- Work fewer hours
- Work from anywhere
- Work in a specific location
- Work in a certain environment
- Work in a specific kind of organization
- Work with specific technologies
- etc.
People are very different and have very different wishes and needs. Salary isn't always priority #1.
The YC startup I worked for got acquired recently. I was employee #38. I've still made more in RSUs working at a big tech company than I would have made had I stayed the full four years and vested all my options. In fact I got a bigger RSU award this year than what I got from my stock in the acquisition.
Startups would be well-advised to hire fewer people, get rid of under-performers quickly, and reserve an extra slice in the cap table for really high performers. If someone comes along that creates entire new features on their own initiative (features still featured prominently in your marketing) then may I suggest you continue to award that person either their initial grant or half (depending on how much it was) on a yearly basis? Even if that means you skip an extra hire that year you'll still come out ahead, both by keeping your high performer happy and by saving the extra salary.
(I want to be clear: The founders were well within their rights to deny my requests for more options and I hold no ill will toward them. It was their business, not mine, and they were free to run it however they wanted.)
Notably, I got what most software developers would describe as "fewer hours". We tracked time and got paid for actual hours worked. (still do) Since the company would be paying more, we were/are seldom asked to work beyond 40 hours per week. Much of this comes naturally with government contracting. You must track time, and you must pay employees for their time.
Being onsite is a positive. I'm never expected to work at home. Work is work, and go home I can focus on my family or hobbies or sleep.
If. People here sometimes make it seem like a senior engineer can just walk into a FAANG, chat with the receptionist, and walk out with a $300k offer. While it is certainly not the hardest thing in the world, these companies are still pretty selective and only employ about 10% of the total seniors in the market. More likely than not you are not getting that kind of offer. This isn't even taking into account downleveling, which Google in particular is notorious for.
A month later Twitter offered me 35% more than Google's best and final offer for a more senior position. I didn't even have to negotiate or mention the rejected Google offer.
Oh, I should add that, in my case, the downlevelling was up front. The recruiter wouldn't even put me in for an L5 interview.
If you knew that you were being slotted for L4 upfront why did you even bother interviewing? I've seen L4s rack up multiple job offers from different companies and use that as leverage to negotiate; they've all been offered $300k+ or more. Not all experience/education is the same but you gotta know how to play the game.
It's all engineering, and the majority (10+) was pure software engineering.
> If you knew that you were being slotted for L4 upfront why did you even bother interviewing?
I didn't find out until late in the process, I thought I was going to get a better offer than I did, and I was trying to correct the mistake I had just made by accepting the job I was then in. I only realized my mistake after the offer came in and I considered what dropping back to L4 would mean.
> I've seen L4s rack up multiple job offers from different companies and use that as leverage to negotiate; they've all been offered $300k+ or more.
That would have been nice, but I barely had time to keep up with one company process at a time without arousing suspicion. I was close with Facebook, but I decided before the actual interview that I wasn't going to take L4 at any price. Facebook rejected me anyway, so it wouldn't have mattered in the end.
Sources: I know people in person who got these kinds of offers.
Keep in mind that you spend roughly half of your waking hours at work. It's important to do what you love during that time. I'm personally not a fan of spending my life to make tiny increases in some ad placement algorithm.
And the stock grants won't begin to compare.
If you're counting stock separately, $180k salary isn't well, well below Amazon. That's the max they pay, and only in Seattle and the Bay Area.
All of these cities have a better salary/cost of living trade off than SV.
Total compensation of $300k or more is pretty standard for the public companies. Check levels.fyi to see examples.
The benefits are also much better than I’ve seen elsewhere.
I moved to SF from Raleigh because even after cost of living I earn significantly more (ie. put a lot more in savings every year)
Housing here is definitely not as nice as other parts of the country, but if you work hard for a few years here you can leave and pay cash for a nice house in most of the rest of the country.
That’s why engineers keep putting up with the drawbacks and moving here.
Especially if you’re married, I know a lot of developers whose spouses income goes straight into savings, investments, etc. but it’s another example of HN Silicon valley thinking that software engineering starts and stops at four companies. Married dual income couples especially can make out like bandits in any of those cities.
I live in one of those cities and depending on how you classify me,I’m either somewhere above the median or well over the 75% percentile. Our nice big, new (comparatively) cheap house in the burbs is less than 20% of our take home pay. How much do you think we put aside in savings?
