As someone who grew up in the Bay Area, but moved to Portland about three years ago, I can tell you there is a stark difference in ecosystems. However, if you are a young up-and-coming programmer coming out of school, it makes complete sense to move to the Bay Area. If you're an Actor you move to L.A. to get your big break. If you're a programmer, you go to the Bay Area to work for a big firm that will help build your reputation and resume. For people later in their careers who have "been there/done that" it's less about what you can do for a company and more about what you can do for yourself. People later in their career tend to think more about their quality of life after spending years grinding it out in markets like the Bay Area. I know it's the big reason I moved to Portland. I love the tech community here. It's much more collaborative. The salaries may not match what you get in the Bay Area, but what I lose in salary I gain in not being stressed all the time.
I agree with you, but only people who want to make big buck should move to the Bay Area. As you concluded later, money is not everything. I am young and about to finish school, but I am moving away from the Bay Area and even move to a different country. I do not care about the high salaries here, as I just do not like the lifestyle here. So, I'd say that the Bay Area is for people who do not mind having to work 24/7 (mind work, not physically being in the office 24/7). Mostly, this is people who love tech a lot and want to innovate all the time (start up people).
I for one care more about less stress, less inequality, etc. and decided that the Bay Area is not for me.
My experience doesn't line up with your preconceived notions of the Bay Area at all. I've worked at three different jobs in San Francisco, and all of them were standard 9-5 jobs. I've worked weekends under 5 times. Most of my friends are in the same situation.
Sure if you want to work at an early stage startup, you can grind yourself into a paste. But there are plenty of jobs here where that's not the case.
When he said "mind work", I took it as the constant, 24 hour stress I experienced while living there. Which sometimes is completely unrelated to work.
The insane commutes, the work culture, the high rent / COL, the culture of trying to look as rich/smart/successful as possible, the sue happy people, the fact that there's absolutely nothing else to do other than work, etc really wore down on me.
I lived in the south bay though... admittedly it seemed slightly better in SF. Less money grobbing and more hipsters. But it looks like all that is going out the window very quickly. The south bay culture is spreading like a cancer.
I've lived in the South Bay my whole life and have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. There are subcultures of workaholic stress magnets, but they are easily avoided. I work 40 hour weeks, have non-tech hobbies and weekends are sacred. Your experience may be typical of the crowd you hang with, but not the valley as a whole.
I'm also mystified at the assertion that SF would be better in this respect. The conventional view is that SF is more status seeking and elitist while the South Bay neighborhoods are more laid back, or at least more diverse in their subgroup compositions.
The cost of living is insane, yes, although astronomical tech salaries entirely compensate for you and me. (Sucks for people who work retail though, and schoolteachers, police etc.)
I've lived in San Jose from birth to 19 years old (worked one year at a startup) and I can see where you're coming from, but you must be blind if you have no idea what I'm talking about. The friendships I cultivated while growing up there are sacred, but those friendships would have been impossible if I didn't meet them while growing up. If I moved to SJ from somewhere else at 19+ I know I would be miserable, because like it or not most people are exactly like I described in my original comment. The type of people we grew up with and the type of people who migrate here are VASTLY DIFFERENT. Thankfully you and me could avoid them, since we were "fortunate" enough to grow up in the south bay. I'm thankful for my unique experience, but it's just that: a unique experience.
As far as SF goes, I was talking about 5-6 years ago. I've heard its way worse these days. And it's going to keep getting worse, because the south bay is a cancer. It wasn't until I moved away when I realized that.
I don't know what to say. Get out more, I guess? Change your group of friends? There's a million people that live here and I'm always meeting new people and striking up conversations. Some stick, some don't. I actually don't hang out with anyone from my childhood anymore, as I've made so many new friends over the years.
I don't think I'm getting my point across correctly. Sure. There are niches in the bay area that are great, and I'm sure I'd meet many interesting people there, if I decided to stay.
However, there's a certain point where enough is enough. It's not like this problem I'm describing is just the effect of a one-off bubble that will go away soon. It is going to get worse and worse; like it has always been. Housing prices / COL are going to go up and people are going to be constantly forced out of their homes and have to relocate and compromise. If you fuck up in your career or make one bad move with your finances, you are done. Bye bye bay area. If it doesn't happen to you it will definitely happen to your friends. It's just a horrible existence and I am honestly baffled you don't see this despite living there your whole life. The only way I could conceive of you not seeing this is if you and your friends have something like $2M saved up and don't need to worry about finances.
