No, it's really not -- it's actually more like $77,000[1]. With the bulk of the difference being driven by housing prices. And $77,000 is actually above the average salary for a SE in Ft. Lauderdale (according to Glassdoor: $73,000).

[1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...

Forget about having a house with a shop/garage unless you're willing to spend a million and a half, though.

Closest "real" hiking trails start along Skyline Boulevard - there's plenty of them but it is not close.

20 minute driving time includes Rancho San Antonio, Stevens Creek County Park, Villa Montalvo, and Lexington Reservoir, all of which are perfectly adequate half-day hikes. Make it 30-40 and you also get the Los Trancos/Montebello/Russian Ridge area, Castle Rock, Almaden, Calero, Garin/Dry Creek, and Don Edwards.

Almost anywhere else in the country, that $2200/mo will get you quite the spread; you can trade off between square footage, neighborhood, and commute time, but you're going to have very nice accommodations if you're willing to put that much money up. In SF, you're lucky if you can get a 1-bd for that, and LA is only slightly better.

While the price of goods doesn't fluctuate as much, housing is a HUGE factor. If you want something functional for a family of 4 (or if you just like a lot of space), you are going to be paying at least $4000/mo in these tech hubs, or living 60 min+ away.

Florida also has no income tax, v. California's rate between 7.5% and 13.3%. That is a big dent too.

One other note. If you have the skills, look for remote work in companies that pay rates that are higher than you get paid in your local market. It's a great way to make the COL differential work even more in your favor.

[0] http://sf.curbed.com/2016/3/30/11332920/rent-small-soma-micr...

I truly don't understand why anyone would live in Florida unless they were growing sugarcane. The climate is extremely hot and damp, and there is Zika according to the CDC. So what is good about Florida?

True, in the summer it becomes a hellscape, but 5 months of paradisiacal weather is better than most people get. ;)

Florida has reasonably priced housing (for the most part), plenty of land, and with almost 20 million residents, there is tons of variety across the state; from most population centers, it's a relatively easy drive to more than enough to interest anyone, no matter what you're into (except maybe skiing).

It's very scenic with palms swaying, beautiful sunsets and beaches, many lakes and an abundance of interesting wildlife.

Florida also has no state income tax, strong homestead protections, pretty-OK gun laws, and otherwise mostly-sane state policies.

Zika is a non-issue at this point and there are only a tiny handful of cases of local transmission. Florida is a large state and only the very tip of the peninsula was impacted by local transmission. However, it's always wise to avoid mosquito bites.

There are lots of reasons to like Florida. :)

TBH the harder part of the bay area and kids is actually finding an affordable place to live that have good schools.

At least for HS, MV High has come a very long way since my time and would probably lead the "affordable good school" category in the area.

Translation: it's expensive to live where rich people live. "Good schools" is a flimsy proxy for wealthy, exclusive suburbs.

Where I'm from, "good schools" is a nice way of saying "it's a white neighborhood". I would not feel good about letting "good schools" influence where I live, or buy a home.

Eh. The Bay Area isn't where you're from. Actually, relatively few people in the Bay Area use the term "good schools" at all because they tend to have few children and the idea of school quality isn't on their radar.

> wealthy, exclusive suburbs

Honestly if you wanted to say Bay Area residents were coding racism into how they talk about where they live, you could point to the San Francisco fetish where people AVOID suburbs like Oakland and the East Bay, though honestly that's _actually_ because of all the public-transit-accessible hipster coffee spots in the one and the violent crime and strip-mall Starbucks and sprawling freeways with hours-long commutes to work from the other.

There is no need to inject race. Plus, in the bay area, many good schools are comprised of mostly minorities.

Good schools in the bay area just mean good schools, as based on standardized testing methodology, class sizes, dollars per student, extracurricular activities available, and acceptance rates to selective colleges.

You can definitely pay a lot of money to send your child to good private schools.

Citation needed. I have lived in this country for a long time, and have never hear it used in this manner, and Google searches turn up nothing.

> pretending like the comment is "injecting" race into the discussion ignores American history

"Pretending". Way to jump to conclusions. If you're proposing that an innocuous phrase like "good school" is forever tainted by history, that is a small and petty view of the world. That's like saying "honky tonk" has racist connotations because of the word honky.

Here for instance was a fair housing organization filing a lawsuit suggesting that real estate agents used "good schools" as a proxy for race in attempts to racially steer buyers.

Its in the normal lexicon enough for Urban Dictionary to consider that the top definition: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=good%20school...

I'm not suggesting saying "hey they are doing a great job over there, my kid goes to a good school" is enough to assume that the person is saying their kid goes to a white school, but in the context of a discussion about real estate pricing, distance to city centers, etc, the term "good schools" has connotations.

That you are unaware of them is fine, but it wasn't the original commenter that injected those connotations, they've been around for a long time.

Urban dictionary and one isolated lawsuit doesn't a pattern generally make.