Because assortive mating is a thing - it’s statistically likely that two college educated people will end up getting married and I’m trying to keep this as generic as possible. If one was a software developer making $135K a year in one of those cities and the other was almost any college educated professional making $65K a year. The net of the lower paying spouse could pay off your nice house in the burbs in ten years or less.
I don’t know of any couple who is in that situation (and I know a few) who would think about moving to the west coast just for one spouse to make $300K when their combined income is already above $200K in a much less expensive area.
(1) the salary / equity combination I’m talking about is not just FAANG, it’s basically every large SF tech company. I don’t work for a FAANG but the deal is almost as good.
(2) I specifically moved with my wife and kids to SF to make it easier for my wife to stop working — she wanted to focus on the kids for a few years. One income here was worth more than double what I could earn in Raleigh and this is the first job I had in my career that offered comprehensive medical for the whole family, not just me.
We live in about the same amount of space as we had in Raleigh, it just costs more.
Lastly, while I would prefer to have a little more space for a less absurd mortgage, I’m not interested in living in any suburb. So when you compare housing in the central city of Raleigh (or Austin) versus SF, the comparison is less unfavorable.
So, sure, if I was willing to live in the suburbs I could have more house. But I’d rather deal with less space than is ideal than have to live in the burbs. No judgment intended, it’s just not the lifestyle I want, in the same way it sounds like city life isn’t the lifestyle you want.
I am always telling people that you reach a point where you have enough money to live the life you want. That point is different for everyone and it also depends on where you are in your life.
If I made twice as much money where I live now. It wouldn’t have an immediate effect on our life. Even now when I get a raise it just goes to “increasing my net worth”. It doesn’t really change too much of anything.
We could retire earlier. But my hobbies are computers and working out and traveling. I dont see myself fully retiring, maybe just doing consulting/contracting part of the year. As far as health insurance, my wife specifically took a job with the school board so we could get benefits whether I am consulting, contracting, or working salaried and we are guaranteed coverage for the rest of our life after she has been working ten years. I work with someone whose wife gave up her demanding job that she didn’t like to work in the school cafeteria for the same reasons.
Recruiters and consulting companies are baffled why I don’t accept an opportunity to be a high price consultant and I am sticking with this small company I work for when I could easily be making 25%-50% more. But living in a low cost of living area gives you that optionality.
Heck, there is a 50/50 chance I could get a job with Amazon working as an in house AWS consultant without moving (but with traveling). I’m just not interested in large companies. I worked at one at the time Fortune 10 (non tech) company for two years and I said never again.
On the other hand, if you can't get one of those top positions in the Bay you're probably looking at closer to $150k-$200k in a senior position, which makes a $100k or so low CoL position look awfully nice.
This gap widens as you go up the salary scale. I don't think I've ever seen even $300k in a low CoL area, whereas in the expensive areas 7 figures is possible (although quite rare).
That’s easily affordable with one income, with a family making the median software developer wage. Any competent developer can pick up the phone, call a few local recruiters and have three or four offers in three weeks. Of course the pickings get slimmer the further to the right of the bell curve you go. But I do know developers who have been a lot more aggressive about their career a lot longer than I have and usually takes them two or three months to get jobs over the 80th percentile.
I picked $135K because that’s a pretty easy mark to hit if you have any negotiating skill, keep your eye on the market, and keep a warm network.
$160K+ is doable as an architect or an overpriced consultant working for a consulting company.
Which is to say - the finances are only one part of it! Living in a large city is qualitatively different from living in a small city which is different from living in a rural area. If you have a strong preference, giving up the best financial situation to live the life you want is super reasonable. I know plenty of people who could live more comfortably in a cheaper area, but some people just want to be in a big city. I'm sure the reverse is true as well.
None of the cities I listed are in what you would consider rural America. Yes we live in the burbs, but if living in the city were the lifestyle we wanted, we could buy a smaller condo for about the same price and I could still have access to the same job market.
See if you can prove me wrong: find a 10-acre lot within a half hour commute, with a large single-family home, that is affordable to a senior engineer. Alternately, make it 1 acre, but within a 5-minute commute.
I work in SF and most of the people here are here specifically because they DONT want to live on ten acres in some rural place, they love that the city is walkable and dense and interesting.
