At these rates it doesn't make any sense for any company to hire in the bay area. There are amazing engineers elsewhere in the US and in the world who have much more reasonable salary expectations and also live in places with much more reasonable living expenses.

Bay area engineers like to pretend that there are no people of their calibre elsewhere in the world, but that is just flat out wrong.

Not really. Developers who are good enough to command that wage in the Bay Area, but who live elsewhere, also know how good they are. They might be willing to take a slight pay cut from what the lives-in-Bay-Area person would be paid, but whatever the pay cut is, it will not be proportional to cost of living. E.g. if I could earn 400k living in SF, but you offer to pay me 200K living in Lincoln, Nebraska, I'll turn you down. Not because that's not a good wage for the area, but because it communicates to me, as a potential employee, that you are trying to effectively extract rents on my productivity. You know that I'd be worth at least 400K to your business, but you want to slurp up an extra 200K off the top of that by paying someone who resides elsewhere. As an employee, this says you don't value me according to what I can add, but instead are looking to minimize my share in what I produce, and will use geography as a convenient excuse for it.

Beyond a certain level of salary, salary stops varying too much by cost of living or geography. If I make well over 200K per year in a major city, I'm going to expect someone else to pay me 200K/yr at least no matter where I live.

I wouldn't even try to get other job offers to negotiate you on it -- I'll just simply believe you're not meritorcratic and flat out reject your offer and view your company skeptically from then on. Low-balling an exceptional engineer over geography is dysfunctional in the same way as working really hard to hire a senior, experienced engineer and then telling them "2 weeks vacation is the standard for all new hires.." or something. It's just a big red flag.

I agree with the parent comment of this.

The bay area gets a lot of attention because it's the software capital of the world, and software has these crazy gross margins and rapid life cycles that allow companies to be born, experience explosive growth, make insane profits, (potentially) suffer radical declines, leading to a quick boom or bust. Software companies make great news stories, so the bay area gets a lot of attention, and many talented people who aren't sure where to go decide to move there.

I live there now and work out of coworking spaces where I've met a number of startup founders. Many of them are self-proclaimed visionaries hyped up by VR and AR or IoT. Few of them are as smart as my friends who are getting their Masters and PhD degrees at Duke, Wash U, or Case Western. The most impressive startup I saw in the last year was being made by a self-taught programmer/entrepreneur building his own company out of Colorado Springs.

Beyond just my anecdotal evidence, where do MIT and Harvard graduates go? Where do Georgia Tech, Rice U, John's Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon graduates go? Silicon Valley doesn't take all of their students nor just the top in their class. Some people move to DC, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Austin, NYC, or Denver because they have family or friends there, or because the kind of work in these other cities is more appealing than The Bay.

Apologies for the rant. I realized after writing it that your 'Not really' comment was probably in response to the parent's assertion that companies should hire from outside the bay area, while I took it as 'Not really' in that there are no engineers of the same calibre outside SV.

Regardless, the amount of hubris and hype over the Bay Area is staggering when there are so many equally talented engineers all over the US.

Why do you talk about ivy league graduates? Honestly, the degree is completely irrelevant. If you're a good developer living in Europe and/or the US, you can command $200k-400k a year (often as a consultant) doing specialised work. Plenty of companies are comfortable paying a day rate of $2000-5000 for someone who can deliver results. Not always super easy to get the work, but doable.

I think that the common US conception of education value and pedigree is a function of the high sticker costs and some romantic notion of meritocracy.

Seriously, I work for a US company in Europe, and am massively surprised (and disconcerted) by the fixation on where someone went to school.

We had an awesome candidate a few months back, did 4 interviews with us, aced them all, and one of the final interviewers (US-based) was obsessed with where they got their university education, whereas I don't think anyone else had even noticed it (being more focused on their skills).

Turns out she'd gone to Oxford though, so it was all good :/

Some businesses extract value from an employee based on how impressive-seeming that person is on paper. This happens a lot in consulting, finance, law, arts, academia, corporate business administration and politics. In these domains, status and affiliation are very important, generally vastly more important than actual productivity. Since these fields are also associated with things like wealth, elite status, access to private clubs and opportunities, being a sought after relationship partner, etc., it glamorizes them and by extension glamorizes the path necessary to get to them -- typically either happening to come from a well-connected family or else attending an "elite" school and succeeding in networking there.

