I feel like the author here is a bit naive of the salaries out here. They seem to think directors and VPs make 125k when a large firm would be offering 1-2m total comp in the Bay Area for those positions. More than enough to live very well even I’m SF. A junior engineer is offered the 125k quoted for comparison in the article.
It seems like he switches between the intro talking about VP/directors to mid-level for the actual comp portion. Like a mid-level SE in Columbus earning $80k sounds reasonable (but still low), and would be ridiculously low for a VP/director even in a low cost of living metro.
I've lived in the bay area for 4 years now and am still perplexed by salaries here. Sites like paysa.com and H1B salary sites tell one story, then job sites like Indeed tell a very different story. Also whenever a recruiter contacts me and includes a salary range, it's usually on the very low side considering the cost of living here. What are people in the bay area really making across all company types? I honestly don't know.
> Hypothetical scenario: a reputable tech firm in SF or NYC offers $125,000 in salary to a mid-level
That’s not even what a fresh college grad would make in total compensation at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc, let alone “mid level”.
A senior engineer at one of those companies would make several times that in total compensation.
P.S. The biggest common mistake I see in salary comparisons is the omission of scheduled stock grants, which sometimes can comprise even the majority of one’s compensation.
Obligatory "^ this." Perpetuating the idea that everyone who comes out of school with a CS degree will end up with such a comfy gig is a disservice to software engineers everywhere, particularly for those outside the United States.
As a mid-level engineer currently job hunting in NYC, the salary range for most non-FAANG companies (including most start-ups) seems to be $90-150k.
From my experience, the idea of "mid-level" and "senior-level" employees in our industry seems to be skewed to the left. Mid-level employees are generally 2-5 years into their careers, and senior-level can be anywhere beyond that. When you think of senior-level employees in other industries, you generally assume they have 10-20+ years of experience under their belt.
At large companies, sure. The proliferation of startups really skew this on average. I know of many people who were "Senior Devs" at startups within the 1-5 years range.
Software Engineers outside the US make less, full stop. Amazon has a COL adjustment for SF and NYC but it’s not as much as you might think. Not as sure about other companies but I believe Google is similar (they also have a small local office).
The best setup IMO is to work at a FAANG company outside the bay, it’s the best of both worlds. Supposedly Amazon pays p90 of market rate, but in my area it’s more like p99.
I’ve heard that working remotely (full time) for Facebook, Google, or Netflix is nearly impossible though unless you’re truly indispensable to the company. This may be 1-3% of their employees that can actually leverage that option?
I can't speak to SF, but NYC's big employers aren't just FAANG -- the big financials employ tens of thousands of software developers. Publishers employ thousands more.
Compensation is, broadly, very generous. They're competing with three of the FAANGs, after all.
Citation sorely needed. Goldman only raised new grad SWE salaries over $100k in the past year or so. They are currently barely above that. The other banks are the same. The only financial firms that compete with FAANG salaries either don't hire juniors or are even harder to get in to than the FAANGs.
As for publishers, please find me one that routinely pays anywhere near FAANG salaries.
EDIT: changed "SWE software engineers" to "SWE salaries". Oof.
You can't just say "etc" after having listed pretty much every company which would compensate at that level. The only other one I can think of is Salesforce.
The vast vast majority of tech firms in SF do not compensate at that level; Yelp, Uber, Square, Twitter, etc, that list goes on. They're all right around that $125k + $5-$20k signing/moving + a fraction of equity for entry level, then scaling up ~5-10% for each position above that.
These Engineer 3/Senior Engineers at a place like Facebook making $400k total comp are, for the most, true stories. But it's not even close to representative of the bay area as a whole.
Well then, maybe the real reason “why you’re having trouble hiring” is simply that “you’re not paying market rate”!
If an engineer can get a job at one of these companies, and work on exciting & fulfilling work, what’s the incentive to work elsewhere if you get paid a fraction of what you’re worth?
When did the definition of "market rate" become "what the top 20% of engineers make"? The "if" in your second statement is a big one, because the majority of engineers can't just get a job at one of those companies.
We may be talking past one another / misunderstanding. My apologies for my post’s vagueness: I was specifically talking about these “top-20% engineers”.
Because — A lot of the time when you see a company complaining about how difficult it is to hire “good engineers”, when you look closer, what you’ll really see is manager(s) (in denial) who really want to hire top-20% engineers at bargain rates.
I agree with the sibling comment about how it's ridiculous to consider "market rate" to just be the very high salaries offered at the handful of large tech companies. (Tech companies, who btw have the capacity to establish satellite offices at secondary hubs, and also sometimes do already.)
But also "work on exciting & fulfilling work"? Hasn't it already been established in previous discussions that the average engineer at Google or wherever may not be doing the most fulfilling of work, becoming a cog in a larger machine, as opposed at a startup? There's only so many roles that gives both high big tech pay and meaningful individual contribution.
> I agree with the sibling comment about how it's ridiculous to consider "market rate" to just be the very high salaries offered at the handful of large tech companies. (Tech companies, who btw have the capacity to establish satellite offices at secondary hubs, and also sometimes do already.)
With absolutely no offense intended, I've never been offered one of those FAANG-grade packages, so if you were, hypothetically, to try to hire me away from a present position, I would have to insist: fuck you, pay me, I won't leave things I already like to get the same middling compensation.
In early 2016 I had two offers as a Product Manager from companies here that everybody's heard of. They were making more than $10M ARR, obviously not FAANG. Offers were for $146k with a handful of options, and $150k with basically no options. One had moderate profit sharing (I modeled 10-15k annually). Healthcare ranged from decent to excellent. Total comp for both was under $200k.
FWIW I've been working in tech FT professionally as a line PM, head of product, developer, or founder since 2001 - 15 years at the time.
In other words his numbers aren't that far off. FAANG is a different compensation class but shouldn't be the base case as you can't do a comparison of FAANG in Raleigh to FAANG in SFBay/NYC.
It is not just the cost of living, it is the homeless defecating on the streets in San Francisco that gets to me. Enjoy your SF lifestyle! I do laugh at the Y Combinator job postings that appears on HN.
I have actually very few emails from the Bay Area in the past few months. Maybe recruiters have gotten together and blackballed me.
But the actual Bay Area is boring. You pay the premium in SF and NYC to be close to arts and culture, both of which are lacking in Silicon Valley. And good luck getting a date if you are a guy.
The rest of the Bay Area is not at all boring if you value being close to a wide variety of outdoor recreation. Many people don't care about about arts and culture; everyone values different things.
This is myopic. I live in Mountain View and there is absolutely tons to do. Same with Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Jose.
And before you say I “don’t know any better,” note that I spent the vast majority of my life living in and loving NYC.
Those who say the “South Bay is boring” haven’t spent enough time in it. In fact, I have friends who specifically come down to the South Bay to do things. Furthermore, SF is only a 45 minute drive from Mountain View, about what it is from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so I get the best of both worlds, without the defection and the homeless.
People find something to do in in a middle of Nebraska, too, but it's pretty hard (well, probably easier in Nebraska). In 5 years I couldn't even find a decent grocery store there.
Next door to me, I have a Safeway that has a greater selection than most of the places in the city, a Trader Joe’s, a Whole Foods, and a Sprout’s. All within a 5 minute drive.
If you don’t try to go out and look for things, I agree you won’t find them. I am very social, and have found no shortage of things to do. People who complain about this haven’t tried it.
Sorry, no, this isn't what I am looking for. Sure, I know I can get your generic grocery store experience at Safeway, or Lucky, or Nob Hill, or overpay at Whole Foods (now that they are owned by Amazon I don't shop there anyway), but where do you go to get some really fancy stuff? I have found some decent little places in San Francisco that have good cheese and charcuterie, or decent fresh bread, but nothing in the South Bay. In Chicago I knew I could always drop by Mariano's (heard that they went downhill lately, though) or Plum Market, or Pastoral. NYC obviously has quite a few places like Dean and Deluca. Austin has Central Market. What does South Bay have?
All due respect, you’re coming off as defensive and dismissive, without stating a single example of what was missing. There are plenty of stores that have incredibly varied selections of “fancy things,” including but not limited to Nob Hill and Mollie Stone’s.
I come from NYC, where we had fancier things than you’d find in SF, and the South Bay comes close. SF doesn’t.
No, seriously, Safeway is hard to miss. Now a good grocery store that has a decent selection of cheese and fancy sausage and good fresh bread and some obscure ice cream (so no, Whole Foods doesn't count, let alone that hipster paradise of two buck chuck that is Trader Aldi) -- maybe there is something somewhere in South Bay where you could get it, but in several years I did not see anything like it.
Actual Bay Area is close to ski mountains, mountain bike, paragliding, skydiving, climbing, and hiking. Would rather be able to run, jump, and play than go to boring art museum.
As someone who works in SF every day, it does seem that in the last few months the city might be turning a corner – there are definitely fewer tent cities, and general public cleanliness seems improved as well.
The cost of these programs must be phenomenal (permanent police presence on the Civic Center plaza, full-time attendants in many subway elevator cars are just a couple examples I've seen near my work), but in a city as rich as San Francisco I think many would say it's a price worth paying to clean up the commons.
One thing the author didn't even mention was the disparity of purchasable real estate between places like Austin and SF. Having a middle class salary in Austin will likely enable you to purchase a decent home near the city. A middle class salary in the Bay Area will maybe get you enough or a downpayment on a condo in 8 years.
I was talking to someone who builds a product for recruiters recently. Apparently, common knowledge among recruiters these days is that you can't get anyone with experience to move to SF anymore (they are still able to attract young talent right out of university).
It breaks my heart the way this city is squandering its potential with backwards-looking policies that make it impractically expensive for basically everyone, tech employee or no.
Lately Netflix has been trying pretty hard to get me to come in for an interview. They don't seem to understand that because I make $200k/yr doing contract work in Austin, they would have to pay me $500k/yr to not take a relative pay cut. I know they pay well, but no company in CA will be able to offer me the same income to cost of living ratio that I have here.
