I think college towns in the midwest / rust belt are untapped resources, or areas that used to have strong technically focused companies that moved away. I've personally seen founders bootstrap and launch successful companies (B2B with real revenue, not Uber for cats) in areas with little tech presence.

The ability to not have to shell out huge salaries and equity was a real winner, there's also less distractions. You can get strong engineers (no, not SV / Seattle top end engineers, but people that can throw together a reasonable website) for < 100k in these areas, and they won't bounce around as much. You aren't competing with AmaFaceGoogSoft here, you're competing with HR companies and random consulting houses. There's disadvantages to being outside of the tech bubble, but advantages too. That being said, for an employee, you should at least try and do some time in SV / Seattle etc.

> ...starting a company in an area that does not need the top tier of engineers...

As far as quality of talent, the "top tier of engineers" aren't all in SF, Seattle, or NYC. There are plenty of "top tier" engineers in all kinds of places.

If you mean the "top tier" in pay rates are in those cities, that probably true. But those cities also have a ridiculous cost of living adjustment baked in.

I might be misreading what you're writing here, but it sounds like you're saying, "Try founding a place in Champaign, Ill. The engineers aren't top notch, but they're cheap enough to be worth it." I just wanted to push back against this meme.

Based on my purely anecdotal experience, engineers that would be easy no-hires in Chicago get scooped up into senior roles in the valley because everyone there is so desperate to hire anyone who can fizzbuzz. It's the best area to be in if you're one of the best... and also if you're one of the worst. Top-flight talent exists in these "hotspots" but they're all "Unobtanium" for anything that isn't a unicorn, IPO'd, or founded by one of their friends.

I disagree; top talent is very obtainable, provided that you have:

* decent compensation

* great culture

* interesting problems to solve

* a great hiring process

We've grown our engineering team from 12 to 29 since opening up shop in Kansas City this February, and I could not be happier with the quality of people that we've found.

I left a Chicago Loop job 3 years ago for a fully remote startup, moved to Tampa, moved from that fully remote startup to a Tampa-based org, and Chicago recruiters get in touch 2-3 times a week offering full relo expenses. There literally is an insane amount of demand and people with very little experience being pulled into Chicago roles.

EDIT: I know I'm not allowed to complain about downvotes, but I'm doing it; why would someone downvote this comment? The poster I'm replying to is near me IRL, and I am just trying to be friendly and connect in person (and they have no contact info on their profile). No need to downvote or upvote.

I don't necessarily mean there aren't smart people outside of the hotspots, but there isn't the specialized skillsets that get built from working at the Microsofts / Googles etc. edit: In the number that you need.

Champaign obviously has lots of smart people (my parents went there), but you may have issues finding specialized senior people there.

Maybe. But how many people live in those places because that's where the well-paid jobs are?

Sure, so minimal commute times and affordability of family homes in areas with good schools should be very appealing to many of the specialized senior engineers.

Moving the family is a pain, sure, but that just means the pitch needs to include why it's worth it for the family. And it means that senior engineers move cities less often. It doesn't mean they move less altogether.

Idle thought: this kind of risk (moving around too much) could be mitigated a bit by some sort of contractually guaranteed employment. A move to Princeton from SF would sound better if a four-year employment guarantee or a comparable cash buy-out was part of the employment agreement.

Personally, I hate living in the tech hubs, I'd love to be able to move back to my hometown, it was a great place to raise kids, didn't have the same crushing traffic / monoculture and it was close to my family. I'm where I'm at due to the jobs, nothing else.

The job-is-terrible concerns can be addressed other ways. Like putting the candidate up in temporary digs for a month or three while they decide on a longer-term deal. A reverse contract-to-hire, if you will. That sounds complicated, but it's not more complicated than a normal contract-to-hire.

I would say that is only a good measure of where more money is being spent.

Surely depends on the metric used: the same people who, if brought up in one of the progressive teams at an SV giant or a well-funded startup might become celebrated code-fashionistas touring the conference speaker circuit, would likely have turned out very different had they joined the insurance company that was the only game in town. But the things they would have seen there! Not C-beams glittering in the darkness near the Tannhauser gate, bad a lot of bad code plastered over and over with half-hearted attempts to clean up during decades of maintenance and extension. If there are wisdoms to be learned from working with that one of our two hypotheticals will know them.

- A cat sharing service?

