Atlanta has great food, amazing music, and is in the middle of a forest. (Google "Atlanta forest"!) There are so many places to hike and swim, it's glorious.
The culture is so diverse here. We're a music capital, the new Hollywood, and major finance hub. We have a lot of really cool non-engineers to hang out with and date. (Nothing wrong with engineers! But there are a lot of different types here to mingle with.)
Also, we have real barbecue. You can't get that outside the Southeast. :P
Move here and help change our electorate. :)
Cons:
- Though we have four full seasons, no one knows how to drive in the snow in the rare event we get any. Our summers are hot and humid (only a problem if you don't like that), and our springs have a ton of pollen - seriously, more than you can imagine (Atlanta is a forest).
- We lack decent public transit. But living within the city makes most commutes negligible. The Beltline (Google it) helps a lot too. The city is ramping up to spend more on transit, though.
Of course, Atlanta might still win that on cost of living, but it's a more reasonable comparison.
What I see in the market right now is wage suppression at almost any cost for the vast majority of jobs, and then a huge jump up in wages for those few specialized roles where actual productivity is required.
Do you agree? If we had data about these things it would shed light on whether employers are motivated to get talent because talent is productive vs. motivated for some other means by which companies are profiting from headcount?
Absolutely I would agree if the data indicated that. My opinion is admittedly based on anecdata, even if the people I've spoken with is somewhat large and limited to engineers in Tech companies.
My salary is $130k, but RSU grants bring that up to about $250k total comp a year.
I grew up in the Bay Area and have zero desire to return.
[0] https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/3/16/14942904/seattle-tech-w...
I suspect the vast majority of the income gain is due to Washington lacking a state income tax. e.g. a single eng pulling $200k is paying $15k/year ($1300/month) in CA state income taxes and $0 for WA State.
The tax code changes for this year only make it more true.
But yes, the math is heavily weighted in the favor of places like Seattle with still bearable costs of living but with competitive software labor markets.
edit: unfortunately we also have a very regressive tax system which makes it easier for developers.
1. Best weather, never too cold or too hot.
2. Can walk everywhere in the city, never need to own a car. Transportation here does suck, but it's still better than every other US city except NYC.
3. Have all the services, restaurants, trendy stuff to do if you want.
4. ~$250k base salaries prevent stress with buffer/retirement savings.
5. People who want to accomplish something move here. I haven't found another city with as many driven people as SF. That's exciting for me, but can also be exhausting sometimes.
Every time I try moving away I always move back. Missed out on buying a house here, but the salary and life quality make up for it for now.
I’m probably making 4-8 times less than you, but still living very well. Paying $700 for a 50m2 flat with pool and gym. I eat out several times a week and can travel anywhere in the world once a year. And still saving half of my income.
As a renter, you’re not allowed to work on your home and probably don’t have access to a washer/dryer. There are laundromats, but your cargo-hauling capabilities are severely limited, so unless it’s nearby you’re paying for cargo hauling one way or the other.
Since transportation-with-cargo is such a clusterfuck and the local retail skews heavily upscale to afford the exorbitant commercial rents, getting most consumer goods delivered makes complete sense.
No argument on the cost of going out so frequently, but cooking for one isn’t necessarily cheaper than takeout, depending on your local grocery stores. (Yes, you can be deliberate about picking cheap meals to cook).
Living in San Francisco imposes different problems and different constraints than living in typical American suburbia; choices that would be exorbitant in one place can be efficient in the other.
> As a renter, you’re not allowed to work on your home and probably don’t have access to a washer/dryer
Only in the lowest end places is this true. (it's been true once for me exactly once out of 6 places I've rented in SF) Most software eng can afford to rent places with at least shared laundry.
> Since transportation-with-cargo is such a clusterfuck and the local retail skews heavily upscale to afford the exorbitant commercial rents, getting most consumer goods delivered makes complete sense.
And it saves time as well. Even in suburbia I don't want to go to the grocery store when Amazon can deliver items for me.
