No amount of salary will give you clean air and tidy streets. Some people will just prefer that as part of their package. But I guess few months / years of experience won't hurt westerners.

When you talk about PPP, keep in mind to factor in housing and other modern lifestyle conveniences. These are very very expensive if you price it as a percentage of your salary. Even in the Bay Area, a Home is still 5-6X annual income of a typical software engineer. In India, it is more like 10-15X.

>Even in the Bay Area, a Home is still 5-6X annual income of a typical software engineer.

Is this true? I am ignorant of actual prices in Bay Area, but people are always complaining of high housing prices there.

To give some idea of the market - people are starting to count stock options as future income in order to qualify for home purchases. The median home price that sold recently in San Jose is close to a million dollars.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/25/about-silicon-valleys-...

When I bought in 2001, every house on the peninsula (between San Francisco and San Jose) no matter what condition had at least a dozen offers and it's worse now. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/13/sjm-shortage-0414/

Seems low, I'd put it at 8-10x. You're hard pressed to find a property for less than a million dollars.

Yup.

5-6X will not get you a nice house in a nice area. It will just get you a small house. In San Jose, the cheapest ones I'm seeing are in the 500-600K range - smaller than 1000 sq ft.

as a counter to that, in third world countries, rent is often a way better deal all round, so if you're not hung up on home ownership, you can get by pretty well for less.

OTOH, rented houses are pretty bad, compared to owned houses in India.

This is most certainly not true. I don't deny there will be shitty houses for a drop-dead rents, but you can also get a fairly luxurious rentals in Mumbai and Bangalore, at least (I don't have personal experience with other cities).

Sure, but aren't basic necessities less expensive in India?

Do you know Numbeo?

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cit...

Companies try to do that in America where they justify your income based on the fact you live in an area where you have high PPP. (Urbana,IL vs Palo ALto,CA)

That doesn't make it right to do or that this behavior will get the high quality talent pool every company says they will hire. So why do you think that it will work in this case?

That assumes the person in question wants to live in India, not save to leave India.