Anecdotally, I would need to be paid 3 times as much as I currently make to even consider moving to SF. And that 3 times is almost always outside (by 30%) the salary range for a parallel position in SF. I have more than 10 years of experience developing software. Every time I get pinged by a recruiter I do some snooping about the salary for the position (Glassdoor, LinkedIn, etc). 99% of the time, the salary range for the position would be a pay-cut (even with stock options). And no, I'm not overpaid based on my current position and where I live. I could easily leave and find another company that was willing to pay me the same salary within a 5 mile radius. Here are some additional metrics, my mortgage (owning a house in one of the most desirable areas in the city) is 1/6 of my monthly paycheck. My taxes are 10% of my monthly paycheck. I'm not saying any of this as a way to brag or show off. I'm pointing out that the quality of life I have would only drop off if I moved to a place like SF.
Having just moved from SF to a smaller market with a 'lower cost of living' I can tell you DO NOT DO IT
The value you lose from your current and future network alone is so devastating that any NerdWallet estimate of your costs is total BS. Lookup how much networks are worth to lifetime earnings
Now your job sucks? Good luck getting a new one you like. Either move back or find something that 'works'
Lastly, your coworkers will be from a smaller pond and instead of learning with the most experienced, you'll atropying your progress as you argue for basic things with people who've never worked in a big pond.
There's a reason people go to hollywood for movies and SF for tech. A bunch of them actually.
Have not been there, but I suspect this is very true. Couple that with the authors assumption that those in the flyover area will ever get a raise (he makes the comparison of the person in atlanta eventually making 40k more a year). I live in a flyover area, have 25 years of experience, and have never seen a real raise, much less "oh, in 15 years I will be making 40k more". I would move to a tech center in a heartbeat, just for the networking.
I live outside the Bay Area and I get interview offers for good real jobs about 3-4 times a month even though I am not looking. If I were looking for a new job it would be 12-15 recruiters contacting me per month.
What I have observed from listening to recruiters and hiring managers in the bay area is that they are desperate for any talent they can get, which is great if you are a junior or if you simply suck. As a senior developer the work looks for you (like the zombies in World War Z) regardless of the metro.
The problem with being a senior though is whether your teammates operate on your level or whether they are juniors. The problem with being a senior on a newb team is like being a 50 year old man marrying an 18 year old girl. Beauty and first impressions diminish quickly and you are left chasing busy work for immature bullshit.
You can also become very 'senior' in level without exposure or experience that would be comparable to somebody in SF. Its a bummer when you live there, but the whole city lives and breathes tech. You can't get that elsewhere.
You don't need that ("SF senior experience") to make an outlier salary though. If that's your cup of tea, awesome, but I don't work because I want to breath tech; I work to make as much money as possible. If you need to hire someone in SF for your business, go for it. The rest of the world hires from outside the Bay Area.
I am sure this is probably true. I just got my first Sr. Dev job which resulted in a 50% pay raise and I dont live any where close to a tech hub. Now I have no doubt that I am not as good as most of the people in the SF scene. But I have kids, make a great salary and can afford to live very comfortably and send my kids to private schools.
I think SF is great for people who live and die for the technology. For everyone else just trying to live a good life they can get not quite to SF Sr. level salaries in affordable regions and come out very far ahead. But if I do agree if you are looking for the bleeding edge, SF and NY is where its at.
The other problem with being senior seems to be that most companies interview the same as if you're junior: you have to study for the interview by doing all the leet code problems you can because that's what they ask.
In that case it's not really particularly a problem of senior vs. junior, but one of software jobs in general. My beef is more with the idea that we shouldn't verify whether people that call themselves senior can actually write any code. I've seen candidates with "senior" on their resume who can't even write code at an intern-level proficiency.
When I'm interviewing, I don't mind reversing a linked list doing a binary search. It gives me an indication that the company is actually concerned with whether its employees have some baseline competency. I regard it as a positive signal.
Writing down binary searches and reversing linked lists is one thing, but what people are talking about here are questions of the nature "write down this algorithm that was publication-worthy 30 years ago," or, what I like to call "stupid programmer tricks." Those would include "implement rand10() using rand7()," or "find the closest palindrome to a given integer n."
I absolutely should be tested on when to use a dictionary vs an array vs a tree. But if finding the "acceptable" solution to a problem relies on remembering one particular algorithm from college that I've not had to use in a dozen years, as some LC problems do, then that's reducing a senior level dev interview down to a junior level dev interview. As it stands, all senior level devs have to do a month of Leet Code just to be competitive. The people down voting me can't honestly say they remember every single one of the algorithms that are popular on LC without studying. That's just not being honest.
Generally speaking, yes. But Leet code style problems touch on aspects of CS that a senior doesn't practice day to day as a senior's responsibilities are more system holistic.
Duke Mu of Ch'in said to Po Lo: 'You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?' Po Lo replied: 'A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse — one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks — is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talent of my sons lies on a lower plane altogether: they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him.'
Duke Mu did so, and subsequently despatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. 'It is now in Sha-ch'iu,' he added. 'What kind of a horse is it?' asked the Duke. 'Oh, it is a dun-coloured mare,' was the reply. However, on some one being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. 'That friend of yours,' he said, 'whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a nice mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's colour or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?'
Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. 'Has he really got as far as that?' he cried. 'Ah, then he is worth a thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses.'
When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative horse.
And this is why having code reviews devolve into stylistic nit-picking by supposed "seniors" while structure and glaring bugs go unmentioned is one of the must infuriating things in the world. The color of the horse is all they see.
The kind of "tests" that most interviews use (and leetcode etc) are more riddles than anything else. Either you know the answer already and are able to recall it and pass the interview, or you don't know the answer and you'll fall flat on your face.
Hopefully, the job they are hiring for isn't "master code riddle solver", making the whole process irrelevant whether you're junior or senior. In any case, the interview checks whether you know this problem and its solution or not. That's not a junior/senior distinction.
I can usually recognize when that is happening and I turn it around with something like: "Here is how I would do that...". If its critical to code like a junior then I probably won't be a good fit there.
Bottom line up front here is the difference between seniors and juniors:
Seniors want to accomplish the work so they can either move onto the next task or simply zone off into space. The goal is to accomplish all requirements as aggressively as possible with the smallest result possible. Less is more, but more time is less.
Juniors want to play with tools and code style. Frameworks are a huge deal. Seniors don't want to dick with any of this unless it is in place to intentionally police the juniors. Yes, I understand that juniors can be policed by simply having the proper automation in place, but that doesn't make the juniors feel like they are contributing to a cure for cancer.
Not my experience. I work in the midwest and my co-workers are creating technology that is used by people all around the world, and competing well against tech coming out of the coasts. I love working with them. Sorry your experience has been bad.
Very fascinating insight. As someone who moved from SF to Santa Monica, I can say that if I only stayed in LA, this would absolutely be the case. You lose quite a bit of network value, which definitely impacts (1) fundraising, (2) hiring, and (3) overall work opportunities.
Improving network for people in non-geographically dense areas seems like a problem waiting for a solution.
And the solution is hampered by the privacy of given companies. I work in biology, and networking opportunities happen multiple times a year in different international conferences. You present your work and look at everyone else’s in your field, effectively networking with the entire field at once, multiple times a year. There doesn’t seem to be an international community like this in computer science, and I don’t know that there will be beyond academic conferences just because of the secrecy of research in tech. There’s a strong anti collaborative sentiment in technology that hampers joint innovation because everyone just wants to get profitable before anyone else. Even in biotech, employees have chances to present their work in conferences.
While the network bit is valid, it implies that networking in smaller areas can't still have the same impact in cost adjusted terms, meaning that while your lifetime earnings may be 20% lower, if you're living in an area with 20% lower cost of living its a wash.
When combined with a generally snooty attitude about "small pond" people, it seems like you simultaneously feel that you're going to be the smartest guy in the room and yet aren't smart enough to see the MASSIVE potential benefit of that in a smaller pond. If you have even rudimentary soft skills you could end up a VP of a Raleigh or ATL based company while possibly never even making it out of middle management in SF.
I'm sad my comment came off as snooty. Its not meant to be. I'm not the smartest guy in the room by a long shot. I've just seen things that people in smaller ponds haven't. ICs at my last company in the bay make more than very senior people here. All of the cost of living calcs are essentially BS unless you have kids
There's also a reason people go to south Atlanta for movies and a dozen different, lesser hub cities for tech.
Movie people from Hollywood don't go to Atlanta. Tech people from SV/NYC don't go to other cities. But there are significant incentives for people from everywhere else to consider different aggregator communities as their base when they are planning out their careers.
I don't have a SV or NYC network to lose. The proposition of moving doesn't automatically give me one. All it gives me is a pay raise, which is more than eaten by higher costs of living.
Tech money people from SV/NYC ought to consider going to these secondary hubs. They can become big fishes in smaller ponds really quickly, and build networks to make use of the talent going to these communities. To some extent this has happened to other industries. Charlotte, NC became a major financial hub after 9/11. Vancouver is Hollywood North. Montréal is as significant, if not more, than the Bay Area for video games.
This type of thing is not cheap or easy for most companies. Who is expanding into these small ponds? Amazon, one of the largest tech companies on earth, and with a years long theatrical processs. Talent going to these communities was already passed over by SV university recruiting. There’s no urgency to get into these puddles when every 22 year old with a CS degree is willing to drop everything and come to you.
I can't agree strongly enough. I wonder how many VCs read about Arthur Rock and the Traitorous Eight and are smart enough to realize that Silicon Valley has become today's equivalent of 1950's New York: expensive, dominated by advertising money and networking, and so self-evidently the center of the universe that one shouldn't need to worry about what people are working on in the hinterlands.
New industries will be born somewhere, and it probably won't be in SV.
I don't know where you moved, but this is pretty condescending.
The idea that there are just a bunch of small-pond professionals in places like Austin/Atlanta/Raleigh is just...not accurate. A ton of the folks I've worked with actually lived in the Bay until they decided they wanted to start a family and moved to a place where that is possible.
I don't think the GP is talking about somewhere like "Austin/Atlanta/Raleigh" I would consider those places big cities. They are probably talking about a city that's 50,000-100,000 people, not a major metro.
Normally I wouldn't expect consider Chicago a "smaller market" but for software it is.
Moved from SF to Chicago about 18 months ago after working in the Bay Area for 17 years. I can't speak for other cities but Chicago is fine from both a network and comp standpoint. The profile of the type of work that's done here is different, sure, but nothing wrong with that. Depending on your point of view, it could be considered refreshing.