You are very fortunate then. My experience here in the Bay Area mirrors kLeeIsDead's. I get up at 6AM and come home from work at 7-8PM, and am mentally and physically exhausted daily from the whole rat race + commute. Totally different from other places I've lived where I could have a life. Fortunately I'm currently not subject to a lot of weekend work.
> The insane commutes, the work culture, the high rent / COL, the culture of trying to look as rich/smart/successful as possible, the sue happy people, the fact that there's absolutely nothing else to do other than work, etc really wore down on me.
Oh god, you really quantified the cruft that made me hate the place. The bay is sublime in its beauty but could only be perfect for me if the population was subbed out for Austin's or DC's (which are in many ways opposite, but they're also far more distant from SFBay than they are from each other).
The crazy part about it is it's just going to get worse and worse. I was born and raised in SJ... since the 80s this tech stuff has been slowly building on top of itself like some sort of tumor, and the city does absolutely nothing to stop the gentrification and overall shittyness of the money-money-money mindset from taking over. I'm 23 now, most of my friends and 100% of my parents friends (lived there since the 60s) have moved out because of the constant influx of migrant workaholics.
It's given me a very cynical view on life. I really don't know where else to move, I feel like I need to leave the country as well, or at least leave California. Where are you going, if you don't mind me asking?
FWIW, it's not the "migrant" part in itself that irritates me. It's the whole thing, "migrant workaholics". I hate the people who moved to my hometown for the sole reason to make money and go back to their home country, with no intention to integrate.
I am moving (back) to Europe (Germany). I have a European Passport, so I don't have to worry about a visa, like I would have to if I decided to stay here.
If you get exhausted by working a lot, it's probably best to not work at a small startup or a company that is growing super fast. There are larger (usually public) companies in the Bay Area where people can work 9-6 type jobs and be great at their jobs. It can be team dependent, but there are people who work totally normal hours at google, apple, linkedin, etc. There are a lot of other mature companies people work at as well. It's not as sexy to say you work for them, but they pay you a respectable salary and don't have to take over your life. That said, ANY job can take over your life if you let it, whether that job is in Portland, Austin, Chicago, or San Francisco (not that it is necessarily a bad thing to have your job be your life).
Over the years I've noticed the south bay culture spreading up to SF and Oakland, and down to Santa Cruz. They haven't been hit as bad as Palo Alto and San Jose, but I'm afraid that the culture will continue to spread as long as the software industry continues to be lucrative (and other industries become less so).
Not everyone has the same experiences with the Bay Area - I live in the Valley and my commute is better than when I lived in DC (where even going < 2 miles to work took longer than it takes for me to go 7 miles by bus currently, even with direct routes in both cases), and I enjoy running/playing board games/hanging out with friends greatly.
Agreed though I'm coming from the opposite perspective. Despite the traffic, I'm willing to put up with it in DC because the caliber of people is entirely different and far superior to any experience I've had in SFBay.
I've carefully cultivated non-tech friends in SF/South/East Bay, to the point where I actually need to meet more tech people now since I have no idea what work life is like at other companies.
It's been worthwhile and we do plenty of stuff, but you have to be prepared to drive very long distances to see anyone. And many people who don't get into tech move away, so practically everyone is younger than me (and male) and can't afford the hipster restaurant visiting hobbies.
Oh, but the commute here is really not that bad compared to other American cities that aren't "world tier" (LA, Atlanta, DC) because those cities refuse to build mass transit.
I lived in Vienna, VA for a while, so I'm pretty familiar with all the failings of WMATA. And there are many. But...and it's a big "but", if you've lived in any major non-coastal city in the US you might think that DC's Metrorail is at least a public rail system, which is better than many cities have.
It's sad that in the US, you have to take what you can get, and the reasons why the US doesn't have good public transportation have been discussed here ad nauseum, so I won't even flog that dead horse again.
Sure, but when the density gets too high, you require public transportation to get around. I used to live in Falls Church. 20 years ago it only took 20 minutes to drive 5 miles to Tysons Corner (still crazy). Now it takes 45, but you can take the metro.
