Let me describe a typical mid-career Silicon Valley salaried tech worker scenario. YMMV of course.

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.

Here we go again with the "typical" tech worker making 250K. According to Glassdoor [1] and Payscale [2] the median/average base pay for SW engineers in the SF is about 1/2 of that.

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

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

Glassdoor skews low due to having more historical data. It should be noted that a lot of people also work in the Valley & live in SF since companies there pay more in general (although rent in the Valley has been rising the past few years in general, especially in Palo Alto and Mountain View).

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.

You are half right, and half wrong.

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".

That sounds more like a new grad salary...

You meant to say “typical google or Facebook engineer”. There aren’t too many companies out here that can afford to pay you $200k base and give you 50k stock and bonuses.

How do you spend $41/day on food and another $41/day on transportation? That's pretty ridiculous budgeting...

I don't live in the Bay Area but my options are spend 30$/day parking or add an extra 2+ hours to my total commute time, I can see spending 41 a day pretty easily.

Although maybe I'm wrong - I really question that 250K is "typical" pay even in the bay area. I'd say the truth is that is about 1/2 that (maybe slightly more). If you are the cream of the crop (top 10%ish? in top/senior positions) maybe that is reality - for the majority I don't see it after living here for the last 6 months.

Is it really typical in SV tech to get that much matching on 401k and/or get a bonus? Seems extraordinarily high. Maybe that bonus, stock, 401k match is sort of an unknown that one may or may not receive (in which case, you'd be comfortably saving $10k/year).

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

No, they are extraordinarily high. Those comp figures are what I like to call "HN normal". My theory is that HN readers/posters tend to be smarter than the average bear -> they and their peers tend to get better than usual pay -> they begin to believe these extraordinarily large comps are "normal" for tech workers. You'll actually see people here with a straight face claiming $400K is a totally usual "all-in" package at a normal tech company.

I've seen numbers like that from a company that says their salary range target is "70th percentile of peer companies." Dunno how they defined peer company, but I need to find that one-out-of-three peers that pay even more.

Only at the big tech companies in the Bay Area will you get a hefty bonus, and typically generally mainly in the Valley in particular - startups generally don't pay that (occasionally you might find a startup that does 401k match though).

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.

It took me 10 years to get close to that, but I didn't work for Goog/Facebook/Amazon, and didn't jump jobs every 1.8 years to maximize salary increases. Salaries keep going up; so does cost of living (see: 1400 sq ft house in sunnyvale just sold for $780,000 over the asking price of 1.4m)

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

Those sound like marginal rates, not actual taxes paid.

Depends on your salary and general lifestyle. Single with no kids helps. Commuting from the East Bay helps. Not eating out or having expensive hobbies helps. Not owning a car helps. Making more than the typical low-to-mid 6 figures helps. Not having an onerous student loan burden or consumer debt helps.

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.

If you're single without kids -- 50% easily. Perhaps someone with kids can comment.

People with children in SF either have locked in cheap housing due to Prop 13, make top-2% salary, or move out. Like, seriously, SF proper has half the primary-school-aged children than it should. It's not just people not having kids - SF has approximately the "right" number of infants and preschoolers.

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.

Subsidized day care is $1900/mo for 2 kids; rent on a 3 bedroom house with a serious termite problem and an absentee landlord who doesn't care is $3300, babysitters are $20/hr if you want to go see a movie. Couples with 2 full time tech workers are fine (although they tend to not think so). I've got a spouse who works part time outside of tech and we make it work. We'll never buy a house here, and we had a landlord raise rent $1000 (33%) overnight once so you never really rest easy, but if you love your job it's a good place to be.

If you and your partner both work full time, factor 20k+/kid/year for child care. If you later send your children to private schools, factor roughly the same rate.

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...

been running this math recently:

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.

you're lucky to max out your 401k

Depends on your circumstances. If you're single, 50% or more, easily. If you're married/living with a partner or roommate, even more. If you have kids and/or significant debt, that drops significantly (my family of four saves about 10%).