On top of that, comp is moving upward here. I'm not sure the trigger but recruiter reach outs started jumping here (like for a couple a week to 10+ a week) about a year ago and I'm seeing a definite upward trend in salary numbers.
Now, this is Chicago, so there is still a lot of dev shops that aren't modernized but there were a lot of shops in the Bay Area I wouldn't touch either for varying reasons. I don't regret moving away from the Bay Area other than the roads suck here due to having real seasons.
Lots of companies here are enjoying good times overwall. All the finance/trading companies have been doing really well the past year or so. Plus there has been some investment in the crypto industry including coinbase with their huge pockets
As you pointed out, the cost of living is low, but there are some serious trade offs to consider.
For example:
* There's usually only a few large employers in town, and switching jobs is a very diplomatic and drawn out affair
* Buying a house is cheap, but good luck selling it.
* Your salary is lower which is fine due to living costs, but your equity grants will also be lower. This is a big deal.
* Talent learns from talent, and the pace of life in many lower COL is "this is just a job I get paid for" compared to "this is something I will do for life". Learning opportunities are slim.
SV might be the place to go for networking, if you want to do a startup or work in one of the FAANGs or FAANG wannabes, but the idea that SV is the only place where people know what they are doing is completely laughable self-congratulating bunk. Actually, I've never seen a place with more cargo-culting than SV.
But of course it is the only place to be if you want to "change the world" with the next Earth-shattering break-through like Theranos or Juicero.
I've never worked in SF and it hasn't hindered my career. There are thriving tech markets all over the United States. If your goal is to maximize your income over expenses, DFW is a fantastic place to work, for example.
As far as networks go, my network is spread all over the country. I have former coworkers in Seattle, San Fransisco, Portland, Austin, Dallas, New York. It hardly matters where you live when you've worked with remote teams for half of your career.
I mean... with all due respect, man, you can't argue against what you haven't experienced.
I've worked in tech hubs around the world. I still go back to SF a few times a year and keep connections fresh, because they can make or break things sometimes.
In 2016 the only six-figure lead I had (with 14 years of experience) was a really shitty contract gig with Ziosk. I was sitting at $92,500 at a small company. I got a raise to $95,000 just before I left. I would probably be at $105,000 - $110,000 now had I stayed.
When I left Raytheon in 2012 I was making $82,500 + 3%-5% performance sharing. I would probably be about $100,000 now if I had stayed there.
Who around there is paying $140,000 for seniors? If I could have made that I would probably still be there, since I moved to New Jersey for $180,000.
People in the 'smaller ponds' don't really care about your prestige, we care about your character, which you have shown none. We live in these areas because we can about our families, the people around us and our communities not working on the latest tech in SF to reach some arbitrary goal.
I don't have prestige, I'm not a 10x coder, I'm not special.
I'm sure you have reasons for what you do. I don't like SF or the bay and I'm happy you have a great family.
I respectfully disagree. Just update your resume on Dice, Monster etc. and you will have recruiters calling 2 - 3 times a day. Now you may not get the specific job in the specific industry you are partial too but you can definitely get a good job. I have no where close to SF experience or probably their top of the mountain skill-sets but I have no problem getting job interviews if I want them. My network pretty much consists of me and whatever nameless recruiters call me.
The last time I wanted a new job I just updated my resume on Monster and had 3 interviews a week later and started a great new job two weeks after that.
Sorry you had a negative experience from your move, hope things turn around for you.
I hate recruiter spam, recruiters who call me are useless because they want me to relocate. It's actually kinda insulting because I want to say to them "sure, I'll just uproot my entire life, sell my house, have my husband quit his job, and leave my entire social circle to move to [city] just to work at your shitty startup." I can understand calling JR engineers for positions that require relocation, but not currently employed senior engineers. Of course I don't say that because it's impolite. They seem to operate on "mindlessly spam everyone with the same message, someone might reply."
There's been one exception to this. A single exception. Of all the recruiters who have contracted me one has been local.
EDIT: To the dead commentator that replied to me:
1) I didn't say people don't want to hire me, I politely decline all recruiter spam with "sorry, I can't relocate." It's just the more I get the more I silently get enraged. I find local jobs and get hired locally just fine without recruiters.
2) Being a senior engineer with as many years experience that I have usually means you are old enough to have put down roots where you are. Very few people make long distance moves for a random job when they are older than 35, unless they are unemployed or changing careers or something like that.
This can be true, it does appear that most recruiters appear to take a shotgun approach. They also just search for keywords and have generally not even read your complete resume. Occasionally they also don't look at cities, only states and have no idea the distance between where you are and where the job is.
Recruiter: Your resume says you have .net experience, we are looking for a Sr. .Net developer, interested?
Me: My resume says I developed some tools in .Net and that the bulk of my background is in php.
Recruiter: Great, would you like to apply?
Simplified but generally accurate. Either way I have had pretty good luck getting jobs via recruiters but there is a lot of chaff you have to get through. Your mileage may vary but I have been happy so far.
I don't even bother going as far as you, I have a rock bottom set of criteria they must pass before I'll do anything but mark it as spam:
1) Send it to the correct email address. Not my personal one, use what's on my resume.
2) Give some indication you've read my resume, such as mentioning a technology listed on it. Not something I've never included.
3) Something about the job. Anything at all, even just what city it's in.
That I can recall, only once has a recruiter passed. Kinda felt bad at turning down what seemed like the only recruiter who was competent at their job.
As a counterpoint, I live in flyover country, have a nice house and a job I love, where I work on interesting problems. Whether or not I can compete with Stanford whiz kids is irrelevant, because they never come here.
I’m doing well in a small Midwest “pond” (150k population) and I agree with you. I will say that there are great opportunities in the Midwest if you are an above-average developer, communicate well and understand another domain like equipment manufacturing or logistics. Opportunities are available to me because I developed a combination of skills that stands out. But, in exchange I have to work hard to keep up with the software industry because no one is going to set up any new workflow, language or tool for me. I could go for a month without being challenged on what I know. That’s a risky situation to be in, long term. And yes, if I desired to move back into specializing in back-room software development, I’d be disadvantaged here.
Unlike many, he was an actual SF native. He grew up there, and has family there. He is a highly competent software developer. He now works in Melbourne, FL. He has in fact switched jobs several times while remaining in the area.
He lives on 12 acres with a commute of about a half hour. He has sheep and a couple dozen chickens. He can shoot his AR-15 in his yard.
I think this to some extent depends on what kind of software you are interested in working on. From the perspective of someone working as a developer in finance, SF is nowheresville, you want to be in NYC or Chicago, typically. That's my personal anecdata but I'd imagine other smaller markets have their own niche industries.
If what excites you is web-focused startups, then yeah, you're probably not going to be happy in a lot of other places, but that is just one area of software development and I'd argue it doesn't have any exclusive license on interesting problems or top talent.
Web focused dev isn't the only area with interesting problems but that's definitely what gets the most attention is frankly probably the most lucrative path for most people. I work in finance as well, and am kind of too specialized in it to switch now, but I do think I'd have been better off working at the FAANGs for my whole career.
The claim is that the numbers do not add up for tech workers ro make Bay Area attractive. 125k salary is used as a mid level comp to do cost of living calculations.
The numbers for 125k indeed do not add up. However mid-level in Bay Area is 200k+ and Senior is 300k+. Not sure where 125k comes from.
Finding people with skills expexted for Bay Area’s mid level (forget about Director or VP) is a massive challenge.
125k is entry level for FAANG, but most jobs aren't. I got offers from mid sized companies in the BA, 140k max with +10 years of C++ experience, I guess that qualifies as Senior? +relocation package, green card sponsorship, etc, but still very much not worth it.
125k at FAANG is base. With bonus and RSUs that becomes 160k+.
140k is a very low offer for someone with 10 years. Offers like that are typically made by desperate startups.
Seniority is assessed by skills and not tenure. Requirements for senior positions are pretty stiff in Bay Area. Seniors need to deliver regarless of circumstances.
Ouch, that feels very low to me. Granted, I'm in Boston, but you can get that at nearly any startup around here (I've both held those jobs and hired people for them). The bigger companies can then throw some real equity on top of that.
Mid-engineer is someone who can accomplish all tasks with occasional design-level guidance. Senior is someone who can accomplish complex tasks without any guidance.
The article actually mentions kids. When talking about working in the bay area with technology people from the bay area I really get the impression that nobody there ever has children and everybody is sterilized. I don't think I have ever heard anybody talk about the bay area being great unless they were childless.
Outside of the bay area I can actually afford to have children and a house without being a millionaire. Yeah, I know, its weird. I have enough money left over (even though I have kids and a large house) that my wife isn't forced into labor to prevent immediate financial ruin.
I simply cannot imagine (I mean those words very literally) the horrid state of affairs of making six figures and still being on the verge of poverty.
>>I simply cannot imagine (I mean those words very literally) the horrid state of affairs of making six figures and still being on the verge of poverty.
NYC is rolling out free schooling for children aged 3 and up, known as Pre-3K[1]. It's not a full solution, but it helps alleviate some of the childcare costs in the early years.
The article mentioned: "One semi-local daycare in Manhattan quoted me a waitlist two years deep." Some daycares are in high-demand, but there are also other decent private daycares where the waitlist is (much) shorter or non-existent. While the caregiver outlay is believable, the waitlist datapoint sounds like it was cherry-picked. Depending on the age their child, the author might have had access to free public Pre-3K or Pre-K programs too.
Day cares with wait lists is also something I have never heard of even though I have children and gone through the day care thing and socialize with people who have children. That is so unbelievably foreign to me.
In my experience it's not limited to large metro populations with high COL. We live in a mid-sized Canadian city (~400k population) with a relatively low cost of living and the preferred daycares here all have waiting lists. Basically, if you don't get on them soon after your child is born (or about 12 months before you intend them to start), you'll be left with a lot less choice when they're ready to start.
It is basically limited to places where child care is a) heavily regulated, and b) left up to private providers. Two obvious solutions present themselves: de-regulate and let the kiddos sink or swim; b) have the government either pay for daycare or run them. There are probably others, but no one in Ontario at least seems to have figured one out.