Maybe it is because I live in the South Bay. But here it seems that everyone is just going to work and back home.. and that's it. There is nothing else going on here, but work work work.
It might be your specific location. It also might be a combination of "selection bias" -- people tend to be friends with people who are like them in some way -- and psychological filtering where you just don't see anything else for some reason.
I remember reading a piece about alcoholism where it was describing an alcoholic who concluded that everyone drinks a great deal and just doesn't admit it because that was what their social circle was like. I rarely drink alcohol and have known plenty of people like me, so, no, not everyone drinks.
Most people suffer confirmation bias. We look for confirmation of what we believe to be true about a thing. It is unusual for someone to actively seek more objective data and try to determine what the actual truth is. Most of us default to trying to fit the world to our preconceived notions of it.
The culture of the South Bay is relatively non-existent outside of small pockets like Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Mountain view, and maybe Santana Row.
It's geared toward raising kids and family life in general.
I am having enormous difficulty parsing that comment. I have tried to just let it go, but I am failing at that, and I am seriously struggling to reply in a way that does not sound like snark.
Could you clarify what you mean? Because it sounds like either you are saying "Culture only exists in tiny parts of certain places, no place else in the South Bay even has a culture" (which is utterly nonsensical) or maybe you are saying "People who have kids and put family life first are not part of any culture." (again, a big fat nope).
I thought the same thing of the first place I lived in my early twenties after moving away from my home town. Then my older sister came to visit and schooled me in how blind I was.
Culture is a human artifact and although it exists partly out there in the world we create, a big piece of it lives inside us and informs us of the proper way to interact with both other people and the spaces we share. Sometimes, people who decry the lack of culture of an area are telling you more about themselves than about the area.
Interesting reply, it seems you've misconstrued the intent of my post.
I was merely sharing my observation that certain areas in the South Bay tend to have more stuff to do (i.e. a downtown). Not sure why you took that as me denigrating parents and families. Perhaps I was being vague.
I agree that culture is something, as you put it, that is kept inside of us. However, people don't exist in a vaccum. We are very much influenced by the environment we live in. Most people don't exist in a cultural vacuum where they don't interact with the larger cultural forces in their environment.
My (admittedly anecdotal) experience has been that the South Bay is primarily a work culture. Having lived both in SF and the South Bay, I can tell you that both are offering very different answers for the same question, regardless of whether or not you are single, married, or have kids.
Interesting reply, it seems you've misconstrued the intent of my post.
Yeah, no. Please do not assume that a reply of mine to one of three replies to my actual request for clarification is some kind of commentary on you.
I agree that culture is something, as you put it, that is kept inside of us.
That isn't at all what I said. I said it is a human artifact and part of it is stuff out in the world and part of it is a thing inside us, which is very different from saying it is "only" inside us, which is what your framing strongly suggests you read it to mean. In which case, it is you who are misconstruing my comments.
My (admittedly anecdotal) experience has been that the South Bay is primarily a work culture.
"Chain restaurants" Really? I don't even live in the Bay area but I visit a fair bit on business and I don't know the last time I've eaten at a chain either in the city or the South Bay.
But the South Bay is basically suburbia, SJ technically being a "city" notwithstanding. So just like pretty much every other urban area in the US, there's enormously more "culture" (in the Arts, Theater, and Culture section of the newspaper sense) in the city, SF in this case, than in the suburbs.
Boston/Cambridge are exactly the same way. I live well West and like it but if I want to go to see a show or music performance, 95% of the time I'm going to drive into town.
I don't know what exactly you're looking at, because from my perspective "everyone" is an insane exaggeration on your part. I know countless people who run, cycle, ski, mountain bike, play soccer, go backpacking, play board games, travel, partake in live music, and so on and so forth.
Sure there are disproportionately more workaholics in the area. There are also disproportionately fewer people who work 9-5 then go home and veg out on their couch. To me, the lifestyle here is rich and amazing. Where I grew up, which was in an equally large and cosmopolitan city, it's too cold or too hot for 4-6 months of the year to do much outdoors, salaries weren't high enough for people to routinely go to expensive restaurants or travel, and the geography is nowhere near as beautiful or interesting.
Maybe you should look inward more and take charge of your life; it may be that you're hanging around people who focus entirely on work, and so your perception is skewed.
