L4 is ~215k. L5 (Senior) is ~265k.
Factor in free breakfast/lunch/dinner, free gym, free laundry, generous 401k matching, other perks and discounts, and the gap widens even more.
Of course, this is just "a couple minutes of google research"--I am not a subject matter expert, as someone on HN kindly pointed out last time I posted these here. Also, they are based on self-reported surveys and don't include sellable equity, so take it with a grain of salt. I don't know where better data would be published. I'm intuitively not too surprised by these figures--I think the HN demographic is probably pretty skewed towards the higher end, judging by all those threads where people toss around $150K and $200K salaries as "normal".
1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...
Throwing those out as typical is disingenuous.
The median sales price of a Santa Clara County 3 bedroom house is $820,000. This is $3,877/mo, plus $850/mo property taxes, for a housing cost of $4,727/mo
That $140,000/yr is taxed at $48,922 in the state of California, leaving $91,078, or $7,589/ mo income.
CA Income ($7,589) - CA Housing Costs ($4,727) = $2,682 leftover.
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The median sales price of a Cobb County 3 bedroom house is $173,000. This is $818/mo, plus $140/mo property taxes, for a housing cost of $958/mo
That $80,000/yr is taxed at $23,600 in the state of Georgia, leaving $56,400, or $4,700/ mo income.
GA Income ($4,700) - GA Housing Costs ($958) = $3,742 leftover.
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I'm not saying my numbers are valid for every person's situation, only that this is an example of a situation where the numbers work in Atlanta's favor.