I can't speak to the senior level, but compared to California those junior salaries are lagging by 50%, not 20%.
You'll need a car, of course, and as long as you're not eating at trendy places downtown, everything else is pretty cheap. Bars have $1 beers and burgers at happy hour.
Additionally, another downside I noticed when I was there was that around 2am in the summer, the streets are often flooded due to people watering their lawns. Besides the absent or poor pedestrian infrastructure, this made my after work walk quite a bit more complicated.
My electric bill is about $80 in the summer to keep my $125k, 2000 sqft house at 72F. Not too bad IMO.
And everyone (40% of the houses in my neighborhood?) who waters their lawn does so at dawn and dusk, not 2AM. If you water in the middle of the night when the grass is cold and dormant, you can get mold.
Air conditioning is mandatory some areas, with temperatures in Sydney peaking over 40 C (105 F) in the summer, and electricity costs 27 cents per kWh (US$0.20).
Australia has some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world, as Australia is completely incapable of managing its infrastructure properly.
Imagine that salary in San Francisco is $9000 / month and cost of living is $7000 / month. The ratio of salary : cost of living is 1.286.
Imagine salary in Grand Rapids is $3000 / month and the cost of living is $2000 / month. The ratio has "improved" to 1.5, but the more important figure of (income - expenses) has fallen in half.
So, you might find that it's a 50% lower salary, and an 80% lower living cost. That would be informative.
So, about half the cost of living.
[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Air tickets are significantly cheaper in NY than ruralish areas in my experience
That's a massive cost difference, especially when you're looking at 2-4 person vacations. That's a problem in pretty much every rural area (flying out of Ithaca was expensive as heck). I'm able to travel way more as a result.
It's true, the market is becoming pretty flat with globalization for costs in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZs4NDC4yrI
I had to buy a family member a flight from Seattle -> Detroit for next month, it cost $600. I'm about to fly myself from Istanbul to San Francisco, that flight cost $500.
There's a reason they're called the flyover states.
That said, you can probably move from here to a non-SF tech hub and get a 50-100% bump in your salary with only a 20% increase in cost of living.
That said, our roads are still shit. Like the rest of Michigan.
Salary is one part of that, but unless you grew up in the area, most non-hub-city regions are a hard sell for young folk, and Detroit hasn't yet recovered enough to be "hip". People used to have for move specifically to find a job, but in tech there are so many jobs available currently that you kind of get your choice of destination if you're a capable engineer, especially with remote work available.
Because from my experiences in Australia and New Zealand, the majority of people work a 40 hour week. Everyone in my office has cleared out by 6 PM.
$50k a year for working 40 hours a week in the midwest with its lower cost of living sounds like a fine deal. Those kinds of wages are fairly normal for software developers to earn internationally in other developed countries like Australia or Germany.
I earn the equivalent of US$55k (plus bonus) here in Australia (I could be earning more, long story) as a relatively junior developer.
But then you have to add my annual leave entitlement, I get 4 weeks annual leave plus 2 weeks of public holidays (this country is so amazing, they give me a day off to watch the horse races). I hear that the standard in the USA is 2 weeks for a professional job. So I essentially get a 10% bonus in holiday pay. I also get 10 days of paid sick leave a year, and 3 days of bereavement leave for deaths of close relatives.
I also have 9.5% superannuation on top of my salary, and I don't have to pay health insurance. For the luxury of (almost) free healthcare, my tax burden is only $700 more than it would be in Grand Rapids. According to a random website I found, I'd be paying $3,000 per year for health insurance in Michigan [1].
So my income, adjusted for superannuation and annual leave, is around $67k, add the health insurance to that and I'm at $70k. Apparently cost of living in San Fransisco is about 40% higher than Melbourne [2], so on that comparison I'm not doing poorly, but Melbourne is about 20% more expensive than Grand Rapids [3]. I'm always skeptical of Numbeo though, because the numbers are quite off. Basically though, I have US$20k (plus bonus) per year of disposable income after I pay for food, rent, and utilities.
[1] https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-cost-of-health-insuranc...
[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
[3] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
It rampages through the city like a plague every December through March.
Leave home in the dark, get home in the dark, it's overcast when you do go outside.
Snow comes and goes, it gently falls constantly due to "lake effect", and you'll have a few 10" snowstorms from November through February. Plus a couple random 40-60 degree days where it all melts off.
There is a ski hill (Cannonsburg) half an hour away, but it's only a hill - not a mountain. People ice fish, snowmobile, play hockey, and generally enjoy the winter - but you have to get out and use the right lights, or else you'll join most of the rest of the city in some mild depression.
When my son graduates high school, and our network of great schools, family, and friends becomes less of a tie, I'm running.
Now the summer time is a completely different story...
Here is Grand Rapids [2].
[1] https://www.usclimatedata.com/
[2] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/grand-rapids/michigan/...
I was born here so I am fine but I have met SE Asian, Indian and Japanese people here who were kind of miserable. But you get used to it after a while.
Lake Michigan has a large impact on weather patterns. Grand Rapids on the east and Chicago on the west do not have the same weather in the winter. Lake-effect snow is rare in Chicago, and the colder it gets the higher the likelihood of sunshine. Many days it will feel as though sunglasses are a safety item.
I will say Grand Rapids currently has some issues around software developers that are associated with our growing pains. Because of the rust belt depression of wages, we still haven't caught up. Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K. If you are an ineffective negotiator you might be lower. Many of my contemporaries have chosen to get remote jobs with the usual suspects. Zapier, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, Slack and others all have local people.
That said, this is a wonderful town that is changing all the time. The cost of living is low, though our real estate market is out of control and has been for a couple years. The developers here tend to have a strong sense of community and we generally support one another rather than tear each other down. We have some great local developers.
If you would like the low down on our growing town or are interest in moving, setting up a remote shop or building a company in our town let me know. I'd be happy to help you or get you in contact with those that can. (see profile)