Yes, so most software engineers wouldn't use a laundry service. But for those that do, I'm reasonably certain this is why.
Obviously not everyone. This bears no resemblance to my lifestyle. Can we cool it with the generalizations?
Typical middle class life is nothing like what I mentioned above. Nothing. Anyone who's ever been middle class or known someone who was actually middle class—that is something with a median income—would know this.
There is this tendency to use relevancy to say to somehow equate someone in the top 10% with the middle class. It's just bullshit.
Pray to god that it's enough to at least not fall into complete ruin and destitution from an illness or unforeseen layoff. I think most people now, like myself, have practically zero social or financial support beyond what you can save for yourself anymore.
The targets for most people i know are usually achievable in <10 years.
Why is that? The web is full of remote job offers.
6 months later she's still unemployed, considering giving up her career and just being a stay at home mom. They'll sell their austin house and downsize.
Point is: remote workers are always the first to get let go, and the income is not dependable.
That really sucks for your friend, by the way.
I get that for US workers it might be looking for a different set of tradeoffs.
But, I think, for a lot of people, a lot of their spending is nonlocal (e.g. internet shopping) or at least on price-standardized goods, and so is not tied to cost-of-living.
Let's say that in SV, you'd be making 400k, and—after spending on cost-of-living—keeping 10% as "pocket money." Well, that's 40k.
Now let's say that in Austin, you'd be making 100k, and keeping 30% as pocket money. That's 30k.
40k buys more iPhones (or whatever else you might want) than 30k. 40k is also more money to send back home to your family in India or wherever, than 30k is. It's smaller in relative terms, but what does that matter when it's still larger in absolute terms?
(Certainly, there's a lifestyle where spending on priced-to-cost-of-living goods can expand to consume all available salary. For example, if your goal in life is to throw extravagant parties with delicious food, then that food is going to cost less in Austin, so–even with 10k less in the budget—you can afford to throw more parties, and invite more people. But I feel like HN types are the least likely to have this kind of spending profile.)
No you won't.
Get a job at Google or your choice of big tech company. Work there 5-10 years, doing a regular amount of nonexceptional work.
There. You are making 400k TC, and should have saved enough for a down payment on a single family home.
If you want some numbers with actual sources, the median software engineer salary for a software engineer in the bay area is around $110-125K, according to Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2]. You can argue about their methodology, but it's better than the usual "anecdote = average" logic that these HN salary experts employ. Even if equity added an additional 100% of salary (which I have never seen in my life) we're not even close to these oft-quoted $400K figures.
To you guys outside of SF. When you hear people throwing around these anonymously sourced salary figures you need to take them with an enormous grain of salt. These figures are fantasy land.
1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
2: https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S...
If there's someone reading this who's interested in working at Google or Facebook but worry the compensation might be too low to live a good lifestyle in the Bay Area, ask actual people who work there for input instead of people who gawk in disbelief at these salaries.
For the conversion to be wrong, you first need to show that your personal situation is far from the norm. For example, you could show that you are saving 80% of your income toward retirement, or that you insist on having a violinist play during a private at-home dinner every night.
So... are you that weird?
If you aren't so weird, then the cost-of-living calculation is correct.
It might not be true that SV is the place to go if you want the absolute most pocket money (or, again, money-to-send-home-to-your-family-in-another-country), but I'm pretty certain it is if you're willing to live out of your car.
The actual calculation of where you should live to get the most pocket money is probably available at any Effective Altruist forum. "Earning to give" and all that.
I was stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, TX another lifetime ago as an army infantry recruit in the late 2000's. I know all about living in central Texas as a person of color. Unfortunately red states have become a complete no go zone for me to even consider living in 2018.
My stepfather is a 71 year old African American gentleman from New Orleans. He knows - and all of his friends and family know - that if you see the confederate flag up in front of a house or business, it means "Don't come here unless you want trouble".
Now of course this doesn't apply to every instance where the flag is flown - many people view it as a symbol of Southern Heritage. But it is completely ignorant to think that there aren't lots of people who fly it as a symbol of racial supremacy.
