Is someone making 450k in SV (renting a home, commuting hours each way, having to fly to see family) really living a better life than someone making 150k in, say Birmingham? Where they could work from home, live close to family, have a bike commute?

It's not for me (or you) to decide for others, however :) . I just think there are many more dimensions than raw salary to consider. You could work like a dog for 5 years at a FAANG, make a ton of money, and die just after you retire. It's all weighing the risks and rewards and there isn't a formula for that.

BTW yes, 2-3 months of free time to prep may not be worth it given:

* one will miss/sacrifice other aspects of life

* one may not get the job. Nothing's guaranteed, after all

* the job may not be right even if they get it

>commuting hours each way

At that salary you're looking at probably a 15 minute commute. By bike even if your office isn't in SF itself or you don't mind the hills. It's the startup employees in the bay area that don't have the money to live closer or have their own places.

>You could work like a dog for 5 years at a FAANG

From what I've found, startups and non-tech companies work you a lot more than FAANG especially if you're not looking for fast promotion in FAANG.

Somebody who makes $450k can easily buy a home in the Bay Area that’s close to any FAANG campus, and bike to work, and in many cases, not work like a dog.

(A $1.5M mortgage is around $6k per month today.)

And at the end of the year, even if what’s left over in terms of percentage of income is the same (and it’s usually not, because many COL expenses don’t scale linearly with the cost of housing), you end up with more in the bank to send your kid to college or to retire.

>> Is someone making 450k in SV (renting a home, commuting hours each way, having to fly to see family) really living a better life than someone making 150k in, say Birmingham? Where they could work from home, live close to family, have a bike commute?

You are presenting a theoretical ideal that is probably close to unattainable.

- how many tech startups are in Birmingham?

- how many VCs would be OK funding a startup in Birmingham? I know we're in COVID era now, but how long before VCs again start telling you to move to SF/SV (or perhaps NY)

- how many 150k salaried tech startup jobs are in Birmingham? I'd estimate in the single digits, probably zero.

I won't weigh in on your "is it better" question, but if you make 450k a year in the Bay Area you definitely do not need to commute hours each way and you can probably afford to buy a home if you want.

That REALLY depends on the details of the hypothetical persons situation.

EDIT: looks like copy/paste deleted some of the post, adding back:

$450k is likely $200k base, $40k bonus and $210k RSU (source levels.FYI). Most lenders won’t touch RSUs unless you had 2+ years at the same income level and even then they don’t like it. So taking 45% DTI (debt to income) ratio of base + bonus nets $9000 payment (principle + interest + taxes + insurance) and translates into $2mil purchase price assuming the hypothetical person also has $400k downpayment and reserves. That price point gets something like this:

https://www.redfin.com/CA/Mountain-View/2507-Alvin-St-94043/...? (3/1.5 1500 sqft 5800 sqft lot)

Let’s say RSUs take care of savings/extras.

Schools don’t look great for this house. This is where commute comes into play - you can trade long commute for more house and better schools.

Unfortunately, the geographical reality of Bay Area mean that there isn’t a lot of middle ground between short commute/lots of cost/other trade-offs or very long commute, but better everything else.

FWIW, if you scroll down you'll see the median price in that neighborhood is $1.5MM, which'll bring it down to about a $6K house payment. Easily doable at your salary estimates unless the buyer has a crippling candle addiction, and there's lots of wiggle room for location between $1.5-2MM if the buyer wants schools or anything more than proximity to work.

That median includes condos, which won’t be doable for families.

If you want a house, median is above $2M: https://sanjoserealestatelosgatoshomes.com/mountain-view-ca-...

Another thing to consider is that housing stock in Mountain View is very old on average, so the $2M price point doesn’t get you a mansion, but rather a very modest house (especially when considering that we are talking about TWO MILLION DOLLARS after all)

Fair point! I've never seriously considered living in the bay area so I don't know the full cost of living. Appreciate the context.

you probably aren't making 150k in Birmingham, at least most people are not (even skilled programmers)

Most people aren't making 450k in SV either.

Money isn't everything. I've turned down interview opportunities at both Facebook and Google because the roles on offer were not roles I was interested in doing. In the past I've broken off Google's interview process because the glacial pace they were moving at just was not worth it to me.

I earn well, so granted I'm not turning down as much as some would, but to drag out a tired old saying, I work to live, I don't live to work. I have plenty of things I want to do - some of them I can do in the right job, many I can't.

Of course one of the luxuries of already earning well is that the multiple of my current salary it'd take to convince me to take a job I don't actively love the sound of is far higher that it otherwise would be.

I think the parent was mostly aimed at "how much time they want to spend interviewing", which is an outlier on that list. It's trivial relative to the others.

My point is that there are many reasons why someone may not see a job at one of these companies as all that interesting, and if you don't see the job as all that interesting, then the time it takes to go through interviews suddenly is a big deal.

I think it always makes sense to consider everything, even if you're not gonna weigh your considerations equally because you might discover something that renders the offer unacceptable to you. If you're really just after high payouts and nothing else, was going into IT even the best choice to begin with?

> If you're really just after high payouts and nothing else, was going into IT even the best choice to begin with?

I don't know many other professions where high salaries are pretty much a given, without cutthroat competition among your peers?

You can get high payouts building a company, becoming a top lawyer or medical professional, but the investment in time, effort, and money is much higher, and the chances of success are lower.

Are you comparing average doctors or lawyers to the highest-paid and most career-motivated and personal-life-sacrificing programmers? Because other professions can be strategic too. E.g. the median income for patent lawyers or many medical specialties blows IT away. And those professional credentials are still valuable when you're 50 or 60, while your hot programming skills from your school days will have become an outsourced commodity that hiring managers deem worthless.

With a decent tech income for Canada (i.e. cheap for Bay Area standards), I can live well, achieve financial independence before 45 and work for a great company with inspiring coworkers.

Could I speed this up by another 5-10 years by moving to California to help monopolists serve ads, suppress competition and lure users into walled gardens? Sure I could. And what's wrong with stoking the world's most overpriced und undersupplied real estate market with another willful participant in the process.

That said, "insane" strikes me as an extreme choice of words for someone forgoing this golden opportunity.