- A 'cat on demand' service that allows you to reap the benefits of cat ownership without having to worry about acquisition and maintenance costs?

- A taxi service for cats?

I could envision paying for all of those, under the right circumstances. So such a company would likely have at least a few dollars of real revenue. :)

Obviously cat sharing, but you'll have to find a way to take a margin from what was nominally a goodwill activity.

Maybe you pay cat owners in cathours (pronounced cath-ours), and have a marketplace where people can buy and sell cathours. Even better, make Catcoin (CC), set up an ICO, and get to work.

They had the genius idea of charging both sides of the transaction as well. Owners pay for dog sitting, borrowers pay for time with a dog.

It was such a ridiculously awesome service I wish they had it year-round. Our office ordered bunches of the service and there was a lot more demand than supply (obviously for that one day they offered it.)

This exists though not quite Uber / on-demand style. You need to go to the cats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_caf%C3%A9

Very big in Japan.

http://www.totthecatcafe.com/

And of course, my old neighbourhood in Ottawa got a cat cafe not too long after I moved away:

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawas-furst-daily...

So it looks like the idea is spreading!

Even if it doesn't, it's HBO Silicon Valley worthy.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/uber-kittens-1.3292441

- Create a mobile cat service in a high end Winnebago or Gulfstream business jet; stock with hypoallergenic cats from step 1

- Use mobile cat service to fly/drive in to festivals and corporate events; create pop-up cat lounges where visitors can have a drink and pet a cat

- ??

- Profit

Shut up and take my money.

The other point is, most startups do not need that talented of engineers, they think they do, but they don't. You don't want to pay bay area salaries if you don't have to, and in most of these areas, you don't have to.

If you are somewhere else but the bay, and you are paying people bay area salaries, but you aren't in SV, so you aren't raising VC like SV companies, I don't think that's a winning move.

Most people want to live in expensive areas. Top tier engineers can afford it.

And yet inexplicably I still can't walk through walls.

I'm curious to know what your current thoughts are behind this. As someone who intentionally has steered clear of both those areas in order to try to optimize financially I sometimes wonder whether I'm missing out on something. Obviously one can learn more from better engineers, but don't the brightest ideas from the brightest engineers wind up being written about online and/or presented at conferences at user groups and broadcast across the Internet? Or does having the opportunity to put time into a name-brand tech company for a while really increase lifelong salary or career prospects sufficiently to recover the money thrown away on rent there? Or is there really sufficient value in serendipitous collaboration/socialization to justify moving to one of these places? Is there some other question I've overlooked?

This becomes tribal knowledge. The way most people become experts in these domains is by working with or around people that are already experts, which requires being in an engineering environment where you are likely to come into contact with some. This type of expertise is far from evenly distributed.

Market salaries for software engineers in Baltimore are quite a bit lower (like, 40-50% lower) than SF or NYC. Whereas for companies located in NYC/SF, they understand cost of living is high and are thus willing to pay a premium.

I'm not making a counterargument here, just saying that salaries in different areas aren't usually apples to apples.

Also, cost of living is relative: For 10 of my 17 years in NYC, I lived in a studio apartment with a 1k/month mortgage, and no car, no kids, and a lower cost of living than most of my friends in other cities. So it really depends on your family situation and what kind of environment you want to live in.

* a meaningful degree of racial diversity (makes a big difference if you're not white)

* comprehensive public transit (yeah, yeah BART and MUNI suck, but where I've lived in the US previously, they didn't even exist)

* an abundance of job opportunities in tech

* nice weather

I'm able to save 40% of my income and I don't even work at a high-paying company like Airbnb, Google etc. I live in a new apartment with one roommate in an area that's only a 25 minute commute to my office in SF via public transit.

We all need to accept that people are looking for different things in life. It's difficult to save money in SF, while also having a lifestyle that's relatively easy to maintain in other places. For instance, living without roommates.

I'm mid 30s, wife, kid on the way, and own a home in Sfba with reasonable commute.

You're able to do that because you're obviously "unattached" or "young"... You live in an apartment with a roommate. That's probably fine when you're single/dating. It's not super appealing when you're a person with a spouse and kid(s)... Also, as one progresses in age, there is a desire to stop having 'roommates' and perhaps even consider owning something.

The cost goes up considerably within those parameters.

It's "easy" to save 40% of your income if you live like a college sophomore in a dorm. It's not when you have other responsibilities.