Well, everyone around me pretty much determines what is available to me. No one is going to build a zoo in San Jose if no one is coming. San Jose does not even have something like University Ave in Palo Alto. SJ Downtown is horrible and certainly not a place I'd like to go to have fun. What I am saying is, that compared to other cities such as LA or San Diego, San Jose is dead. Nothing besides working is happening. Considering how much I am paying to live here, that is disappointing.
Santana Row or Lincoln in Willow Glen would be the analog to University Ave. Both are pretty nice to hang out in.
Campbell also has a nice downtown; while it's not San Jose, it's surrounded by San Jose and is basically the same metro and is VTA-accessible. There's also Saratoga and Los Gatos, but those are further out.
Downtown, I'll grant you, though. San Pedro Square can be OK, and the area nearer the University has some quirky stuff, but it has a ways to go. It's gotten somewhat better over the years, though, and I think BART coming to the area may accelerate that a bit since it can actually be a destination.
I totally agree. If people want to gripe about high rent/COL or lack of public transit that is fine and legitimate. But complaining about lack of things to do just doesn't add up. You can go hiking in Marin or in the open space preserves on the peninsula. You can drink great beer at several breweries or go to Napa/Sonoma to wine taste. You can go skiing in Tahoe. You can go to Yosemite or Sequoia. You can ride your bike in the mountains/hills on the peninsula. You can go to several different beaches. There is a good restaurant scene (albeit expensive). There are NBA, NFL, and NHL teams if you are into sports. As someone who moved here from Illinois, I think the variety of things to do in the Bay Area is huge.
But all the places you mentioned are at least 1.5 hours drive from San Jose. You can't expect me to drive 1.5 hours just to not have to sit at home every time I want to have some fun? I love day trips, but I don't want to have to to a day trip every weekend or every day I want to have some fun. Compare that to LA or San Diego where you don't have to drive far to have fun (nightlife for example) or awesome beaches. All I see in San Jose is empty streets after 9pm. There is nothing going on in this town besides work.
But here's one thing I've found: People who really want to have fun find a way. There are small pockets all over the bay. SJ downtown is a little lame but it is getting better
We do have hiking trails in the area too, particularly up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Henry Coe State Park is a little less than an hour away. There are a number of wineries in Los Gatos and Saratoga, around half an hour away. I'm less familiar with the microbrew scene around here, but I know there's mead in Sunnyvale (~30m) and a handful of larger "micros" like Rock Bottom in Campbell and Lazy Dog in Cupertino. NHL is downtown, NFL is ~30 min away in Santa Clara, etc.
You're overstating the issue. It's not New York or San Francisco, for sure, and we sure do need better rapid transit but you're definitely not an hour and a half from everything cool. You're more like half an hour or so. You just need to look for it.
Sounds like you're simply living in the wrong place. Within 30 minutes, I can drive from SJ to a number of great hiking trails or take my road bike to some super fun hills. Of course the streets are empty after 9pm... people want to be able to get outside when the sun is up!
Going straight from work to home and staying there is indicative of a "work work work" culture? That's some doublespeak. I have lots of hobbies (and kids) at home, and wish I could do more of that.
The South Bay is a residential suburb. It doesn't have much of a nightlife. The same can be said about most of the places people live in this country outside of the densest urban centers.
If that's not what you want, then by all means move. But recognize that this is exactly the sort of stability many people strive hard for.
Try Meetup or joining ridiculous activities like crossfit. I read someone here call them "secular cults" - why do you think people go to church everywhere else?
Whether or not that's true, your lifestyle isn't dictated by what "everyone" does, it's only dictated by what you do. I know lots of people who are workaholics or spend all of their non-work time with their families, and I know as many or more people with rich and varied lifestyles that go out and do stuff with friends all the time. It's what you make of it, like many things in life.
Sadly, what everyone does determines what is available to me. They are not going to create nightlife and other interesting stuff if there is no target demographic.
You need to broaden your horizons. There are tons of things to do in the South Bay.
* Rock climbing
* Scuba diving in Monterey
* Bicycling on the bay trail
* Board gaming clubs
* Meetups
* Wineries
* The boardwalk in Santa Cruz
You can even take an hour train ride straight to SF and spend the day with the snobs and homeless. And then take the same train home to a place that doesn't stink like urine.
It really depends on what you want to do. If programming is programming and programming is just a job, then you can do that anywhere there are programming jobs, and with so many companies offering remote work, that could be anywhere.
