You're right, COL adjusted salary is a more accurate metric. According to NerdWallet, COL in Brooklyn is ~22% higher than Seattle. If you're looking at Manhattan, you should be comparing Manhattan vs Seattle-Downtown. Living in Seattle outside of downtown is more comparable to living in Brooklyn.

The really lucrative jobs in NYC, are the ones with Hedge Funds that are based entirely in NYC. Places like 2-sigma, Jane-st, DE-Shaw, Jump, and others. The offers they make, are hard to match anywhere else, even after COL adjustments. If you're considering a job at a random NYC tech company though, I agree that the salary may not make up for COL.

Having lived and worked in both cities, my experience is that salaries in Seattle are higher unless you're in fin-tech. I was quoted consistently better salaries in Seattle.

Salaries in Seattle also work out to be higher given the higher COL in NYC. I owned a mid-sized house with front and back yard in West Seattle; my apartment in Brooklyn is much smaller and more expensive.

Groceries can be up to 2.5x as expensive at some places unless you travel out of your way to someplace like Trader Joe's.

Also, no state income tax in Washington.

That said, New York is New York.

I'd be curious to see more of those CoL comparisons. How big of a place are you pricing for NYC, and in which neighborhood? Are you factoring in the savings from not needing a car?

You can find CoL calculators out there, and they have their faults, but Seattle is already an expensive city in its own right, and I simply don't see how you possibly got NYC to come out double. That's way out of line with the calculators.

I've also done this math -- price per sqft is wayy better in Seattle and you don't necessarily need a car. In any case, a metro card isnt cheap. The cost of groceries/alcohol is also much much higher in nyc and at a lower quality.

I have a postdoc friend who lives in Seattle on slightly less than I do. They have a huge 1br in cap Hill with parking next to the subway with a short committee downtown or to UW. Meanwhile my apartment is the same price with a minifridge, a 40m commute, and no dishwasher/laundry/disposal.

Plus the PNW is just more enjoyable to explore than the northeast in my opinion. You definitely can make more in Nyc but the COL and QoL is just awful compared to the pnw

While I agree with your opinions here, those things are also somewhat personal. I place a lot of value on large housing, cheap car ownership and easy access to nice outdoor spaces.

A lot of other folks place more value on not needing a car ever, lots of easy food delivery options, and access to any kind or show or performance you might ever want to see without having to travel.

As someone who moved from LA to SF to Brooklyn, this exactly. There’s a ton of factors that are very personal. I need a big city; SF is just too small, among all the other reasons I disliked living there. I’m happy to pay for a place that has the things I actually prefer. This sentiment, of course, goes both ways. NYC isn’t for everyone. I don’t want to live in Midtown...

I thought while Cost of living in Seattle is relatively lesser than NYC, the house prices are exorbitant. NYC has advantage of very close proximity to NJ, Connecticut where you could probably get a better home than in Seattle-Bellvue-Redmond area.

The time, effort, and stress of commuting easily offsets any gains from living outside of NYC. Any city with decent neighborhoods will be at least a 60 minute commute door to door, plus you have to budget another 30 minutes for delays and whatnot because the public transit is terrible.

It's very difficult to plan anything on work days if you're commuting into NYC, and you get to pay super high rents and property taxes for states with huge deficits and infrastructure debt which means the situation won't get any better. Seattle offers better food, recreational activities, growing future, and no income tax. I'd say the weather is better too, but some people really miss the sun, but you can easily fly to a beach resort for multiple weekends of the year with the savings of not living in the NYC area.

"It depends"

As someone who has gone through this for some 20 yrs, it's usually a faster commute to travel from Hoboken to pretty much anywhere along/south of the PATH line during peak hours (so 34th down to the southern tip of Manhattan) versus a starting point of the UES/UWS (which is where the comparable housing exists).

My commute from Hoboken to various startup locations in NYC was consistently ~45 minutes door to door, versus an hour for my friends on the UES/UWS.

Hoboken might as well be a borough of NYC, as well as the waterfront part of Jersey City. I was referring to places most think of when raising a family and wanting to own a home with a driveway.

On the other hand, for NYC most of your commute is by train. Resting on the train is a lot less stressful than driving.

Wouldn't be bad if the train was reliable, but if you monitor njtransit.com, it's late all too often, and if you have connecting trains then it will add to the stress.

If it was like Japan and you could actually make plans, then it wouldn't be so bad.