Hard to see either solution coming into play anytime soon. Option (a) is likely out due to recent-enough-to-be-remembered tragedies pushing regulation in the opposite direction and Option (b) seems antithetical to the recently-elected government's style. Also, incorporating this promise into the NDP's election platform didn't seem to help them much. As you can tell, I'm not optimistic ;)
Education in NYC specifically is a clusterfuck of school choice, because school choice doesn't scale up to a school district that has a million-plus kids.
As a result of citywide school choice, people don't really get gentrified out by parents looking for good schools. But many kids will also have really long commute time, and applying for middle and high schools is like a mini college application process, and only people with the time and money can truly navigate it.
I think pretty much any school district with a million+ children is going to have issues, whether school choice is implemented, or not.
Mayor De Blasio kicked off an integration effort[1] in Brooklyn with plans to roll something similar in the other NYC school districts in an effort to counteract the mini-college application process, with mixed reactions depending on where your child would have placed. Reforms are under way for both middle and high school admissions.
There will always be issues, but school choice resulted in
- general confusion; the guide to high schools, for example, is bigger than the Yellow Pages, and that's with all the information of a high school summarized into a single-sided page. Couple that with Bloomberg splitting failing schools with five schools in the same building and it's just far too overwhelming.
- horrible commute times. Schools were designed to serve their local neighborhoods and usually aren't placed well, particularly in the outer boroughs. If you have to go to a school other than your neighborhood school it can be quite the schlep, especially once you factor in start times. It's impossible to design start times that work for everyone when students come across the entire city, and the lack of coordination also affects things like the overburdened public transport, which gets slammed when schools let out.
- extreme stress on parents and students. You have to go around and tour schools. You have to meet with teachers and principals. You have to attend multiple massive school fairs with staff pushing their schools on you. It's like a college application process, already stressful enough, except you're doing this to children going through puberty. It's absolute madness for even wealthy parents with time to do all of this; working class people working long hours or odd hours or multiple jobs basically don't have a shot. And can you imagine what not getting into your top choices does to kids' well-being?
If school choice were limited to the borough level, it would be more manageable. But at the city level it's far too much.
I'm living in Boston, which admittedly also has a pretty terrible cost of living, although not yet quite NYC or SF. Somerville is trying really hard to catch up though.
It's hard enough here to be able to have space for a partner and/or kids, and maybe 100 sq ft of grass in a yard - but it's at least imaginable, and possible to have a semi-decent commute.
I don't know what Facebook or someone would have to pay me to move to SF and be able to imagine similar. $400-500k? Like, the concept of owning property in SF with any amount of space is mind boggling. Same with NYC. I don't want a 90-minute commute daily.
Priorities for me right now are:
- Space for at least a 1 car garage (in which to keep tools, projects, and a few motorcycles)
- At least 100 sq ft of grass/yard
- 3 bedrooms for myself, my partner, music and potentially family expansion
- A decent commute (under an hour, preferably 30 minutes or less)
- A decent kitchen and space to entertain a dozen or so friends for dinner
- A down payment that isn't going to be $200k
This isn't going to happen in SF or NYC. Maybe if I live in NJ or San Mateo?
I'll stay with my already-higher than this article mentions salary, and have some prospect of space and such.
NJ commute into a Manhattan office from a suburban home like you describe would pretty much never be less than 50-55 minutes each way, and often longer.
New Jersey housing costs are completely crazy as well, at least for the places that have a reasonable commute to NYC. In addition to the high cost of the houses, you have to factor in the absolutely crazy property taxes. If you don't buy a house but instead rent, larger complexes have insane "maintenance fees".
“Close” to Manhattan? Close as in I can see it across the river is not the same as I need to commute daily. Jersey City to midtown is minimum 45 minutes rush hour. You still have to add the time for the “last” mile part of commute to your office.
IMHO, the unfortunate economics of high urban density in big cities means that the american dream of a patch of green grassy lawn might be something people need to abandon. Kids grow up and become functional, well balanced adults while living in condos, townhouses and apartments in dense cities like Amsterdam, Berlin or in the center of downtown Vancouver BC, without having their own yard. If you go fully condo lifestyle you can pick a location near good schools and public parks.
For some reason I'm reminded of a description written by William Gibson in one of his "Bridge Trilogy" novels about a person in the SF area, in his envisioned near future, maintaining a closely guarded tiny patch of pristine grass lawn...
The problem is that you're trying to own a house in a city. That's not the goal of city living. Nor is car ownership. In cities like SF and NYC, you should expect to rent forever while raising a family if you refuse to move to a cheaper COL area.
For reference, I live in NYC with a partner, kid and dog.
The problem arises when you have more than one kid and need more than 2 bedrooms. That's when single income can't afford a bigger apartment, and dual income can't afford double daycare. The kids will always share a bedroom. (I grew up in a family of five sharing one bedroom. Parents slept in living room)
The best you can hope for is to space them out so you never have to pay for double daycare: the new one is born when the old one starts free public school. But then you're at the whim of the quality of public schools.
How do I get a job outside the Bay Area? I've been trying to find a job since March, unemployed since August. Some people have suggested that moving to a tech hub is essential to get a job.
I've never lived in a tech hub and I've always been able to find a job. The first job was very, very difficult, but since then it's been fine. I just look for publicly posted job openings. I've solely worked in B2B companies.
However, sometimes it takes a while. Especially now that I'm really picky with jobs.
However, if you live out in the boonies where the only employer is Walmart you'll definitely need to move or get a remote gig.
If you have the means, relocate. Chicago has a lot of jobs, same with the Milwaukee area. While the COL can vary, it will definitely be better than the bay area. The other factor, leave your location off your resume. Sure it will show you worked at companies in a specific area. Just don't include an actual home address. And then have a "go bag" ready.
Where do you live? There is tech demand everywhere. You don't have to live in SF, NY, Seattle or DC to get tech jobs. But these are probably going to be standard office jobs at non-tech companies doing boring work. Pay is lower, but so is cost of living.
Hearing about the challenges of raising kiddos in the Bay is also refreshing to me. I've a lot of friends that would love to have kiddos, but the costs and 'hassle' of child-rearing in the Bay are just too much. Kids are hard enough without 2 hours of commuting per day.
Also, though the article is focused on tech workers, the Bay actually does have other inhabitants. I went out for an interview for a biotech position on the Peninsula recently. Overall, it went well and they offered me $60k. My jaw, of course, needed to be picked off the floor. When I mentioned that, per CA state law, even auto-mechanics make that without a HS degree in their city, let alone the BS/MS/PhD that they required for the position, the company said "well, that's the going rate". I asked if they had hook-ups/dump-points for the RV I would be inhabiting in the parking lot. The req. is still open all these months later.
Tech, and Prop 13, have severely distorted the CA property market to near total dysfunction for proper societal functioning.
Prop 13 only applies when people don't sell. There is actually a lot of property turnover in the Bay Area and that resets the tax basis to the current sale. A measure that would let people over 55 transfer their tax basis failed to pass. As a result difference in tax base due to Prop 13 it much less than you might expect.
> When talking about working in the bay area with technology people from the bay area I really get the impression that nobody there ever has children and everybody is sterilized.
This is the great slow-motion tragedy of cities, especially in the modern era. The phrase I've heard is "IQ Shredder". It's probably not great for society in the long run to concentrate your smartest, hardest working, most conscientious people into a few large metros where an unwinnable rat-race leads to them having zero or 1 kids, since parental IQ has a large influence children's IQ.
But that is getting dangerously close to implying that different humans have different potential intelligence, and that's a very politically dangerous path to go down. The racial history of the US seems to make it a specially sensitive country to this issue.
I would hope on HN of all places people wouldn't devolve into political flame wars and race baiting just because a completely factually accurate statement offends their sensibilities.
I wasn't attempting to race bait. I was mentioning that this is a hard issue to discuss in a lot of circles due to historical reasons. A lot of people hear race when you say "there are differences in intelligence and some part of that is genetic", a statement which doesn't mention race at all!
I'm actually quite concerned personally about the effects of high IQ couples not having children and low IQ couples having a lot but it's not an easy discussion to have since, as I mentioned, people see it as a racist argument when I don't mention race at all.
> different humans have different potential intelligence
Different individual humans do have different potential intelligence. Cities everywhere attract intelligent people of all races and genders, this has nothing to do with the racial history of the US.
There are plenty of well educated, hard working, intelligent people outside of major metropolitan areas. And there are plenty of lazy idiots in cities. And let's not forget that California is near the bottom of the list for average IQ[0] (which is a ridiculous measure, anyway).
> There are plenty of well educated, hard working, intelligent people outside of major metropolitan areas. And there are plenty of lazy idiots in cities.
I never said there weren't; the question is which what is the net internal migration? Do more smart people move out of cities and have more kids, or do they move into cities and have fewer?
> let's not forget that California is near the bottom of the list for average IQ
My point was about cities, not states. California has 3 large major cities, some minor ones, and a very large rural area.
> which is a ridiculous measure, anyway
IQ is not everything, but it's strongly correlated with a host of positive outcomes (longevity, educational attainment, income, cooperative behavior, etc).
Back when San Francisco had open space and people could actually build things, my grandparents got a 4-bedroom house there for $9000. They produced 8 kids. Kids were everywhere. The neighborhood was filled with kids. Kids played outside all day long, running up and down the street. Now the place is silent.
There is a bit of hope outside the big cities. Farmers tend to be smart. Not every software developer has been lured to the big city.
- The table with actual math contradicts the title and the point the author's trying to make.
- The author thinks directors and VPs make 1/2 to 1/10th what they actually do.
- Unlike the author, those of us living in the coastal areas discussed do not play inferiority-complex games where we fantasize about the grass on the other side.
First off, $125k is the entry level wage in NYC and SF. That's what you pay fresh grads out of college. The author massively understates the wage gap between the core job areas and peripheral cities. Any recruiter offering a senior hire $125k to relocate is working on the behalf of complete idiots.
Secondly, distributed teams are nonsense, from an economic point of view.
Why on earth would I pay someone in a "flyover state" $80k when I can get very similar talent for half as much in Argentina? If I'm willing to compromise on time zones, I can pay even less in Eastern Europe or South Asia.
The only reason that your bloated American wage is justified is communication. Good English skills can be purchased in any market in the world, for much less than what Americans demand. Being on site, in the damn office, is how you earn that money.
The numbers really are crazy wrong. My total comp as a new grad in SF tech industry was $170k, in 1998. A “senior software engineer” at Google, which is the median grade of engineers at that company, makes around $500k/yr in total comp.
