Look, you're preaching to the choir about not living in "the hip areas of SF". People around here have lost their minds -- they all want to crowd into the same 20-ish blocks of trendy real estate, and pretend that it's the city's fault when those blocks are expensive. But, I digress...
My point is that if a company wants you to work in SF, you should be demanding a salary commensurate with the costs of that lifestyle. Making an excuse for the company not to pay you is silly. Making a daily BART commute and living in Oakland is fine, if that's what you want to do, but you shouldn't be doing it because a tech startup won't pay you enough to afford housing near where you work.
Re:2015 Engineering Salaries Reviewed
by chimeracoder on Wednesday August 12, 2015 @06:49PM
(#10051276)
> People around here have lost their minds -- they all want to crowd into the same 20-ish blocks of trendy real estate
It would help if more than ~20 blocks of San Francisco were conveniently accessible by subway. BART, MUNI, and Caltrain are woefully inadequate.
Plenty of people -- most people? -- in SF have a car too, and no, you don't actually need $500/month for a car. And hey, it's eminently possible to live in Oakland without a car if you really feel that's a priority.
I agree with you: the market is efficient. It's efficient and filled with people who put a big premium on being near the hip areas of SF. If you have less money than those people, you can get more monetarily efficient by being willing to be farther from the hip areas of SF. If you have identical preferences to a bunch of other people making $100,000-$150,000 in an area averse to adding housing density, then... well, you're going to be bidding a lot for a limited supply of housing.