Agreed, and the reason I am sitting here in Upstate New York, making way more(cost of living) adjusted than I would there. Though it can be argued you're paying the experience tax working for big names there. But it doesn't interest me.

I've worked both in and out of Silicon Valley and you can't beat SV in terms of "opportunity risk". Most places outside of the area are one-horse towns when it comes to tech: If you lose your job there's nothing else there, you're picking up your family and moving to another city at least, maybe another state.

I lived on the east coast for years, and I'd happily move back in a heartbeat, but I'd be a nervous wreck every time it looked like another downturn was coming and I might have to scramble to find another job.

That's just crazy talk, there are PLENTY of companies to work for. If you're talking about big tech companies sure, but for every big tech company, there are zillions of other companies that require big tech people. I work for a company that is complete unrelated to my field. I get paid well, I travel the world to their ninety offices, and my house is only a five minute commute.

The northeast, NY/NJ/PA/DE/DC/MD area has a vibrant economy aplenty. Within a 3 hour radius, there's virtually an unlimited amount of jobs across a ton of industries.

The places that scare me are places like Chicago & Atlanta. Outside of Chicago, there's virtually nothing. Outside of Atlanta, it's the same, which usually means moving across the country for something.

This is a ridiculous trope which keeps getting trotted out.

You can easily live in SV for under $100k/year. You can earn >$200k as an engineer in SV (and in few other places). SV is almost certainly going to leave you with more money in your pocket than working at the average tech job.

The ">$200K/yr engineer" is also a ridiculous trope. I'm sure there are a handful of outlier engineers at top companies making that, but the median base Software Engineer salary in the Bay Area is anywhere from $100k to $105k depending on your source (+ maybe a few K in equity depending on the company).

If as a mid career engineer you can only make 105k in SV, then leave the valley and go to the Midwest. Random senior engineers make more than that in KC, with cheap cost of living. Top senior engineers make a lot more.

Almost any publicly available source is heavily skewed downwards. Also, total compensation is much more important than base salary.

I am a fairly mediocre engineer. I have less than a decade of experience and have never worked at a "top" company. Yet I earned over $200k last year.

I don't agree with this. People making good money would be most often the ones to boast about it. You sound like my hiring manager regarding total compensation. Base salary is everything, and I can prove this when I lost 20% of my "total compensation" in no bonus this year for the first time ever.

You can downplay your expertise, but from reading the About of morgante.net you have plenty of accolades, programming contributions, winning the 2013 ArabNet developer tournament and receiving awards from MIT, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, starting various companies, and even an investment fund. You are very much in a top minority percentage making $200,000 a year with under ten years experience.

Congrats! That's awesome, and I'm really happy for you. You're a far outlier.

$110k is an opening offer to a new grad these days. A few years in, you'd be at least $140-$150k. These are not outlier rockstars; they are standard pay bands at big tech companies. (And to be clear I'm talking salary, stock would be a few tens of thousands on top of that).

I'm not sure how attainable $200k is, but $105k for a mid-career adult is quite low. Perhaps that is the case at actual startups, definitely not the big ones or unicorns.

Unfortunately the publicly-available reports that exist on Bay Area Software Engineer salaries disagree with you. I don't claim to be an expert on this--just someone who can search Google.

$111,885 average [1]

$110,554 average [2]

$103,000 average [3]

I know this is HN, where everyone makes $150K and has $1M in savings and a supermodel girlfriend, but in the real world I think things are a little different.

1: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-facebook-dont-pay-the-...

2: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

3: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...

The big tech companies are VERY standardized in their compensation for new grads. I guarantee you that at the one I know in the most detail, the base salary for a new grad is a bit over $100k. Add bonus and stock, and it's pretty easy to get to around 150k within a year or two. Not base, but total cash compensation. This is certainly not AVERAGE, but those companies hire thousands of engineers, so it's not exactly "unicorn" status either. This is not an estimate, or extrapolated from a couple of data points - this is actual knowledge of the compensation structure I'm speaking from.