But if programming is what you intend to bring as a founder - if it's simply a means to get the burning ideas out of your head and into a product, then there's a much smaller number of places where that will work: San Francisco, Seattle, New York. You need to be able to have coffee with a VC, meet with multiple co-founder options, do a tech meetup and also spend a sizable chunk of the day coding.
If you live near a small city, working that way is an impossibility. You'd have to go to the nearest big city to find that type of collaboration, and the trip will burn through all your coding time, and you still won't have the kind of quality selection that you'd get in NY or SF.
As you say, hacking the rent-salary ratio, which is what the article is about, should be a much smaller factor in how you decide where to live.
What if I'm working on a side project, don't want VC funding (or any sort of loans), and just want to build organically? I can find people who can program and can program well in almost any place on the planet. There are a shitload of Russians and Chinese cleaning up at things in the software engineering domain. There are a shitload of people writing all kinds of good and bad code everywhere. Even if I wanted to found a startup in Nowhere, Saskatchewan I could, particularly since there are plenty of folks who will work remotely and maybe a few locals who are good as well.
San Francisco is a place. Engineering talent is available everywhere, though perhaps most places it isn't so much fish jumping onto the line as in the Bay Area.
What about all the nerds who are Polish, Portuguese, and Peruvian and choose to remain local because their spouses, children, and other interests are? They can still code, some of them are definitely brilliant, and they can either work locally or (more likely) remotely.
Starting a "startup" with venture capital might be next to impossible in Peru, for all I know, but a hell of a lot of folks don't want to exit, don't want to dilute their ownership of their product, and frankly like the environs elsewhere.
If you can afford to pay a couple Chinese programmers this isn't a bad idea. You run the risk of your code just vanishing and a eerily similar Chinese product appearing a few months later, but depending on your financial situation you can be a sole funder in that case.
Not that I have anything against using out of country programmers, but it's a fact that China does not strongly enforce copyright and does not go out of its way to protect foreign businesses. I don't know about Russia, India, South America, etc, I'd be curious about anybody that's done this sort of thing before. Tim Ferris always talks about it for things like running his support and returns and whatnot.
You can just choose countries with Western culture that didn't have too much luck economy-wise in the recent years, but have stable states and law.
That usually means Central/Eastern Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and so on. Avoid Belarus, Ukraine and others with heavy eastern influences (a rule of thumb: if they use Latin alphabet, there's a good chance that it's safe).
I think to padobson's point, it's all about what you want to do.
There are certain restrictions that the Bay Area places on you, like how much money you need to earn, and a particular lifestyle you want to live, in a very specific industry. This is the same as someone going to Houston for Oil, NYC for Finance/Fashion, LA for entertainment, etc. People who live in those places have a particular set of goals - e.g. building big companies (vc or not), doing well on wall street, hitting it big in the movies, etc.
If you don't have those goals, then absolutely - stay where you want to stay. Work remotely. There is a ton of arbitrage in software dev right now, you can make a killing and live in really cheap places. You can literally live like a king. if that is what you want to do.
So it all comes down to your goals, and the Bay Area as a whole is self selecting in that way. If you want to do something more chill in software, that's great. We need more people making money writing code - it's great for the world economy. But you don't need to be in the Bay Area for this (unless you want to).
If you aren't looking to raise VC but instead want to be part of a vibrant tech ecosystem, well, that opens up more mid tier cities. For starters: San Diego, LA, Boulder, Austin, Portland, Pittsburgh(?) in the USA.
I've been far happier as an engineer in NYC and Berlin than SF. Gentrification has made SF a pretty boring place to be, and I felt that my overall sense of creativity plummeted there when I was surrounded by so few people from different backgrounds.
I don't think there's nearly as much gentrification as people say there is, overall. I mean sure, there's a huge amount of gentrification in the 20% of SF that is not rent controlled: there only the super rich can live.
But, as for the other 80% that's rent controlled, lots of it is pretty dilapidated, almost borderline 3rd world country in some parts. 1% (7k people) of the SF population is homeless and even more are nearly there (despite over 240 million$ a year spent fighting homelessness).
Perhaps the reason people find SF boring is due to the hollowing out of the middle class.