Effects like this snowball. So once a school is known for producing graduates that others are desperate to affiliate with in a certain field, like say art or law, then impressive people from other fields may be drawn to work there, like an excellent professor of computer science who thereby actually does elevate the level of education granted to computer science graduates, making graduates into the sorts of people that tech companies want to get on-paper for acqui-hires because acquirers will want to affiliate with them.

One general trend I see in humanity is that the more that we advance a sort of scientific and rational understanding of the world -- something that should supplant most of these systems of credential -- the more that human politics is used to build Dutch book-like circumstances in which, no matter what the outcome, impressive-seeming-ness and competition to affiliate with "fancy" people will continue to be the dominant manner of achieving wealth and autonomy.

To be clear, even though I attended an Ivy school, I find this lamentable. I did not enjoy my time there and feel basically how Mike Reiss feels. But at the same time, I also see all the banter on Hacker News about how the degree doesn't matter and I just roll my eyes. What is it that people think? That something like HackerRank or TripleByte are going to democratize tech hiring? Please. They will be (and already are being) used as just additional tools in the political toolbox to allow people to make up whatever arbitrary standards they desire for the sake of favoring candidates based on political reasons.

My comment was solely about the desire or ability to pay top non-Bay Area devs far less than Bay Area devs.

I agree about the hubris. And for as much hubris as there is about the coveted "SV developer" it's at least 10x worse hubris regarding the coveted SV startup as employment destination.

You have to bear in mind that the dollars productivity of a programmer (how much money that programmer brings) doesn't only depend of his/her skills, but also of the company he's working. A programmer can bring tens of millions a year if he works in HFT in a hedge fund, much less otherwise. Companies in the Bay area have access to more funding, and are (I assume) willing to pay good programmers the high salaries you mention to be able to bring quicker their products to market. A standard company isn't in that situation and paying 400k for a top programmer, as good as he may be, isn't probably just worth it (at least if that programmer is an individual contributor).

I have not found this to be true at all. The highest wage I've ever earned was from a rank and file big box corporate firm doing incredibly boring parochial line of business work as an intermediate developer smack in the middle of the engineering hierarchy.

I've worked in quant finance before too and the trouble there is that pay is more political. Firm sizes are smaller and the people with political power extract a bunch of rent, then leave a comparatively tiny bonus pool for all of the low level workers. It takes years of soul crushing political games to get up into that stratosphere of much higher bonuses. On the bottom, the firms will also hassle you hard during negotiations to try to ratchet down your base wage too, and make lots of unverifiable promises about how compensation will be made up out of bonuses. Whether this turns out true or not is largely a function of whose political darling you are. Ironically, as boring as the work is, this happens far less in rank and file companies.

I think there are so many confounding variables that it's not useful to draw sweeping conclusions about this. Sometimes big box corporate type companies will pay huge wages for someone who just maintains something that is not a revenue powerhouse at all. Sometimes firms will restructure to have fancy new divisions that "are like a start-up inside of an established company" (ugh) and they'll hammer down on only hiring young, inexperienced workers on cheap wages in a shiny new urban office who will work a ton of hours. It varies basically as much as the hyper local political circumstances of the teams vary.

> There are amazing engineers elsewhere in the US and in the world who have much more reasonable salary expectations and also live in places with much more reasonable living expenses.

Then hire them either remotely or open an office at a place where the living expenses are much cheaper (but the latter also costs money for the company which it could also spend in salaries). Where is the problem?

Can verify - I turned down an opportunity for lead frontend work a year ago for $350k-400k (a lot of compensation in stock/bonuses, so it was variable), and that wasn't even at a big tech company.

(For the curious, I opted for tremendous work-life balance instead)

Where are you currently in your career? I'm kind of curious, because I never hear of compensation packages normally going up that high. So I'm wondering what skills companies are looking for at that price.

At that point, I was 2 1/2 years in - that was a year ago. That was a rarity I think, although there are numerous stories of Netflix paying $300k+ now.

400k isn't unusual about 6 years in.