That’s a normal (and still very good) salary for devs working in quieter metro areas.

I left the Bay Area five years ago. My salary is now $100k, a substantial pay cut from my SF years. But quality of life is soooooo much better here, in so many ways. It’s worth the drop in pay.

Philly suburbs are quite expensive for housing. It seems about $100k to support a family is decent but not "very well off". I image that extra $10k could make a big difference. A single person making that (or a dual income family around $200k) would certainly be well off.

Philly suburbs can be expensive (although that’s not universally the case) but Philly proper is relatively affordable.

In either case, it's $300k+ to be in a decent neighborhood for about a 1500sqft house. Cheaper than many cities, but more than smaller cities or rural areas. And anything with land is outrageous ($500k+). And property taxes can be high.

It really seems to be a tale of two cities. On one hand, housing can be affordable for the people making six figures, but on the other we have the highest extreme poverty rate for any big US city (not sure if that's still the case, but was a few years ago).

Slight aside on yards, front yards are typically out of course, but I was astonished when I visited one of my coworkers in South Philly and he had a sizeable backyard behind his rowhome. Don’t know how common that is, satellite imagery is too low-res to tell, but I see a decent number that look like they’re 1/3 of the lot!

Also, perhaps my standards are skewed - walkability and bikeability are pretty important to me, which means I’d want smaller lot sizes anyway. Big SFHs on big expensive lots aren’t so appealing as a result :)

Most of the yards are small - a couple hundred sqft. So maybe we have different preferences for yards. I have fruit trees, a garden, bees, playset, etc. That takes up a lot of room. The garden alone is about the size of many of the yards I've been to in Philly.

Yeah, walkability isn't great here. I don't feel safe biking on any road. There are quite a few cyclists around though, so it can be done (bunch of stores within 2-4 miles).

I hate how expensive land is around here. I'd love 10+ acres. Rural areas are much cheaper.

If you want a lot of space and to be near a lot of people, you’ll have to pay more. You’re basically paying to have more than your neighbors at that point.

(That aside, if you want that much land, why haven’t you moved to a more rural area then?)

"That aside, if you want that much land, why haven’t you moved to a more rural area then?"

My wife won't go for it.

Then you've got "market-competitive" wages that actually needs to get stuff done on a fixed timeline and are willing to pay to get the staffing to do it, deliberately, rather than just letting people fall into it. And finally the FAANG club and lead/architect tier positions, paying the most for top talent, with the latter two cohorts being smaller.

Think about the stuff that everyone was trying to offshore to india 10-20 years ago and that's the cheap tier. And there's a lot of it.

When I was poking around after my bachelor's, IBM Global Services was hiring around $50-55k in my area for java developers.

Atlanta can get you to 200k with a (relatively) reasonable CoL but the current housing situation there is rapidly degrading, so get in fast if you're looking. Traffic is miserable, which is true about anywhere.

However, the public transit is hilariously bad with a heavy reliance on buses running on hourly schedules and sitting in said miserable traffic. I think there's one very specific corridor that has the buses equipped to override the traffic signals, but it really led to absolutely nowhere useful to a tech worker and just mostly ran Emory students between dorms and campuses. They never expanded the idea any further. That said, if you can land a job and an apartment within walking distance of a MARTA rail station, you're living the dream. (Good luck with rent! Anything within a half hour walk of a rail station is 2x-3x the cost.)

Any attempt to market Miami as "a tech hub" is a scam. The pay offered is completely out of step with the CoL before COVID. You could swing a Miami senior level job with either an hour commute on some of the most dangerous Interstate in the USA (that's using the toll lanes, too) or a two hour-ish drive + train + bus commute (one-way for both times) utilizing public transport.

I can't speak much to Austin or Dallas, though I've heard highly conflicting anecdotes about them. I doubt you're finding $300k below a Senior Architect type title, though.

Chicago has a great pay-CoL balance, especially if you want to live downtown, walk or take the train, and not have a car. But even commuting from the suburbs isn't bad. I-90 into the city is always a parking lot though, regardless of day of the week or time of day.

If you didn’t go to college for comp sci it’s kinda hard to get your foot in the door. There’s coding boot camps now but those are pretty new

Maybe you are just out of touch with what your average software developer is paid?

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...