Bay area in a nutshell. You can have higher savings rates too, I do around %40 and I could save even more. Working at a startup does make it harder, usually it's better to work at FANG. You also learn a lot and realize the difference between 'facebook does this dev practice because it's huge so it has to vs. it's the better practice'

If you're starting your own company and want VC investment, I can think of no better place to be than silicon valley, assuming you make use of the social events, meetups, attend YC demo days, rainbow mansion, etc. The personal networking will lead to more and better deals.

But if you have kids, a spouse that doesn't pull in the astronomical salaries, or are trying to bootstrap a company, stay far, far away.

Probably contributes to the logan's run effect you see in SV tech companies ;)

What I've seen from colleagues with kids is the spouse also works some sort of 6 figure job and they either commute a lot or bought a house before it got extra crazy. Like one who bought a $600-700k TIC around the Haight ~4 years ago. Or they sacrifice their living standard somehow. The current family set you see today bought when it was more affordable.

You have to be good, and work hard, but I know lots and lots and lots of tech workers who are single earners with kids and a house they didn’t buy before the boom.

And the difference is smaller compared to other large markets like Chicago, Houston, and L.A.

Your example is a higher savings amount, not rate.

In your example, I may still prefer the 80K one. Why?

Assume taxes are a third of your salary in both places.

In the 80K job, you save 40K, and your living expenses are 13.3K

In the 160K job, you save 56K and your living expenses are 50.7K

In Nowhereville, you are saving 3 times your annual cost of living. In SV, you are saving just a little more than 1x.

The result? Even though you save more in SV, you will not be able to retire quicker.

(My claim of 1/3 in taxes in both places is likely inaccurate, but the essence of the calculation doesn't change).

A higher saving amount does not mean earlier retirement (unless you move to a cheap city to retire).

Depends on your preferences. I don't want to move to a new place when I retire. I'd like to retire in the same place where I have friends, know the city, system, etc.

EDIT: To be clear, I do know people that have "done their time" then left and pulled in really nice consulting rates working remotely from rural / flyover america or overseas, albeit often with a lot of travel to customer sites.

I moved to San Francisco in 2006 straight out of college to work at Google as a SWE. I was $27k in debt (student loan + credit card). My rent was $1450 at the time (2 bedroom with a roommate in a nice part of town), and I took out a $26k loan to buy a car. I'm not particularly frugal.

I did well at Google, left in 2010 with >$200k saved, and used that to fund my entrepreneurial adventures from then til now.

I was very fortunate to land that job, YMMV.

Salaries at Google have scaled with cost of living, so it seems relevant to me.

For what it’s worth I did exactly that - moved to the SF Bay Area, started saving (you can still do it if you don’t have debt), and those connections and that experience really matter. I don’t think we could have gotten into YC without them.

I doubt 40% of Nowhereville, FL salary is as much as 20% of Bay Area salary for a large number of cases. Developer compensation in Nowhereville caps out much lower than it does in the Bay Area (I'm talking base salary): figure in RSUs and other benefits (e.g. job abundance) and it's almost a no-brainer that a move to the Bay Area is better.

If you practice frugality, find cheap housing (which does exist if you look hard enough), and don't spend money on things you don't need, then it's quite easy to save a lot of money.

Being a 400 sq. ft. studio that you pay $3k per month for to live in an area where you won't get stabbed when you go out at night and is close enough to work where you don't need a car.

I lived with 3 roommates to save money, I sold my car, you won't get stabbed anywhere in SF (so live in the sketchy area it'll get nicer each year). My rent was $1,200 a month, a lucky find.

Now don't get me wrong I hated living there, no girls, homelessness everywhere smelled like garbage, and a self-obsession that pretended to be health-minded but was really wealth-minded ($9 juice OMG).

But the earning power change by having lived there is night and day. To have companies people have heard of on your resume goes such a long way.

This is flatly untrue and bad advice - there are absolutely areas of San Francisco where you run the risk of being the victim of physical violence. Some people will be comfortable living in that kind of environment but many won't, and suggesting that all of San Francisco is uniformly safe is irresponsible.

> I lived with 3 roommates to save money, I sold my car, you won't get stabbed anywhere in SF (so live in the sketchy area it'll get nicer each year).

I'm not willing to test that theory and there's an inherent value to not thinking about getting stabbed on a daily basis.

> My rent was $1,200 a month, a lucky find.

