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 :)