I can accept that this term has been used in a certain way as a code phrase signifying something else, but that's been true of so many phrases and terms that it loses all significance. (Is nice restaurant also coding for no minorities?)

The original statement that's objectionable is I would not let "good schools" influence where you live and buy a home, which is ridiculous. Taking school district reputation and test scores when buying a house is neither racist or something to be ashamed of, no matter how many quotes you put around "good school".

I'm willing to bet that as you limit you data set to a smaller region, salaries normalize even further.

It really boils down to your relative earning power vs your professional peers (including non engineers) in the direct geographic vicinity of you, in a supply constrained bidding war situation like desirable real estate.

Let's say the average primary care physician's salary has been matching inflation for 20 years while that of the software engineer has outpaced it. Well even if a physician is doing just fine vs his physician peers, the rapid rise of sw eng salaries and the dramatically increased number of such people will have reduced his or her relative earning power and the standard of living he or she can afford, over said 20 years.

Probably, but doing menial tasks behind where the modern edge progresses in technologies, your skills would become obsolete in 5-10 years. You'd either need to proceed to a general managerial path in your chosen no-name company, or devote time for self-study to stay in touch with the fashionable technologies.

Because traditional industries are so out of touch with the latest hipster trends, giving them just a little taste (calibrated to appear as bottom line-relevant as possible to the right stakeholders) can make you seem like the second coming of Jesus, get you massive raises and promotions, and make you essentially layoff proof. I remember I had a job in 2006 - where I was a low-grade operations nobody - and I prototyped something in client-side JS for an internal project. Overnight I became Master Sensei, and everyone in engineering (not my division) knew my name. They were mortified when I tendered my resignation.

It doesn't always work. Megacorps don't intrinsically care about new technologies for their own sake, and it is true that defending the value of engineering to a bunch of greying MBAs in financial services or retail can be demoralising, at times infuriating or heartbreaking. Sometimes this type of activity can be consigned to skunkworks that never get a hearing or see the light of day, whether for political reasons (you're infringing on the J2EE guys' turf) or because management isn't tech-savvy enough to understand the value.

But man, when it works, it works! I'm in telecom, and much of the industry - by the numbers, forget Twilio and WebRTC - operates according to soul-deadening customs that have changed little since the 80s and the advent of the micro-computer. Core routing tables and key provisioning databases are still distributed as giant spreadsheets and Access databases. Cable companies can be surprisingly low-tech, too.

I've seen what happens when one becomes their connection to spiffy, modern innovation techniques like regular expressions and Python ETL jobs. The threshold for mind-blowing Bushido is startlingly low in enterprise. That can really make you an A-player in their eyes.

Your main competition is going to be that these companies prefer to source such insights from giant professional services companies and consultancies, who can be similarly low-tech, but some of whom have realised there's enormous money to be made in opening large companies' eyes to 2003-era technology like Perl and Subversion. There's also the fact that big companies don't like the risk profile of depending on one guy or a small team to do advanced stuff. They'd rather spend millions of dollars to have it done mediocrely by Accenture or Deloitte, in the customarily obese enterprise fashion, skies darkened with "Linux resources" and the Sun eclipsed by UML diagrams and process maps.

The other main danger is, as you allude, falling behind because the threshold for being ahead of the curve is so low. If you show them screen scraping or write an internal portal in a modern JS framework, they'll think you're from the future. Then you get into an actual tech company job and realise you've become an entrenched maintenance specialist in some decade-old stuff.

LOL, hi, nice to meet you. Well technically, I work at a small agency that does this for many local businesses.

Best job I've ever had. Fair pay, work with great people, zero stress, work on whatever I want, < 40 hours a week every week, actually get to help real people and see how happy they are with our work.

Let me rush to trade that in for a "career in software."

Lots of that is on older "enterprise" stacks v. cool open-source or experimental stacks, but it's still a plenty legitimate career path, and you'd be surprised how modern a company that looks like a dinosaur at first glance can be when you look a little deeper. Example: Walmart runs lots of stuff on Node.js.

If you want to slave away in a startup, then yeah, you're probably going to want to be in SF, SEA, or NYC.

If you want a long-term job at a stable employer where most people don't take themselves too seriously, overtime is rarely or never expected, and you work with a bunch of smart, established people (even if they're a bit change averse), there is plenty of opportunity outside of the tech hubs.

And on salary, the average may be an OK guideline but it is by no means the top of the market. Lots of good people will hire in at 1.5-2x the area's average.

Having one company in an area does not help. My original comment dealt with the risk of when that one company doesn't work out for whatever reason. If that's the only tech employer in the area, you're screwed.

Even if there are a few in the area, getting a tech job is not like getting a job at the local Starbucks. One could easily apply to all 20 companies in the area and not get anywhere. Ask me how I know. At least in the Bay Area, you could apply to 20 companies a week and not run out of potential opportunities.

For one, you have a lot more competition from other applicants, because every brogrammer thinks that he needs to move to SV to be part of the scene (and I really dislike that SV is becoming Hollywood-for-nerds; flooded with tons of fledgling wannabes who worship at the feet of an elite few).