> First off, $125k is the entry level wage in NYC and SF.
It's the entry-level wage at top-tier tech companies, and a few second-tier who can compete with them at the junior levels (like Bloomberg). It is not what the average new grad should be expecting.
> Good English skills can be purchased in any market in the world, for much less than what Americans demand.
Is this true? My experience differs; even hiring semi-technical roles where the most important factor was "high-level English competency" I've had really disappointing results. It gets better if you're willing to deal with less than that, but that's a pretty rough compromise for a lot of highly collaborative roles.
Strong technical skills are easier to source, but strong technical skills without good communication is tough to square.
Are you allowed to require a TOEFL score? I work in academia and find it’s pretty indicative of good English comprehension, and universally done by international students.
I'm not sure, to be honest. I've always had to go through on-site intermediaries, after whose filtering pass I would pretty much downcheck everybody else.
AFAIK that's legal grey area. Aptitude tests in the US are generally illegal because they act as stand-ins for IQ tests, with the specific exception of ability tests proven to be relevant to the job at hand. That's why programming tests get a pass for programming jobs.
So I think it would depend on if you could convince a judge that the TOEFL score is relevant to the job at hand, and not just being used as a discriminatory stand-in for an IQ test.
It is legal (at least based on the guidelines provided by the US Department of Labor: http://www.onetcenter.org/dl_files/empTestAsse.pdf) to give people all kinds of tests as long as (a) they do not select against certain protected traditionally disadvantaged classes more than it does for the average applicant or (b) if it does, there is a demonstrable link between the test and ability to perform job functions (so, for instance, a test of strength in a job that involves lots of lifting may select against women, but if strength is highly correlated with job performance, that is OK).
It's fundamentally _odd_ to me that people are looking at rental costs.
The working class worry about making rent.
A senior professional (in any field) cares about building a secure life, buying property, raising a family, saving for retirement.
For a whole bunch of people it's the entire reason they put all of that effort into their craft in the first place (otherwise they'd move out into the country and work on OSS all day).
You're going to struggle to hire competent, rested, mature, well rounded individuals if you expect them to rent tiny flats downtown and have that be their life.
I don't have a visa anyway, but that's part of the reason I haven't bothered looking in to moving to SF.
It seems to be built around the idea that you spend your youth grinding in a rented flat, with rental furniture, using rental cars, buying every meal outside, so that in your 40's you might be able to move out and live a decent life with some modicum of security.
Baffling. Like, what are you going to do socially? You think you'll just "be rich" somewhere else and live in your house with all the other SF migrants?
I think you misunderstand that several workers out here rent because they can amass capital with their jobs in a more liquid format than buying a house. A house is a middle class investment opportunity, several people out here are making enough to focus more on flexibility and liquidity.
I've had prolonged discussions about this elsewhere on HN, but I think if you're considering a house (or an apartment) to be an "investment opportunity", you've missed the point entirely.
It's a home first and foremost, and a monetary asset second.
If your model is 'grind your 20s-40s away living in a box and then move out' then I implore you to read my comment again.
I have a 1400 sqft apartment in Pacific Heights. It's hardly as bad as everyone wants to make it out to be. It's actually, by far, the nicest place I've ever lived. I think you really misunderstand the high quality of life can be in SF because of all the blogspam. Its hard at times, but it has significant rewards.
I often wonder if London looks worse externally than it actually is (you can afford a house or apartment here if you have a professional job, it's just probably going to involve commuting and not be in a prestigious area).
Of course, if you're something actually socially useful like a teacher or fireman, you're buggerino'd.
I use the term 'house' out of laziness. It's more a commentary on the fact that a 30 year old renting is just incompatible with a decent life in the UK (outside of some secure older council tenancies) whether you live on the ground floor or the fifth floor.
You'll probably have to move every year or two - it's not yours to decorate - the furniture might not be yours - it's not a home, it's a longer-term hotel.
I mean, if I wasn't here, I'd be in Belgravia or Mayfair. London is an amazing place and now about 10% cheaper than SF. It has 2 out of the 5 FAANG companies, but the tech scene is still not in the top 5 IMO compared to NYC, SF, SEA, Singapore and Tokyo. I'd love for that to change...
If a house is a home, I'd rather be homeless. I personally view a house as more of a shackle than a benefit. I enjoy moving every 2-5 years. I value novelty over routine. My first 12 years of life were in the same home, but other than that I've been moving around regularly.
I am in my late 20s currently, and I'm open to a change in perspective. Maybe there's value in consistency that I will appreciate more at some point. But being told that I won't count as a senior professional until I care about buying property irks me.
I don't see why any of that would have to change. You sell your home at the same time you buy the new one, and what you get from the sell goes towards the cost of the new home.
Money-wise, you're no longer throwing it away on rent, but paying down a mortgage that eventually is paid off entirely.
On top of that, you're also no longer racing against the end of the rent contract, and can wait a bit - or move earlier - to find a new place you really like.
The turning point for me was, here in Chicago, when I was renting and my dad sent me some properties with the costs laid out: These places were significantly nicer, and the mortgage cost per month was ~60% what I was paying in rent.
Basically, because it's much easier (in time and money) to switch leases than it is to go through the hassle of buying and selling a house. There are some markets where owning is cheaper, and some markets where renting is cheaper.
I'm also in Chicago and have done a similar analysis. But I'd argue there are two main reasons for the per-month costs for owning are cheaper than for renting:
- Illinois is broke and is going to increase real estate taxes every year for the foreseeable future. So while you can also sell to escape the tax bill, the value will just drop to compensate.
- There are many fixed costs to buying a place that aren't reflected in the monthly bills. Such as closing costs on both the purchase and sale (including chicago's lovely transfer stamp tax, realtor commissions, etc).
Also keep in mind how many high-rise condo buildings are going up right now. This can only be bad for prices of "old" condos around the city.
If you aren’t looking at a home as an investment opportunity, there’s no reason to look at a home. Why would you shackle yourself to something that you can’t easily get out of, takes time and money to maintain, can go away in an instant, and takes years to get any equity. If it’s not appreciating past what you pay in maintenance or what you might be paying in rent, why would you willingly waste your money? If you are going for the “American dream” of the 1950s, there’s no reason why you can’t have a stay at home wife, a boy and a girl, and a car in the garage while renting the home.
>A senior professional (in any field) cares about building a secure life, buying property, raising a family, saving for retirement.
You're not going to afford to buy real-estate in San Francisco on a salary. Full stop. You don't buy multi-million-dollar houses when the company might go pear-shaped and leave you without a paycheck, even if your paycheck is in the six figures.
There are many homes for sale in SF for about a million dollars when I look. Isn’t that completely reasonable on a tech salary of a quarter of a million or so?
Interesting perspective. From your profile it seems you live in London and maybe born there. The social life in the states (especially cities) is vastly different than European cultures.
It would be helpful to us who are accustomed to American social life to learn about what you perceive your social life tied into your work life to be like.
> It's fundamentally _odd_ to me that people are looking at rental costs.
I think it was good that he focused on rent instead of for-sale price. The sale price includes other factors (property taxes, interest rates, expectation of rent increases) that do not affect the cost of living, and many authors get confused when they complain about rising prices while ignoring rents; see https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2017/10/housing-part-264-... for further explanation
> A senior professional (in any field) cares about building a secure life, buying property, raising a family, saving for retirement.
Sure, the capitalist-economy middle class is defined by having substantial property investments as well as labor income, but there's no reason that has to be in one's primary residence. There are pros and cons of tying up capital in an owner-occupied residence.
> It's fundamentally _odd_ to me that people are looking at rental costs.
The median housing price in SF is $1.6M. There is no choice but to rent, or perhaps suffer an absolutely terrible commute.
(And since someone inevitably quips that the entire Bay Area makes $300k+: the $125k in the article is a bit low; the median tech salary is ~$135k. Some lucky souls pulling down massive stock benefits at a FAANG might be making enough total, but those of us not at a FAANG are not so lucky.)
> It seems to be built around the idea that you spend your youth grinding in a rented flat, with rental furniture, using rental cars, buying every meal outside, so that in your 40's you might be able to move out and live a decent life with some modicum of security.
Not everyone wants to live in a tacky huge McMansion that they can fill up with trinkets and garbage they don't use. See? I can make snarky judgemental comments about your lifestyle choices too.
But seriously, not all "competent, rested (???), mature, well-rounded" individuals think living in an rental apartment in a vibrant, walkable neighborhood is the rank indignity you seem to believe it is. They're perfectly happy living in small spaces and spending their money on travel, hobbies, food, and saving for retirement instead.
The article doesn't mention this, but it will be alot easier to max out a 401k and build that retirement fund making those larger coastal salaries. Ultimately it seems hard to argue in general that one would come out ahead financially and career-wise living outside one of those tech hubs.
However, as 'they' say money isn't everything, so it could be worth the trade off to a particular individual or family to make less and live elsewhere.
These numbers match my before/move-to-NYC salary numbers. He mentions the possibility of a raise at current position but doesn't say much about post-NYC/SF raises. It took a few years but I've roughly doubled my initial NYC income.
Also, you have to make it to save it.
I don't understand why people don't just pay more, and hire fewer people. It's easy to see a senior engineer that outputs 2-3x as much as a junior engineer, but you don't see them being comped like that.
If you're a company without a great culture, or other issues, it may still impede your hiring, but just comp people fairly to start with -- plenty of medium sized companies are doing this, and are thriving.
A reality that doesn't seem to get discussed much is that non-FAANG companies in Bay Area don't actually pay that much. If your option is Austin post-IPO or Google, then okay. If your option is Austin post-IPO or Series A Startup in SF, then it's not that straightforward of an equation. It seems pretty common for funded startups in SF to pay something like 140-160k for mid-level engineers. You can easily find 120k salaries in Austin and Raleigh and it goes a hell of a lot further.
Like a mass media news story, these anecdotes are written to appeal to the demo in question, namely engineers not in the Bay Area or NY, to make them feel better about their choices.
This blog post also has the side effect of being framed in a naive way that also has people who do live in NY or the Bay Area discuss the sheer ridiculousness of it, which is why it's already got 51 comments in less than hour.