To live with 3 other people in the sketchy part of town? Yeesh.

Even if that's not you, you have to realize that everyone else needs that option if we're going to have a functioning community.

Now consider: what would you do if you were already married and wanted to do this? (Meaning, move to the Bay with your SO, not leave them behind.)

An American studio apartment is essentially a hotel room with kitchenette. It has only two doors, one for the bathroom and one to the exterior. Thanks to fire codes, it will usually have at least one escapable window.

While it isn't the lowest tier of city housing, it is the smallest type of apartment with significant supply in the US. Dormitories aren't tremendously common away from university campuses, and communal barracks are uncommon outside of the older military bases--where they are generally mothballed until a particular need arises for large quantities of temporary housing.

Perhaps you're not familiar with American apartment terminology or I'm missing something? A studio apartment is as cheap as you can get normally.

    what's cheaper than a studio?

For example, where I live [1] a studio is $1,700 but one room in a 3br is $1,100.

[1] http://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices

Unless you're strongly introverted, and/or suffer from social anxiety, having roommates is a great way to a) meet new people and b) save lots of money.

    Not everyone is a student anymore.

(We've lived in four places since getting married, one without housemates and the other three with. We've definitely preferred the latter.)

The "best" deal I've found in LA is when you have a partner and can split the one-bedroom with them.

Having roommates! Rent a victorian with a few roommates in West Oakland. One train stop to San Francisco, way less than 3k a month.

Many in this thread seem flabbergasted that a studio would be expensive or could ever be cheap, it's probably based on whatever market they're used to.

Well, that was uncalled for. I’m willing to bet a paycheck that someone named “Nikolae” lives in a place where “studio” might have a meaning different than it does in the U. S. And so they wonder why you’d live in such an expensive place if you’re trying to save, whereas in the U. S. a studio is the bottom tier of apartment inventory.

Then yea you can make it work...just no fun.

Plus, doesn't pg say the most important thing is to just stay alive?

Whereas now that I live in the bay area, I see companies get funded all the time and think to myself they would never get funded if they were HQ'd elsewhere.

At this point I also get a little kick out of doing things differently and trying to change the ecosystem. Isn't that what being a contrarian is all about?

To have a successful company (not a VC startup) you really just need to code a little and know to market/sell (or have co-founder who can do that). And you will be fine - not rich but fine.

Of course, the above is only true if you live in Bay Area... If you live in Bay Area, then you will need at least $250K/year to live "fine". Which is about $150K/year in Austin, TX.

Also: UK salary ranges are ~$50k-$90k (but you can't save 40%)

This doesn't mean move to the Bay Area to be a janitor. Some jobs will absolutely make it difficult to afford the cost of living.

But with good discipline, I'd argue it's typically easier to save (in absolute dollar terms) in a high-COL place than a low one.

In Atl, I saved $2k/mo.

In SF, I saved $3k/mo.

Its hard to save $3k/mo if you're only making $4k/mo. In SF, I took a huge lifestyle hit. No car, no apartment to myself, eating out less. which let me save a lot more.

Base comp 200K

Bonus, stock, 401k match 50K

Total gross comp 250K

Expenses:

Taxes 40% (30% fed, 10% state) 100K

Rental housing 40K ($3300/month)

Food 15K

Transportation 15K

Discretionary spending 20K

Total expenses 190K

As a result, you can comfortably save $60K per year. Of course, kids and housing options will add greatly to your spend.

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

2: https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...

Of course it's a terrible commute, but some people prefer that - it should also be noted that the comment you responded to was talking about the Valley, not SF. Software engineering jobs in SF proper is a raw deal IMO excepting that you get to live in SF & be closer to the offerings of SF (or you can commute into SF, but might as well be commuting to an area with better pay IMO). Engineering quality is probably roughly the same across the Bay Area though.

The average startups are not paying engineers anywhere close to 250k.

But I can assure you that every one of the big 5 tech companies pays those numbers (as do the "hot" unicorns that are on a similar "tier" as Google, ect) .

The moral of the story is, don't work for a startup. Go big or go home. Sell out and work for one of the companies with the actual money.

Because at those companies, those numbers are real.

And the thing that people need to realize is that those "top" companies have a whole lot of people working for them. The numbers don't back up the common argument that is made about how "you have to be in the very top 1 percent of engineers to work at Google, FB, or Amazon".

At any rate, if those bonuses are real, maybe I need to move out of Texas.

