So in my analogy, the last round ended in Sydney in 1978 meaning if you weren't sitting then then you didn't get another chance at a seat.

I remember seeing property shows in the 2000s and there'd be a young couple in their mid-20s with a baby looking at houses that were up to $800K. You'd really need to be earning $200k+ then to afford that or, more realistically, $250k+. Not a lot of jobs in Australia (even Sydney) paid that then (and still don't for the record).

So how were such people affording houses? The Mum and Dad Bank is how. Their parents who were sitting down in 1970s were now sitting on considerable unrealized property wealth and this gets passed along to the children.

So when I say Sydney became unaffordable in the 1970s, I mean what people viewed as Sydney back then, which is inner Sydney, the North Shore and coastal suburbs. But these have now been so out of reach for people who aren't wealthy for so long that people don't think of them as Sydney anymore.

Now when people talk about the affordability of Sydney they're talking about the areas where "normal" people buy. Sydney has expanded far to the West, basically to the Blue Mountains (eg Penrith). It's also expanded south (eg Campelltown). But somewhere like Mosman isn't part of the normal person's mental picture of Sydney property where it was 40+ years ago.

This reminds me of something that happened to me in university. I mentioned to someone the suburbs I'd be staying in over the summer when university was out and they literally said "la di da" like it was fancy. To them it was because they were part of a newer generation who lived very far north (I remember they took 3 buses to get to university). To me, it was just where my grandparents lived and had done so for 40-50 years. When they bought that house it was literally the edge of the city, as in the other side of the street was bushland.

You see it on the train too. When I went to university the one where all the students and twentysomethings lived was 5 stops from the CBD. 15 years later it was 8-9 stops.

At least that's how I interpret it.

Its even more so right now, if you're up for contracting. $1000+ a day is common. Kind of nuts, but hey its been good for my wallet.

But, more importantly, Big Tech senior engineer total comp is rapidly pushing to $US500K+.

Is it really though? I'm looking on glassdoor and it's saying average is $130k with high at $180k. And yes I realise that just salary not total comp.

levels.fyi is widely known to be accurate.

I do fear that housing here is going to end up like the other major Aus cities though. I think Brisbane house prices are rising at like $500 a day or something. An amount I couldn't have fathomed paying in rent weekly when I first moved to Sydney.

But a simple example that shows how lucky I and others are: I can rapidly, from $0 (if I was silly enough to have no savings for this exercise) save up a deposit within a year or two, less if one has a partner.

Any of my friends and acquaintances, unless they also went into high-paying jobs and industries here in SEQ, or unless they have parents well-off enough to help them, are writing off being able to enter the property market for years or decades.

Its worrying, for sure.

Comparatively it seems like contractors in the USA get punished by the tax system.

$1200 a day puts you into the top few percent of salaries here in Australia. I don't really care what a "brisbane sized city in the states" might be doing, because moving there means I have to live in a country that I'm not a good fit for culturally.