People move to the Bay Area because of the idea of opportunity. Maybe a friend's startup makes a billion dollars and you get to do your own after, or maybe it goes bust and there are 100s of other jobs that are more interesting and make more than you would in NC, Austin or other small metros. I'm not a billionaire, but I have found MUCH better work and opportunities, and if I choose I can move to a lower cost of living area and buy a house in cash and start my family there.
Put another way, would you rather spend the first 5 years with your kid at home, or would you rather worry about slaving away to a bank for $100K hoping you aren't laid off in a downturn? Being smart with your money even with expensive housing can go a long way.
I have found this to be extremely true working for a small company in CA. We have great benefits and ok salaries for the market, but nowhere near the huge total comp numbers seen at big companies. Decent candidates are hard to come by and generally want more money than we can offer.
No vehicle = massive reduction in options for impromptu leisure activities (unless you factor in costs for rentals or trains / planes, which in my experience was non-negligible). Unless all you plan to do is reachable by public transit. Which gets old after a few years. (Plus let’s be honest, anyone on that kind of salary takes a good deal of cabs / Lyft rides.)
That and, factor in a yard large enough for me to have BBQs and store my sailboat and then we’ll talk.
The amount of recruiter spam being sent to people in fly-over country (or anywhere outside the handful of major hubs by companies within those hubs) is based on the fact that there is almost no cost to sending those messages, and if one in 10,000 pays off the ROI is still probably fantastic for the recruiting firm.
This article is mostly about COL differences and why people may not choose to move, but the premise about the reasons for the volume of recruiting spam is flawed. It's not because "recruiting is hard" (though it is) so much as it can be explained by "sending spam is easy and free".
FWIW, I've been telling recruiters for years now that I'd be willing to knock $20K off my salary for an office with a door that closes. Everyone always treats it like a joke.
The problem with an analysis like this is that people have a strong preference about the environment they live in. I know a lot of people that would never consider moving out of a major city. I have similarly established a clear guide for any future job moves:
Can I afford 6 acres within a 10 minute commute from work?
That narrows down my options quickly, and makes my current job, which I really enjoy, seem extravagant.
Moving to SF/NY makes sense if you're an ambitious, hard-working extrovert who knows how to sell and take advantage of those networks.
For ambitious introverts like myself, remote consulting/contracting feels like the best option.
A childhood buddy of mine moved to SF last year and got a job at a big corp downtown. He manages to save around $3,000/month as a senior developer with a ~$200k salary. No children, living with a partner who works as a teacher, and they're both quite frugal.
I work as a remote contractor from a small European town and am able to consistently save way more than that. I was saving more than that even in the past while working as a sub-contractor through platforms like Toptal.
How big of a salary would one need in order to save > $100k/year in SF (Single, small rental apartment, no car, average middle-class lifestyle)?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadThat’s not even what a fresh college grad would make in total compensation at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc, let alone “mid level”.
A senior engineer at one of those companies would make several times that in total compensation.
P.S. The biggest common mistake I see in salary comparisons is the omission of scheduled stock grants, which sometimes can comprise even the majority of one’s compensation.
As a mid-level engineer currently job hunting in NYC, the salary range for most non-FAANG companies (including most start-ups) seems to be $90-150k.
From my experience, the idea of "mid-level" and "senior-level" employees in our industry seems to be skewed to the left. Mid-level employees are generally 2-5 years into their careers, and senior-level can be anywhere beyond that. When you think of senior-level employees in other industries, you generally assume they have 10-20+ years of experience under their belt.
0-3 years-Junior:You don’t know what you’re doing.
3-8 years-Mid-level: You think you know what you’re doing.
8+ years-Senior:You know that you don’t know what you’re doing.
The best setup IMO is to work at a FAANG company outside the bay, it’s the best of both worlds. Supposedly Amazon pays p90 of market rate, but in my area it’s more like p99.
Source: live in PDX, work at Amazon.
Compensation is, broadly, very generous. They're competing with three of the FAANGs, after all.
As for publishers, please find me one that routinely pays anywhere near FAANG salaries.
EDIT: changed "SWE software engineers" to "SWE salaries". Oof.
(Serious question, not snark).
The vast vast majority of tech firms in SF do not compensate at that level; Yelp, Uber, Square, Twitter, etc, that list goes on. They're all right around that $125k + $5-$20k signing/moving + a fraction of equity for entry level, then scaling up ~5-10% for each position above that.
These Engineer 3/Senior Engineers at a place like Facebook making $400k total comp are, for the most, true stories. But it's not even close to representative of the bay area as a whole.
If an engineer can get a job at one of these companies, and work on exciting & fulfilling work, what’s the incentive to work elsewhere if you get paid a fraction of what you’re worth?
Because — A lot of the time when you see a company complaining about how difficult it is to hire “good engineers”, when you look closer, what you’ll really see is manager(s) (in denial) who really want to hire top-20% engineers at bargain rates.
Because you’re spouse wants to be close to family and there’s no tech where family is located?
But also "work on exciting & fulfilling work"? Hasn't it already been established in previous discussions that the average engineer at Google or wherever may not be doing the most fulfilling of work, becoming a cog in a larger machine, as opposed at a startup? There's only so many roles that gives both high big tech pay and meaningful individual contribution.
With absolutely no offense intended, I've never been offered one of those FAANG-grade packages, so if you were, hypothetically, to try to hire me away from a present position, I would have to insist: fuck you, pay me, I won't leave things I already like to get the same middling compensation.
FWIW I've been working in tech FT professionally as a line PM, head of product, developer, or founder since 2001 - 15 years at the time.
In other words his numbers aren't that far off. FAANG is a different compensation class but shouldn't be the base case as you can't do a comparison of FAANG in Raleigh to FAANG in SFBay/NYC.
I have actually very few emails from the Bay Area in the past few months. Maybe recruiters have gotten together and blackballed me.
There is lots of fun stuff in the Bay Area outside of San Francisco. I always have a blast going to shows, openings, etc in Oakland and Berkeley.
And before you say I “don’t know any better,” note that I spent the vast majority of my life living in and loving NYC.
Those who say the “South Bay is boring” haven’t spent enough time in it. In fact, I have friends who specifically come down to the South Bay to do things. Furthermore, SF is only a 45 minute drive from Mountain View, about what it is from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so I get the best of both worlds, without the defection and the homeless.
Get over this trope.
If you don’t try to go out and look for things, I agree you won’t find them. I am very social, and have found no shortage of things to do. People who complain about this haven’t tried it.
Ones I've visited in San Jose are were extremely underwhelming.
Nob Hill on Grant Rd. in Mountain View.
I come from NYC, where we had fancier things than you’d find in SF, and the South Bay comes close. SF doesn’t.
Then you have to fight the crowds for your activities.
If not, it gives you access to an almost limitless variety of indoor and outdoor recreation.
The cost of these programs must be phenomenal (permanent police presence on the Civic Center plaza, full-time attendants in many subway elevator cars are just a couple examples I've seen near my work), but in a city as rich as San Francisco I think many would say it's a price worth paying to clean up the commons.
It breaks my heart the way this city is squandering its potential with backwards-looking policies that make it impractically expensive for basically everyone, tech employee or no.
The value you lose from your current and future network alone is so devastating that any NerdWallet estimate of your costs is total BS. Lookup how much networks are worth to lifetime earnings
Now your job sucks? Good luck getting a new one you like. Either move back or find something that 'works'
Lastly, your coworkers will be from a smaller pond and instead of learning with the most experienced, you'll atropying your progress as you argue for basic things with people who've never worked in a big pond.
There's a reason people go to hollywood for movies and SF for tech. A bunch of them actually.
What I have observed from listening to recruiters and hiring managers in the bay area is that they are desperate for any talent they can get, which is great if you are a junior or if you simply suck. As a senior developer the work looks for you (like the zombies in World War Z) regardless of the metro.
The problem with being a senior though is whether your teammates operate on your level or whether they are juniors. The problem with being a senior on a newb team is like being a 50 year old man marrying an 18 year old girl. Beauty and first impressions diminish quickly and you are left chasing busy work for immature bullshit.
I think SF is great for people who live and die for the technology. For everyone else just trying to live a good life they can get not quite to SF Sr. level salaries in affordable regions and come out very far ahead. But if I do agree if you are looking for the bleeding edge, SF and NY is where its at.
When I'm interviewing, I don't mind reversing a linked list doing a binary search. It gives me an indication that the company is actually concerned with whether its employees have some baseline competency. I regard it as a positive signal.
Duke Mu did so, and subsequently despatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. 'It is now in Sha-ch'iu,' he added. 'What kind of a horse is it?' asked the Duke. 'Oh, it is a dun-coloured mare,' was the reply. However, on some one being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. 'That friend of yours,' he said, 'whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a nice mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's colour or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?'
Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. 'Has he really got as far as that?' he cried. 'Ah, then he is worth a thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses.'
When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative horse.
- Liezi
Hopefully, the job they are hiring for isn't "master code riddle solver", making the whole process irrelevant whether you're junior or senior. In any case, the interview checks whether you know this problem and its solution or not. That's not a junior/senior distinction.
Bottom line up front here is the difference between seniors and juniors:
Seniors want to accomplish the work so they can either move onto the next task or simply zone off into space. The goal is to accomplish all requirements as aggressively as possible with the smallest result possible. Less is more, but more time is less.
Juniors want to play with tools and code style. Frameworks are a huge deal. Seniors don't want to dick with any of this unless it is in place to intentionally police the juniors. Yes, I understand that juniors can be policed by simply having the proper automation in place, but that doesn't make the juniors feel like they are contributing to a cure for cancer.
I find the wages in my area are the same as Cali. SE Michigan FYI.
But I agree about quality of people. Very few are talented, however that is enough to get me through my personal projects.
That is my experience. Current pay 55 an hour, opportunity for 59 an hour.
Bring on the downvotes.
Improving network for people in non-geographically dense areas seems like a problem waiting for a solution.
When combined with a generally snooty attitude about "small pond" people, it seems like you simultaneously feel that you're going to be the smartest guy in the room and yet aren't smart enough to see the MASSIVE potential benefit of that in a smaller pond. If you have even rudimentary soft skills you could end up a VP of a Raleigh or ATL based company while possibly never even making it out of middle management in SF.
Movie people from Hollywood don't go to Atlanta. Tech people from SV/NYC don't go to other cities. But there are significant incentives for people from everywhere else to consider different aggregator communities as their base when they are planning out their careers.