For most folks the issue of living in condos or apartments it’s an issue at all until they reach a certain family size. At that point, most of the people in the city would be thrilled to live in a 3-4 bedroom townhome in the city — but THAT is where SF gets really difficult, because those cost $4 million or more these days.
Actually for many people they feel trapped because they’d like a LITTLE more space, ie. the Victorian townhome, but they specifically DO NOT want a car or a yard and do not want to leave the historic, walkable city. At that point you’re really screwed because outside of SF there is basically nothing else walkable west of the Mississippi. So there’s nowhere to go.
If somehow magically you could build a 1900s Victorian townhome city about 30’ away by train I think you’d find a couple million urban Californians wanted to move there.
But of course the sprawl all around the job centers, and the regulatory environment, both make that impossible.
Oh well.
There are a few other big cities on the west coast, and many of them have towns or small cities nearby that have walkable centers.
Seattle is walkable enough for me. It's not a binary variable.
outside of SF there is basically nothing else walkable west of the Mississippi
Where can you live outside of SF that you don't need a car and can live a normal adult lifestyle?
Car-ownership-hostile != "walkable". Using Lyft/Uber isn't "walking".
Anyway, as to your question: parts of Sacramento, Auburn, Carson City, Eugene, Bend, and Boise all qualify, and that'slimiting to cities I know firsthand. Other cities that I hear this from others include Salem, SLC, ...
Much depends on what you consider to be "normal adult lifestyle". If one's definition of that includes walking through waste and needles to the Folsom St. Fair, SF probably does have a monopoly there.
Things that I do within two blocks of the flat I live in:
- get groceries
- go to a bakery
- go to one of three coffee shops
- go to one of ten or so restaurants
- go to a comic book store
- go to a game store
- go to a pub
- get my hair cut
- go to the dentist
My two kids, both under school age, at this point can safely walk with me to any of these activities, and, except for the dentist, they often do and quite enjoy it.
I could walk a bit further, but usually bike, and occasionally take transit, to my office, and to literally everything else in my life except the following:
- Trips out of town
- An occasional visit to a Lowes on the other side of town
That’s the bar I’m aiming for.
Note 1, I’m not talking about Manhattan. There’s almost nothing over three stories for several dozen blocks around me, this is all just really ordinary small/medium scale stuff from circa 1900.
And note 2, you asked how many people “really live like that,” and as best I can tell in San Francisco the answer is somewhere between 50 and 90% of the ~million residents. (I don’t know how good every neighborhood is, and I think some are less convenient than mine, but mine is pretty ordinary for SF.)
And, given where I live, my medical, grocery, and a significant chunk of my social needs are truly within walking distance. The only one that isn't is work, and that would be accessible via public transit if I was willing to compromise on commute times a bit (or if I changed employers/offices).
Carson City has 4 bus routes serving 150 square miles, San Francisco has close to 100 serving less than 50. Those aren't remotely comparable.
Disliking public transit is fine,
The parent comment asserted walkability. If your environment is walkable, that means you don't need transit/carshare for everyday needs.
Carson City has 4 bus routes
Carson City has a walk score of 34 (although apparently there's a 4 block area in downtown that gets up to the mid 70s). SF has an average of 86. My apartment scores 99. Like I said, there isn't a genuine comparison to be had.
Not because you live within walking distance of work, which almost nobody does. That definition of "walkable" would be so tiny to render it almost meaningless.
Muni and Bart do make it possible to get around most of SF
BART cuts one diagonal swath through the SF core only, and it doesn't even connect directly to Caltrain in SF county. It's hardly the Underground.
L transferring to the KT? It doesn't even require a bus.
>BART cuts one diagonal swath through the SF core only, and it doesn't even connect directly to Caltrain in SF county. It's hardly the Underground.
Indeed, I'm not suggesting transit in SF (or the bay area as a whole) is perfect. Far from it. But compared to anywhere else west of the Mississippi (and most of the places east of it), there's nowhere better.
Even if you are already at a FAANG in Silicon Valley, you will likely get your salary adjusted down by the standard amount if you move somewhere else. You'd actually have more luck avoiding a pay cut at a startup because they almost always have less rigorous HR policies than FAANGs.
There’s a big difference between places where you can walk (technically that’s almost anywhere) and a city that was built for walking (ie was large before cars).