I haven't been at my BigCo long enough to say how much a bonus is like, but I do have max 401k match at 3% of my salary (rises up to 6% given time), which alone turns out to be ~$5k. Employee stock purchasing program with 15% discount with 10% of my salary maxed out also turns out to be ~$25k in stock (savings of ~$4k) - this does not include whatever benefits might come out of refresh stock grants, or performance bonuses. $50k in extra benefits does sound quite attainable though, even for an engineer not on $200k base at a BigCo.

YMMV of course.

Those sound like marginal rates, not actual taxes paid.

I've personally been saving over $2k/mo on an after-tax income of just over $6k/mo, haven't been trying particularly hard to max that out though.

Under-appreciated fact about SF: your kid's schooling choices are either winning the school assignment lottery, having a 50 minute commute, homeschooling, or moving to a city that actually handles things sanely and has lower housing costs to boot.

If instead you choose to send your kids to a public school that provides good educational opportunities, factor in either several thousand in additional local property taxes [1] or similar amounts in donations to the school PTA [2].

[1] http://www.paloaltopulse.com/2014/10/16/palo-alto-pulse-asks...

[2] http://capta.org/pta-leaders/run-your-pta/finance/fundraisin...

quality child care or private school is +$2k/month/child

+2bdrm housing $4k

food/transport/other $2k

for couple with one kid you're at $8k/month post-tax or $150k/year pre-tax to break even.

It doesn't look like you've been in this kind of flamewar on HN before, or at least not recently, so I'm going to assume that something in the parent comment provoked a strong reaction in you based on experience that the rest of us don't know about. This happens all the time of course. On HN, we all need to remain respectful and give the other the benefit of the doubt, even if their comment was clueless. Your comment would have been fine with just the third and fourth paragraphs.

We have almost no information about each other—just a few dots—but since we're wired to relate to other humans, we always connect the dots to get a picture. Lacking information, we fill the picture in with past experiences of our own, often painful ones, especially when we've seen one or two of those dots before. (Just one is enough, two feels like absolute proof.) In reality we're mostly making these pictures ourselves and then seeing them in the other. Everyone does this everywhere, but it's acute in internet comments because we have so little information about whoever we're speaking with.

On HN, we need to watch for those reactions in ourselves and consciously hold them so they don't blast out at others. The reason is not so much to spare others' feelings, but to protect the commons. When people start blasting and blasting back, they destroy things like gardens and cities, and HN is like those.

You made good points in this thread. But those go up in flames like everything else in a flamewar. That prevents good points from being expressed and received—the kind of exchange that leads to more complex behavior, which makes discussion interesting. Everything on HN boils down to trying to be more interesting where possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Definitely wish I had said what I said differently - you're right - it was an emotional response. I was in the middle of a busy day and didn't have to time to gather my thoughts better so it was all stream of consciousness.

That said, all my follow up responses were a lot more measured, and I even acknowledged that I shouldn't have used the language I used in that post.

I should know better than to call tech workers entitled on a site like HN and that's probably the best reminder for me out all of this - know your audience.

Regardless, apologies that you had to spend time cleaning this up.

Lots of people on HN feel that tech workers are entitled. Some of them are tech workers, some not. Some are even entitled tech workers. It's complicated! So I don't think this is a question of the specific audience so much as human nature. Both sides of this happen to all of us all the time.

What if you are married with children? Not sure about you, but I would definitely not feel comfortable having roommates in my 1.5BR. With me + wife + 5yo son + 2yo daughter, how would the logistics even work? -- where would the roommates sleep? In the kitchen? In the kids' bedroom? In our bedroom with my wife and me?

Your situation is definitely tough and would probably mean having to live way out of the bay area and commute to work.

I mainly reacted to OP saying it wasn't possible. How can you say that when people commute from Vallejo into the city everyday wasting 3 hours a day so that they can provide for their family?

It's hard, but to complain that it isn't possible is especially unnerving since if you are a tech worker you're probably in the class of people for whom it's the most reachable.

Except it isn't what most tech workers expected. The vast majority of tech workers I know have sacrificed a lot and work very hard. Many paid top dollar to go to top schools. They spent their entire 20s working nights and weekends to learn as much as they could. I spent college studying red black trees instead of going to frat parties. I still spend parts of my weekend just keeping up with technology. So me and my friends find it difficult to swallow that despite all this, we struggle to have even a sliver of what our parents enjoyed almost as an American right. Yes, it is better than what people have in Africa or Detroit, but it isnt what many people expected. Yes, it is better than what baristas get, but it isnt what people expected.