And historically it has meant much worse than that. My high school, Southside High School, in Fort Smith, AR was founded in 1963 - six years after the Little Rock Nine. The mascot was Johnny Rebel, a confederate soldier. During football games, we played Dixie as our fight song and before the 90's, waved the confederate flag at football games. In fact, the interior courtyard of the school was once one giant confederate flag. The practical (intended!) effect of all this was that for African American students living within our gerrymandered school district, the vast majority of them chose to go out-of-district to the other poorer high school. Through our mascot and the flag the local government had achieved de facto segregation without legal segregation, thus avoiding a showdown with the 101st Airborne.
Anyway, I don't know why I wrote this since probably no one will read it but I get really upset when I see something that smacks of Holocaust denial that applies to my native culture.
Killeen is a military town in the middle of nowhere. It has a weird population. But the sibling comment that talks about people hanging Confederate flags isn't representative. California has nutters and boonies too.
San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Austin are the fastest growing cities in the nation. TX has a larger minority population than it does other. If it was such a racist backwater I think my friends would say something about it, but I too get the impression that the level of racism is about the same as any other major city.
I don't mean to demean their experiences, but I also don't believe it's representative of a state that in 20 years is going to be as important as CA if it isn't already in various areas. If you were transported to a neighborhood in any of those cities, you'd have a hard time figuring out you weren't in NY< CA, or any other major state/city.
When people write off entire states because of politics, that's missing a lot of nuance. If you want to do that, you can also ignore Atlanta, at your own fault, which has as compelling a minority cultural boom as anywhere in the country. Someone needs to tell Don Glover to get the hell out of there.
It's just as offensive to natives of various places to hear their home stereotyped as it is for races to hear their race stereotyped.
They didn't say all Texans are racist. Just that they experienced racism in Texas. It's the same, playing Overwatch is a drag because people are jerks. Not everyone who plays Overwatch is a jerk, but I experience it often while playing.
If the top comment on this thread was "California is full of racists, anyway", you'd bet you'd get the same response.
This is such an insane false equivalence, especially given Texas’ history of institutionalized racism, I don’t even know where to begin.
The thing is, many of us are very aware of that past and will do anything to change it. But also consider that some of it isn't even our fault (my Dad came from Gary, Indiana by way of Illinois). I can't change the past, only acknowledge it, and what I'm telling you is it isn't 1970 here anymore, and many people need to give up stereotypes about places and people the same way they need to do about races.
2) Unparalleled liquidity and depth to the job market for engineering in SFBA. There is a universe of jobs here that pay engineers better than the $140k quoted by Hired.
This sounds quite insane - especially if you contribute to any of the open source projects. Any cases you could quote?
For most people, i actually expect the best game to play would be to acquire a large amount of bay-area level equity compensation, then move for the same company to somewhere else and ride it out :)
I just did a long bike ride through the redwoods and along the ocean. Doesn't meet my definition of hellhole... I probably will leave if I ever want to buy a house but besides that the area has a lot to offer me at least.
I do have a problem that everyone not making 6 figures is being pushed out which is another reason I would go.
The majority was from stock and significantly boosted by the rising price. If I stayed it would have decreased slightly over time due to the stock price levelling out.
If you achieved steady career progression at Facebook over the last four years (reach E5 level, a couple of promos) and not get fired them making 400k+ would be common. I’d hazard a guess that probably 50% of new hires achieve this. Base salary would be 200k and the rising stock price makes up the rest.
For what it’s worth I left the Bay Area and Facebook and cut my compensation by more than half to do so.
With stock compensation it's pretty easy because of the appreciation of company stocks. 5 years ago, Facebook was trading at $24/share. It now trades at $193/share, a roughly 8x increase. If your compensation package included $125K/year in RSUs - something eminently achievable even with just a few years of work experience - you're now making over a million a year as those stock grants vest.
This discussion thread seems to be a mix of both, so...YMMV.
As an absolute number - maybe
As a percentage - it’s minuscule
When I ran the numbers, it wasn't worth me moving to the US.