On the east coast these are much more common, for obvious reasons. Places like Charleston and Savannah have a very similar feel to San Francisco. Some of New Orleans. Most of the center cities in the northeast. A lot of Chicago.
But the common thread here is age of the city and how well it has held on to its historic core. Out west there’s just not much old enough to qualify. Sure, there are some nice small towns here and there with historic main street areas. Portland, Seattle, and Boise have a neighborhood or two. But just ask the question “would you live here without a car?,” and then look at what percentage of the population does. Outside of those aforementioned bits of the country, not owning a car would make life extraordinarily difficult.
I find that if you live within a couple blocks from a nice grocery store, life without a car can be quite pleasant.
That seems excessive. You certainly don't need to live on a multi-acre lot to have a good life.
I work at a FAANG and most of my colleagues own single-family homes and have no problem paying their mortgages. Of course they aren't on 10-acre lots -- we aren't in the middle of nowhere, we are in a city.
1 acre is not at all unrealistic. I work at a well known tech company and live in an area where you can afford acre (and multiacre) lots. While owning a 1 acre lot with house is certainly not the norm in the company, it is also not at all noteworthy. No one gets surprised when they hear someone owns one. It's seen very much as a preference thing. Some people like apartments, some townhouses, some houses, and some larger lots.
And yes, they're mostly "tech types".
More realistically, in most parts of the country, a tech job will get you a 2000+ sq ft house built no earlier than the 90's. And in many of those places, a short commute to boot. Now I know SV folks often talk about how they don't need a house that big or one that "new"[0], the reality is once you're outside and can afford one, you won't find a good reason to buy a 1960's house, or a 1200 sq ft one. The preferences of SV folks are really post hoc rationalizations.
[0] Many of my coworkers reject houses built in the 90's - it's too old for them.
A coworker of mine bought 11 acres. (That's one more than 10. These lots go to 11...) He has sheep and goats and chickens, and he can shoot his AR-15 in his yard. Interestingly, he grew up in San Francisco. His current lifestyle is ridiculously incompatible with his city of origin.
I settled for a little 0.4 acre lot with a modest 3500 square foot house. (1619 square meter lot, 325 square meter house) By settling for that, I got to live within a mile of the beach and within a mile of work, and I paid off the mortgage in 8 years without trying terribly hard.
So that's close. I suspect you'd normally have to commute about 15 or 20 minutes to get a whole acre, and they go for $220,000 to $500,000. There is a house on 1.3 acre (like a football field) selling for $320,000 that is 11 minutes away, but the house was built in 1957. If you don't mind paying a couple million, you can be 5 minutes away with a modern waterfront home on an acre or two.
So this is non-urban life. It's mostly not even rural; we have an airport with about 7 passenger jet flights arriving per day. Senior developers live in nice houses, paid-off unless they really go nuts. They can have waterfront access, or room for a horse, or room to shoot and raise sheep. They can get McMansions. They can live within walking distance of work.
I just can't see giving that up. Sure, cable cars are cool and all, but that doesn't compensate for what I'd have to give up.
I can’t help but be a bit jealous, but it was really interesting to hear how different things can be.
But yes, a senior engineer can likely afford a large single family home relatively close to work (many of my co-workers do).
I like walking to the grocery store (or bar, or restaurants, etc). I like biking to work. I live within walking distance of literally 6 parks, so it's not like I'm starved for green or open space.
I don't understand your point of view to the exact same degree that you don't understand mine.
My life is very simple and I’ve never lived in an apartment bigger than 600 square feet. The idea of 10 acres is insane to me.
Wait what? What city are you talking about that has a tech hub or commercial center within a 5 minute commute of 1 acre homes?
We have sort of a specialist tech hub here, featuring stuff like radar and cyberwar. Lots of these companies are hiring. (mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18819736)
You can get more than ten acres if you are willing to commute a bit. I think 2.5 acres is the minimum lot size if you go south about 14 minutes from one of my workplace's buildings, or 22 minutes from the one I'm in.
It is a small farm. Senior engineers can afford to live on hobby farms. Some of them expect to do so. It's not just here either; I've known people who did that in relatively rural parts of Massachusetts and Virginia too.
I recall somebody on HackerNews proposing an interesting explanation for how people react. The available jobs get dismissed because you'd have to seriously consider moving (which is annoying) if you admitted that employment in these locations is viable.