I don't have a SV or NYC network to lose. The proposition of moving doesn't automatically give me one. All it gives me is a pay raise, which is more than eaten by higher costs of living.
New industries will be born somewhere, and it probably won't be in SV.
The idea that there are just a bunch of small-pond professionals in places like Austin/Atlanta/Raleigh is just...not accurate. A ton of the folks I've worked with actually lived in the Bay until they decided they wanted to start a family and moved to a place where that is possible.
Moved from SF to Chicago about 18 months ago after working in the Bay Area for 17 years. I can't speak for other cities but Chicago is fine from both a network and comp standpoint. The profile of the type of work that's done here is different, sure, but nothing wrong with that. Depending on your point of view, it could be considered refreshing.
On top of that, comp is moving upward here. I'm not sure the trigger but recruiter reach outs started jumping here (like for a couple a week to 10+ a week) about a year ago and I'm seeing a definite upward trend in salary numbers.
Now, this is Chicago, so there is still a lot of dev shops that aren't modernized but there were a lot of shops in the Bay Area I wouldn't touch either for varying reasons. I don't regret moving away from the Bay Area other than the roads suck here due to having real seasons.
For example:
* There's usually only a few large employers in town, and switching jobs is a very diplomatic and drawn out affair
* Buying a house is cheap, but good luck selling it.
* Your salary is lower which is fine due to living costs, but your equity grants will also be lower. This is a big deal.
* Talent learns from talent, and the pace of life in many lower COL is "this is just a job I get paid for" compared to "this is something I will do for life". Learning opportunities are slim.
It works for some, but buyer beware.
But of course it is the only place to be if you want to "change the world" with the next Earth-shattering break-through like Theranos or Juicero.
I have a hard time recommending that someone who is trying to have a family live here. If they are single, and willing to have roommates - sure.
I am hoping that the California High-Speed Rail project opens up housing arrangements that change the equation.
A 2.4 hour round trip commute to Fresno doesn't sound bad if it is on a train. (https://www.hsr.ca.gov/Newsroom/Multimedia/maps.html)
What is also interesting is that Facebook is willingly paying for reactivating the Dumbarton rail bridge. ( https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Fast-growing-Fa... )
As far as networks go, my network is spread all over the country. I have former coworkers in Seattle, San Fransisco, Portland, Austin, Dallas, New York. It hardly matters where you live when you've worked with remote teams for half of your career.
I've worked in tech hubs around the world. I still go back to SF a few times a year and keep connections fresh, because they can make or break things sometimes.
Must have changed a lot in the couple years since I left, because I was having trouble finding senior jobs that paid over $100k/year.
And my cost of living was approximately 30k/year. That's the part I really miss.
When I left Raytheon in 2012 I was making $82,500 + 3%-5% performance sharing. I would probably be about $100,000 now if I had stayed there.
Who around there is paying $140,000 for seniors? If I could have made that I would probably still be there, since I moved to New Jersey for $180,000.
The last time I wanted a new job I just updated my resume on Monster and had 3 interviews a week later and started a great new job two weeks after that.
Sorry you had a negative experience from your move, hope things turn around for you.
There's been one exception to this. A single exception. Of all the recruiters who have contracted me one has been local.
EDIT: To the dead commentator that replied to me:
1) I didn't say people don't want to hire me, I politely decline all recruiter spam with "sorry, I can't relocate." It's just the more I get the more I silently get enraged. I find local jobs and get hired locally just fine without recruiters.
2) Being a senior engineer with as many years experience that I have usually means you are old enough to have put down roots where you are. Very few people make long distance moves for a random job when they are older than 35, unless they are unemployed or changing careers or something like that.
3) No need to use scare quotes around senior.
Maybe it's your attitude that make people not wanting to hire you
Recruiter: Your resume says you have .net experience, we are looking for a Sr. .Net developer, interested?
Me: My resume says I developed some tools in .Net and that the bulk of my background is in php.
Recruiter: Great, would you like to apply?
Simplified but generally accurate. Either way I have had pretty good luck getting jobs via recruiters but there is a lot of chaff you have to get through. Your mileage may vary but I have been happy so far.
1) Send it to the correct email address. Not my personal one, use what's on my resume.
2) Give some indication you've read my resume, such as mentioning a technology listed on it. Not something I've never included.
3) Something about the job. Anything at all, even just what city it's in.
That I can recall, only once has a recruiter passed. Kinda felt bad at turning down what seemed like the only recruiter who was competent at their job.
Unlike many, he was an actual SF native. He grew up there, and has family there. He is a highly competent software developer. He now works in Melbourne, FL. He has in fact switched jobs several times while remaining in the area.
He lives on 12 acres with a commute of about a half hour. He has sheep and a couple dozen chickens. He can shoot his AR-15 in his yard.
What salary would he need in SF to get all that?
If what excites you is web-focused startups, then yeah, you're probably not going to be happy in a lot of other places, but that is just one area of software development and I'd argue it doesn't have any exclusive license on interesting problems or top talent.
The numbers for 125k indeed do not add up. However mid-level in Bay Area is 200k+ and Senior is 300k+. Not sure where 125k comes from.
Finding people with skills expexted for Bay Area’s mid level (forget about Director or VP) is a massive challenge.
140k is a very low offer for someone with 10 years. Offers like that are typically made by desperate startups.
Seniority is assessed by skills and not tenure. Requirements for senior positions are pretty stiff in Bay Area. Seniors need to deliver regarless of circumstances.
Ouch, that feels very low to me. Granted, I'm in Boston, but you can get that at nearly any startup around here (I've both held those jobs and hired people for them). The bigger companies can then throw some real equity on top of that.
Lead is a senior engineer.
Outside of the bay area I can actually afford to have children and a house without being a millionaire. Yeah, I know, its weird. I have enough money left over (even though I have kids and a large house) that my wife isn't forced into labor to prevent immediate financial ruin.
I simply cannot imagine (I mean those words very literally) the horrid state of affairs of making six figures and still being on the verge of poverty.
NYC is rolling out free schooling for children aged 3 and up, known as Pre-3K[1]. It's not a full solution, but it helps alleviate some of the childcare costs in the early years.
The article mentioned: "One semi-local daycare in Manhattan quoted me a waitlist two years deep." Some daycares are in high-demand, but there are also other decent private daycares where the waitlist is (much) shorter or non-existent. While the caregiver outlay is believable, the waitlist datapoint sounds like it was cherry-picked. Depending on the age their child, the author might have had access to free public Pre-3K or Pre-K programs too.
[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/enrollment/enroll-grade-by-grade...
As a result of citywide school choice, people don't really get gentrified out by parents looking for good schools. But many kids will also have really long commute time, and applying for middle and high schools is like a mini college application process, and only people with the time and money can truly navigate it.
Mayor De Blasio kicked off an integration effort[1] in Brooklyn with plans to roll something similar in the other NYC school districts in an effort to counteract the mini-college application process, with mixed reactions depending on where your child would have placed. Reforms are under way for both middle and high school admissions.
[1] https://nypost.com/2018/09/20/de-blasio-kills-admissions-sta...
- general confusion; the guide to high schools, for example, is bigger than the Yellow Pages, and that's with all the information of a high school summarized into a single-sided page. Couple that with Bloomberg splitting failing schools with five schools in the same building and it's just far too overwhelming.
- horrible commute times. Schools were designed to serve their local neighborhoods and usually aren't placed well, particularly in the outer boroughs. If you have to go to a school other than your neighborhood school it can be quite the schlep, especially once you factor in start times. It's impossible to design start times that work for everyone when students come across the entire city, and the lack of coordination also affects things like the overburdened public transport, which gets slammed when schools let out.
- extreme stress on parents and students. You have to go around and tour schools. You have to meet with teachers and principals. You have to attend multiple massive school fairs with staff pushing their schools on you. It's like a college application process, already stressful enough, except you're doing this to children going through puberty. It's absolute madness for even wealthy parents with time to do all of this; working class people working long hours or odd hours or multiple jobs basically don't have a shot. And can you imagine what not getting into your top choices does to kids' well-being?
If school choice were limited to the borough level, it would be more manageable. But at the city level it's far too much.
I'm living in Boston, which admittedly also has a pretty terrible cost of living, although not yet quite NYC or SF. Somerville is trying really hard to catch up though.
It's hard enough here to be able to have space for a partner and/or kids, and maybe 100 sq ft of grass in a yard - but it's at least imaginable, and possible to have a semi-decent commute.
I don't know what Facebook or someone would have to pay me to move to SF and be able to imagine similar. $400-500k? Like, the concept of owning property in SF with any amount of space is mind boggling. Same with NYC. I don't want a 90-minute commute daily.
Priorities for me right now are:
- Space for at least a 1 car garage (in which to keep tools, projects, and a few motorcycles) - At least 100 sq ft of grass/yard - 3 bedrooms for myself, my partner, music and potentially family expansion - A decent commute (under an hour, preferably 30 minutes or less) - A decent kitchen and space to entertain a dozen or so friends for dinner - A down payment that isn't going to be $200k
This isn't going to happen in SF or NYC. Maybe if I live in NJ or San Mateo?
I'll stay with my already-higher than this article mentions salary, and have some prospect of space and such.
NJ commute into a Manhattan office from a suburban home like you describe would pretty much never be less than 50-55 minutes each way, and often longer.
(and they are quick to follow it up with "South Jersey is different.")
IMHO, the unfortunate economics of high urban density in big cities means that the american dream of a patch of green grassy lawn might be something people need to abandon. Kids grow up and become functional, well balanced adults while living in condos, townhouses and apartments in dense cities like Amsterdam, Berlin or in the center of downtown Vancouver BC, without having their own yard. If you go fully condo lifestyle you can pick a location near good schools and public parks.
For some reason I'm reminded of a description written by William Gibson in one of his "Bridge Trilogy" novels about a person in the SF area, in his envisioned near future, maintaining a closely guarded tiny patch of pristine grass lawn...
For reference, I live in NYC with a partner, kid and dog.
The problem arises when you have more than one kid and need more than 2 bedrooms. That's when single income can't afford a bigger apartment, and dual income can't afford double daycare. The kids will always share a bedroom. (I grew up in a family of five sharing one bedroom. Parents slept in living room)
The best you can hope for is to space them out so you never have to pay for double daycare: the new one is born when the old one starts free public school. But then you're at the whim of the quality of public schools.