For two, you have a lot more snobbery and people expecting specific pedigrees. They want Ivy League, they want other startup or big-name tech experience, etc. There are a lot more people who think talking to a candidate coming from a job in Nebraska where he wrote software for a company that runs a machinery rental business (for example) is below them. That type of experience is severely undervalued, and if SF needs anything it's more people with an appreciation for a stable production ethos.

For three, SF is appreciably worse along most axes and the extreme cost of living means the "extra" money go down the drain very quickly, seriously diluting the real value of the salary. This is compounded when you consider that taxes are also very high in CA and SF, especially compared with states without income taxes like TX or FL.

Four, we're talking about "the Midwest" as a unit here, but the fact is there are a lot of cities in the Midwest and some of them have a lot more bustle than others. There are not many companies that are strictly tech companies, but there are hundreds of potential employers in every metro area, and again, some are much more active than others.

Also, when discussing job markets in the "Midwest", I'm really referring to everything that's not a tech hub, because the distinction is really tech hub v. non-tech hub. Houston and Dallas/Ft. Worth are in the top 5 biggest metros in the US and I'm sure there's plenty of tech work there. Florida is one of the most populous states in the US and the availability will depend on the metro, but they have a good share of tech work. The Mountain West has much to offer (especially Utah).

The point is that there is plenty of opportunity for someone who wants to look outside of NYC, SF, SEA, and LA. No one should feel like they're trapped there as long as they're willing to work for some companies that aren't household names.

Lastly, you never run out of opportunities if you're willing to work remote, and this can be a good way to maximize the benefit of low COL areas.

This is true for SF and NYC but not for SEA (all three of which you mention in the grandparent post). Washington has no state income tax. The cost of living in Seattle is also more comparable to, say, Austin than SF or NYC.

I'll dispute that your points one and two about competition and snobbery apply less in Seattle than they do in SF. I've never been to NYC or LA so I won't comment on those. My feeling about those areas is that the tech scene in NYC is more comparable to SF than to SEA and the tech scene in LA is more comparable to SEA than to SF - although you still deal with the crazy California state income taxes and cost of living issues.

Personally, I think that it is preferable to work for a tech company where what you do is a profit center rather than for a non-tech company where what you do is a cost center. That said, plenty of people make a good living making internal software for non-tech companies. I am sure quite a few of them are great programmers. If they prefer that lifestyle to what they would get in a tech hub, more power to them.

It is of course true that the vindictive or psychotic boss could always try to make your life a living hell by filing a ridiculous lawsuit, but if they want to do that, they'll do it no matter what state you live in, and just trudge up whichever allegations seem most plausible.

California's toting of such protections is really a crafty political scheme. The change in law doesn't really make a substantial material change for anyone, as it's almost never worthwhile to sue someone over their side project (and if it is, you can usually get them on all kinds of violations that are related to but are not directly "he was employed by me while he made it"), but it sounds great in a soundbite and gives the people something to feel better about when they look at their tax rates.

Aside from these "protections", the state has significant disadvantages for someone interested in running a side project or any other type of business, not the least of which are the high taxes.

Not really. The quality of life on just about any axis, from parks and recreation to culture to education in Ft. Lauderdale is just inferior. Also, $50k doesn't go as far as you think there. There are a number of day-to-day and intangible costs (e.g. commute) that are actually less expensive in the valley.

On the other extreme - absolutely free - I would take Fort Lauderdale Beach and the weather over anything SV has to offer. After all there was a move to totally relocate Hollywood movie industry from CA to South Florida. And parks? What measure does SV outperform? Everglades National Park is probably 4-5x larger than SV and it's in Fort Lauderdale's backyard.

Though South Florida doesn't get the tech press, we also have billion dollar startups. As far as schools, I went to a public high school (top 50 in the US) not even the best rated public school in my area, but my 4 brothers and I all have graduate degrees, fellow alumni include astronauts, countless professional athletes and even a tech founder by the name Jeff Bezos.

I won't touch culture, because it is much to loaded but there is no shortage of meuseums dedicated to arts and sciences. Come to Wynwood during Art Basel and you might leave thinking we have the most progressive city in the world artistically. Finally, I don't want to minimize the diversity of the SV demographics but it again doesn't compete with the diversity and actual cultural influence these various background have in South Florida.

Surfing. Significantly better in the bay area.

Seriously though Fort Lauderdale beach and Hollywood beach have great surf communities that have been around decades.

Florida is absolutely a garbage state (born and raised Floridian speaking) but there's no place in the US that is even in the discussion when it comes to water recreation-- MAYBE Hawaii.

Edit: to get an idea do a Google image search of Fort Lauderdale International Boat show. As to your quip about things with motors, South Florida is also home to the largest cruiseships in the world (>100,000 tonnage) that are dubbed floating cities.

e: changed killing to stunting, because I do believe that it is recoverable.