Also, how many SWEs in SV make $400k? Do you think they're a representative sample of white collar workers for that city?
10x means 90% difference, all consumed by the more expensive healthcare? That's like one order of magnitude wrong.
> how many SWEs in SV make $400k?
Saved you a google: > The average total compensation of a Software Engineer in San Francisco Bay Area, US is $242,000.
the topic was programmers, all "white collar workers" is not relevant to this conversation.
Healthcare costs could help to make up for that for many employees. The average American spent ~$13,000 in health care expenses in 2022, but a full time employee making minimum wage only gets ~$15,000 a year. Even if someone earns twice the minimum wage, healthcare costs will eat a huge percentage of what they'd earn.
Obviously software in the US is an exception, although here too wages and benefits are being slashed at every opportunity. The tech industry is hard at work suppressing wages and hiring from a global pool of talent (and waiting for AI to replace employees) so jobs in software might not stay so nice for very long, except for a select few with the most rare skills.
I don't even live anywhere near SV, I used a $110K average for the USA in my example, if we were talking SV that would probably be closer to $400K, so 10X what a programmer in France might make. I really don't think anyone in SV would be willing to work as a programmer for what an average programmer in SV makes so that they were guaranteed a better payout if they got fired.