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200+ utils e.g. water, power, cell, potentially separate internet, all required to live and work considering you'll probably work remote outside office hours as well while you're vesting that sweet, sweet equity.
300+ commuting (yes that's within the city of SF)
- OR AT LEAST double that for even the most basic car/gas/insurance/parking (consider parking at both home and work can cost 200-400 monthly for each)
300+ food (outside FANG you'd be surprised how uncommon free-food-culture actually is)
820+/mo student loans going by the 10% rule on debt payoff, which also assumes a sadly-reasonable debt of 75,000 on a 10 year note by graduation.
We're now at a floor of 1620 dollars/mo gone to expenses which are effectively mandatory. And that's not including invisible costs of living like walmart-tier clothing on the clearance rack or the fact that I budgeted for a single human. Throw a dependent human in the mix and this becomes impossible, and seeking cheaper rents e.g. eastbay adds substantial hidden costs e.g. gas and tolls (6 dollars per day on tolls eastbay to the peninsula, easily 15 dollars extra per day on gas).
Start stressing your engineers out with cost decisions and see how productive they'll actually be. It's one thing to budget. It's another thing to force serious compromises. Not life-threatening, certainly, but as an engineer you'll definitely be doing that Uber hustle on the side if you make only 98k a year, which most assuredly means I'll be getting lower-quality work from them when they show up with <6hrs sleep.
If I'm forced to hire engineers at <100/y in SF, I'm quitting that job as a manager. The cost pressures on engineers hired at these rates will result in a drastic reduction in quality work product.
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Edit: revised some numbers
This is for a basic ranch starter home, though, not an apartment.
We have a hard time making $4k a month cover expenses when you factor in a home repairs, car, gas, food, health care, internet, cell phone. Shit adds up so fast. Saving for retirement or a vacation is not easy.
100k/2k a month after rent is certainly doable in SF. I know many people that make it work. Also if you’re making 100k you’re likely paying closer to 1500 a month and having roommates and sharing a bathroom.
It claims a 1 bedroom is 3k. Living outside the city would be cheaper, but by over 2/3 cheaper?
I can sympathize with people who have families when they talk about how expensive SF is, but when single people do it, it's almost always possible to cut their spending in half and still live comfortably, they just don't want to give up the little luxuries they've accustomed themselves to.
> Living with roommates lowers the cost of everything by a lot, especially if you do communal meals/food.
Wholesale pricing is a good strategy, correct. This isn't viable for everybody, or even for most people. Not everybody can live this way for various reasons, and certainly many engineers that I've interacted with aren't able to or need the alone time to be productive.
I've seen a pretty wide spread of living situations. I wouldn't call anything I said hyperbolic.
In Bay Area's case. Living outside city means, going some where like 60 - 80 miles far in any direction.
But even then I'm shocked at some of the numbers. A median of 98 is poverty level in the city of San Francisco when you consider studios can go for 2500+/mo in the outskirts of the city. Shoot, after taxes as well as rent and before utilities and other costs of living, my napkin math suggests you'd be left with less than 24,000 a year. Doesn't matter how much equity you get, that's not liveable.
Considering I'm also a hiring manager and have seen others' offer letters when negotiating (and have also seen some of the competitive research that goes into pricing our own roles), I'm also pretty convinced the dataset used here misrepresents reality.