. I count as failures, even these smaller "pivots" such as one where an employee is let go because different talents are needed (their stated reason to you). You wasted your time? No skin off their noses, they get to be the nice guy to somebody else they can use.
The startup world's harm is as cruel as any harm the corporate world can do. The startup world is just far less honest about the harm that it does to individual startup employees, preferring to say whatever they need to, keeping everybody's dreams alive until they absolutely can't anymore.
Interpreters make the inner loop of the programmer's life faster, making program development faster.
Once the program works, a profiler can be applied, and only the very slowest things recoded in lower-level language.
For many projects, optimization is not necessary at all.
Even in Donald Knuth's time, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil," was a common caution. Modern hardware makes this even more true today.
Not to say that you should go out of your way to code clumsily, but that shaving a cycle here and there anywhere but the innermost of loops is likely to be a waste of the only time that is really precious any more... your own time writing the code.
Given the amount of time code spends in maintenance, taking the time to write clear code will save the maintainer (possibly you!) time, so readability should be prized over raw execution speed in almost all cases. In six months, you won't remember how that tricky one-liner really works, and will waste reading time in minutes to hours that saved microseconds in execution.