As for me, I've lived in NYC most of my life and there are few building restrictions. So while it is expensive, it isnt as absurd as the bay area. I also yearn to build things, but spent much of my career trying to squeeze more $ out of trading algos...mostly because it supported a better lifestyle.

Obviously low interest rates, tax policies, and poor land usage is to blame for a lot in the bay area. But whatever the reasons, step back and consider a world where people with Top-5 university degrees in computer science and illustrious careers are told to keep random strangers as roommates with their 2yo and 5yo children...

It's harder than we expected, but not impossible. To say you can barely get by with your 120k salary when there are people getting by on 40k is offensive.

Believe me, I know what it's like to be banging your head against the desk at 1AM on a Friday night while your friends are out partying. But I also know what it's like to see a family work hard to provide for their kids in some of the poorest neighborhoods in California.

They too work hard and it's a disservice to them who try their best to make it work to say that it's impossible on a 100k salary.

We should raise the bar for everyone - but that bar starts with them, not with tech workers. This is why you get protests for Google buses, sometimes the points people are making here come across as tone deaf.

Baristas who work 40 hour weeks will make (minimum) $28k, and SF provides subsidized or free health insurance on top of that.

That’s still not enough to live on, but let’s not exaggerate.

No this is the reality of living in the Bay Area. People who are living on barista wages are getting screwed by it. It's an insult to them that this is the reality today.

> Just fucking wow.

Alright calm down, you're on HN not reddit. You can express your viewpoint without being dramatic and vulgar.

> You can save in the bay area, live with roommates and pay <2k rent.

A tech worker shouldn't have to be loading up on roommates to get sub 2k rent (which is still crazy high compared to the rest of the country) but in the Bay area they have to. Why? It's insane that's how it is.

> At a salary of 100k you should be able to save 1500-2k per month comfortably.

Again looks great on paper, but you bet California tax is going to eat most of your paycheck in one go. Not to mention that many are having to carry student debt, personal debt, or have other financial obligations.

> and save for a downpayment if buying a home is your goal.

Let's be absolutely clear on this: there is currently little to no path to home ownership in the bay area for the majority living there. This isn't drama, this isn't made up, this is fact.

> If you think you're entitled to owning a big house, 2 cars, with money left over for dining out everyday and to pad your savings for a 5M retirement fund, you're going to have a bad time.

If you think that those living in the Bay Area still subscribe to this "dream", you're completely disconnected from SF.

> you're going to have a bad time.

Again, not reddit. You can express serious viewpoints here without memes and jokes.

Comments need to get more civil and substantive, not less, as a thread gets more provocative. Otherwise we all go up in flames.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I did get lost a bit getting over worked about the situation. It's a topic that hits close to home for me as SF was a great place to live for me for a better part of a decade, but myself and other friends had to leave as the rising costs squeezed us out.

> - Someone who is completely disconnected from reality

I totally agree that on this one, but have found that this group can come in quite a few more shapes and sizes than your original comment suggests. Not everyone is as out-to-lunch as your parent: I know a healthy number of people down here who are just fundamentally optimistic about things, and will tend to think positively at all times (and probably right up until the moment that the guillotine falls).

I have one friend who just put down roots with a house and recently had a child. He insists that the price tag on his place (well over $1M+) is perfectly reasonable, even though it's right at the fringes of the city and would be considered a worn-out hovel by the standards of almost any other North American city. The house's previous owners bought in a few decades ago and paid ~$50k for it.

In a few years he'll be putting his child through the city's public schooling system, which is broadly considered to be a nightmare by any standard, but he insists that SF's schools are great at the municipality is doing an excellent job. He harbors no resentment for major failings in public policy like Prop 13, despite the fact that he's probably paying on the order of 10-20x as much property tax as the vast majority of all his neighbors.

Despite a myriad of failings on the part of policy planners in everything from traffic to cleanliness to crime, he has a way of not seeing any of it. I envy him because it's a bit of a survival adaptation: he's happier on average than anyone in the area who thinks about any of this stuff regularly.

Suggesting getting a roommate would just be not that big of a deal to him because you're still in the city and still having the fun, even if there maybe should be a greater existential concern about workers making six figures being put in this situation.