However, sometimes it takes a while. Especially now that I'm really picky with jobs.
However, if you live out in the boonies where the only employer is Walmart you'll definitely need to move or get a remote gig.
Also, though the article is focused on tech workers, the Bay actually does have other inhabitants. I went out for an interview for a biotech position on the Peninsula recently. Overall, it went well and they offered me $60k. My jaw, of course, needed to be picked off the floor. When I mentioned that, per CA state law, even auto-mechanics make that without a HS degree in their city, let alone the BS/MS/PhD that they required for the position, the company said "well, that's the going rate". I asked if they had hook-ups/dump-points for the RV I would be inhabiting in the parking lot. The req. is still open all these months later.
Tech, and Prop 13, have severely distorted the CA property market to near total dysfunction for proper societal functioning.
This is the great slow-motion tragedy of cities, especially in the modern era. The phrase I've heard is "IQ Shredder". It's probably not great for society in the long run to concentrate your smartest, hardest working, most conscientious people into a few large metros where an unwinnable rat-race leads to them having zero or 1 kids, since parental IQ has a large influence children's IQ.
I'm actually quite concerned personally about the effects of high IQ couples not having children and low IQ couples having a lot but it's not an easy discussion to have since, as I mentioned, people see it as a racist argument when I don't mention race at all.
Different individual humans do have different potential intelligence. Cities everywhere attract intelligent people of all races and genders, this has nothing to do with the racial history of the US.
[0] https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/we-compared-average-iq-sc...
I never said there weren't; the question is which what is the net internal migration? Do more smart people move out of cities and have more kids, or do they move into cities and have fewer?
> let's not forget that California is near the bottom of the list for average IQ
My point was about cities, not states. California has 3 large major cities, some minor ones, and a very large rural area.
> which is a ridiculous measure, anyway
IQ is not everything, but it's strongly correlated with a host of positive outcomes (longevity, educational attainment, income, cooperative behavior, etc).
There is a bit of hope outside the big cities. Farmers tend to be smart. Not every software developer has been lured to the big city.
What is this half baked clickbait doing on HN?
Secondly, distributed teams are nonsense, from an economic point of view.
Why on earth would I pay someone in a "flyover state" $80k when I can get very similar talent for half as much in Argentina? If I'm willing to compromise on time zones, I can pay even less in Eastern Europe or South Asia.
The only reason that your bloated American wage is justified is communication. Good English skills can be purchased in any market in the world, for much less than what Americans demand. Being on site, in the damn office, is how you earn that money.
It's the entry-level wage at top-tier tech companies, and a few second-tier who can compete with them at the junior levels (like Bloomberg). It is not what the average new grad should be expecting.
Is this true? My experience differs; even hiring semi-technical roles where the most important factor was "high-level English competency" I've had really disappointing results. It gets better if you're willing to deal with less than that, but that's a pretty rough compromise for a lot of highly collaborative roles.
Strong technical skills are easier to source, but strong technical skills without good communication is tough to square.
So I think it would depend on if you could convince a judge that the TOEFL score is relevant to the job at hand, and not just being used as a discriminatory stand-in for an IQ test.
The working class worry about making rent.
A senior professional (in any field) cares about building a secure life, buying property, raising a family, saving for retirement.
For a whole bunch of people it's the entire reason they put all of that effort into their craft in the first place (otherwise they'd move out into the country and work on OSS all day).
You're going to struggle to hire competent, rested, mature, well rounded individuals if you expect them to rent tiny flats downtown and have that be their life.
I don't have a visa anyway, but that's part of the reason I haven't bothered looking in to moving to SF.
It seems to be built around the idea that you spend your youth grinding in a rented flat, with rental furniture, using rental cars, buying every meal outside, so that in your 40's you might be able to move out and live a decent life with some modicum of security.
Baffling. Like, what are you going to do socially? You think you'll just "be rich" somewhere else and live in your house with all the other SF migrants?
It's a home first and foremost, and a monetary asset second.
If your model is 'grind your 20s-40s away living in a box and then move out' then I implore you to read my comment again.
I often wonder if London looks worse externally than it actually is (you can afford a house or apartment here if you have a professional job, it's just probably going to involve commuting and not be in a prestigious area).
Of course, if you're something actually socially useful like a teacher or fireman, you're buggerino'd.
I use the term 'house' out of laziness. It's more a commentary on the fact that a 30 year old renting is just incompatible with a decent life in the UK (outside of some secure older council tenancies) whether you live on the ground floor or the fifth floor.
You'll probably have to move every year or two - it's not yours to decorate - the furniture might not be yours - it's not a home, it's a longer-term hotel.
That might be different elsewhere.
I am in my late 20s currently, and I'm open to a change in perspective. Maybe there's value in consistency that I will appreciate more at some point. But being told that I won't count as a senior professional until I care about buying property irks me.
My claim is that a senior professional (in _any_ field - not just a senior developer) doesn't care about the cost of rent.
It includes your scenario - of course you should be able to rent and move about if you want to.
If the cost of the rent is heavy on your mind, your position is not that of a senior professional.
The title has become meaningless because it's effectively become an entry-level job.
(Externally it looks like in SF, real entry-level jobs result in, well, homelessness or living in a van or something).
Money-wise, you're no longer throwing it away on rent, but paying down a mortgage that eventually is paid off entirely.
On top of that, you're also no longer racing against the end of the rent contract, and can wait a bit - or move earlier - to find a new place you really like.
The turning point for me was, here in Chicago, when I was renting and my dad sent me some properties with the costs laid out: These places were significantly nicer, and the mortgage cost per month was ~60% what I was paying in rent.
- Illinois is broke and is going to increase real estate taxes every year for the foreseeable future. So while you can also sell to escape the tax bill, the value will just drop to compensate. - There are many fixed costs to buying a place that aren't reflected in the monthly bills. Such as closing costs on both the purchase and sale (including chicago's lovely transfer stamp tax, realtor commissions, etc).
Also keep in mind how many high-rise condo buildings are going up right now. This can only be bad for prices of "old" condos around the city.
You're not going to afford to buy real-estate in San Francisco on a salary. Full stop. You don't buy multi-million-dollar houses when the company might go pear-shaped and leave you without a paycheck, even if your paycheck is in the six figures.
Isn't that double what was discussed in the article?
It would be helpful to us who are accustomed to American social life to learn about what you perceive your social life tied into your work life to be like.
There are a whole bunch of people in London doing the flat-share-can't-afford-anything-rent-it-all lifestyle too.
I think it was good that he focused on rent instead of for-sale price. The sale price includes other factors (property taxes, interest rates, expectation of rent increases) that do not affect the cost of living, and many authors get confused when they complain about rising prices while ignoring rents; see https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2017/10/housing-part-264-... for further explanation
Sure, the capitalist-economy middle class is defined by having substantial property investments as well as labor income, but there's no reason that has to be in one's primary residence. There are pros and cons of tying up capital in an owner-occupied residence.
The median housing price in SF is $1.6M. There is no choice but to rent, or perhaps suffer an absolutely terrible commute.
(And since someone inevitably quips that the entire Bay Area makes $300k+: the $125k in the article is a bit low; the median tech salary is ~$135k. Some lucky souls pulling down massive stock benefits at a FAANG might be making enough total, but those of us not at a FAANG are not so lucky.)
Not everyone wants to live in a tacky huge McMansion that they can fill up with trinkets and garbage they don't use. See? I can make snarky judgemental comments about your lifestyle choices too.
But seriously, not all "competent, rested (???), mature, well-rounded" individuals think living in an rental apartment in a vibrant, walkable neighborhood is the rank indignity you seem to believe it is. They're perfectly happy living in small spaces and spending their money on travel, hobbies, food, and saving for retirement instead.
However, as 'they' say money isn't everything, so it could be worth the trade off to a particular individual or family to make less and live elsewhere.
If you're a company without a great culture, or other issues, it may still impede your hiring, but just comp people fairly to start with -- plenty of medium sized companies are doing this, and are thriving.
This blog post also has the side effect of being framed in a naive way that also has people who do live in NY or the Bay Area discuss the sheer ridiculousness of it, which is why it's already got 51 comments in less than hour.
People move to the Bay Area because of the idea of opportunity. Maybe a friend's startup makes a billion dollars and you get to do your own after, or maybe it goes bust and there are 100s of other jobs that are more interesting and make more than you would in NC, Austin or other small metros. I'm not a billionaire, but I have found MUCH better work and opportunities, and if I choose I can move to a lower cost of living area and buy a house in cash and start my family there.
Put another way, would you rather spend the first 5 years with your kid at home, or would you rather worry about slaving away to a bank for $100K hoping you aren't laid off in a downturn? Being smart with your money even with expensive housing can go a long way.
That and, factor in a yard large enough for me to have BBQs and store my sailboat and then we’ll talk.
It's not that you can't take a bus with kiddos, it's the emergencies, especially in a place like SF with less than 'efficient' mass transit.
Your kid puked in class today? Gonna need a car to come pick them up.
Your kid broke an arm at the park? Gonna need a car to go to Urgent Care.
Your kid has a science fair project due tomorrow that they just told you about? Gonna need a car to go pick up supplies.
This article is mostly about COL differences and why people may not choose to move, but the premise about the reasons for the volume of recruiting spam is flawed. It's not because "recruiting is hard" (though it is) so much as it can be explained by "sending spam is easy and free".
Can I afford 6 acres within a 10 minute commute from work?
That narrows down my options quickly, and makes my current job, which I really enjoy, seem extravagant.
It reads like just another rant against sf/nyc. Some back-of-the-envelope math with conclusions that we all knew already.
For ambitious introverts like myself, remote consulting/contracting feels like the best option.
A childhood buddy of mine moved to SF last year and got a job at a big corp downtown. He manages to save around $3,000/month as a senior developer with a ~$200k salary. No children, living with a partner who works as a teacher, and they're both quite frugal.
I work as a remote contractor from a small European town and am able to consistently save way more than that. I was saving more than that even in the past while working as a sub-contractor through platforms like Toptal.
How big of a salary would one need in order to save > $100k/year in SF (Single, small rental apartment, no car, average middle-class lifestyle)?