And if you are into oil/gas, Houston. Marijuana, Colorado or Washington. Cars, Detroit (maybe?). Commodities, Chicago. Ag, Kansas City (maybe?). Outdoor experiences, SLC. Building something for Latin America, Miami. Ets, etc.
I imagine there are many other cities that dominate in niches that I'm missing.
Someone should tell Google (hey googlers on here) to add that case to the search engine's special cases, as in: "Did you mean agriculture or (the chemical symbol for) silver [1] or ..." :)
>go to Bay Area to a big firm to build your reputation
Doesn't make sense. The big 4 have campuses across the country.
Instead of telling people to move to SV I would recommend making sure to get into the right (big 4 or not) team and role for your career. Just fixing bugs at big SV company will not help much. You want to make sure you have a chance to contribute something to show your skills on an innovative or leading team.
Joining one of the FANGs as your first job is a great way to kill your chances of developing a highly diverse skill set early on. Good luck doing anything interesting when there are 120 superior engineers who are bored out of their minds all vying for the opportunity. Working in a smaller company that has real problems to solve tends to be much more rewarding. There's a reason the technical leadership at the big 4 tends to be comprised of engineers who came from elsewhere.
I have to agree with the OP, I know a few Googlers (my wife used to work there) who transferred from satellite offices (say Venice or NYC) to MTV and all of a sudden their careers took off. Generally, being physically there where the action is (HQ) seems to pay off for ones career.
One time I talked to a Google recruiter, and that was the message he conveyed. "Sure, you can work at a satellite office, but if you are interested in your career, Mountain View is where you want to be."
- I promise you that's only true as far as your project's priority. For example if Google Maps in Colorado is more important to the company, at the moment, than some other project at HQ, then working on that project at HQ is not better for your career.
- Remember a recruiter is a sales person. Some are honest, some will tell you what serves their own interest.
All Google VPs are in MTV, it's not a secret inside Google that it's easier to get promoted there. Still, I'm perfectly happy in working at a satellite office.
> Doesn't make sense. The big 4 have campuses across the country.
Yes, but a disproportionate number of their positions are in the bay area. Also, it's much easier to job hop between high-paying companies in the bay area, and this is particularly true if you have a specialization more specific/less common than "web dev" or "iOS dev".
My first role was in Charlotte - at a startup. It's not everyday that you get to work for a company with fewer that 10 people and less than 10 months old but it happened for me in a market notorious for only having banking mobile dev roles. Ironically, I left the Bay Area to get my first shot because I wasn't young enough for cultural fit most places (apparently). Now, I'm in Chicago and while the weather is shit, there is a lot of energy here and the scene appears to be lifting off. You don't need to build a reputation in SF (or Oakland, et al).
I think that whole ridiculous "cultural fit" nonsense is why I ignore jobs in the BA. What on earth do I care if my team listens to the same music that I do? or wants to eat the same food I do? Culture is best when it's infused with all kinds of outside sources. Having this homogeneous hive-mind isn't really good for any business. But trying to explain that to your average 20-something is typically not that easy.
They're called "incidents" at some (enterprise software) bigcos, BTW :) - and tend to be called "defects" in software services companies using software engineering standards like ISO 9000 or SEI CMM.
Juniors or freshers tend to get assigned those for a while. Nothing wrong per se, it helps them learn the codebase, and in some bigcos, the codebases can be pretty big. The same practice is followed in some smallcos too.
I live in the BA and work in tech, and I'm not super-stressed. Neither my peers seem to be. It doesn't mean we don't work - but not more stressfully than I'd expect to work anywhere else. Maybe I'm just lucky.
The downside is everything is so expensive. Housing, of course. But also everything else too, services, other things. If you can live frugally, it may be to your benefit - you get higher income and keep low spending, win. But if you can't or work lower income job, it may be a problem.
The upside is there are a lot of exciting opportunities around, both in employment and in conferences, lectures, events, etc.
Totally. The nice thing about being in Portland is that the Bay Area is only an hour and a half flight. We still have family down there so we spend some time there, but we have kids. So one big reason we left the Bay Area was just to find better quality education and we definitely do not regret the move after finding amazing schools here.
But to your point, there are some great events and conferences which is probably the biggest thing missing from Portland. There are a few good events, but nothing at the scale of what happens in SF.
I love Portland. I might make more in SF, but I'm already making more than the median SF salary while living in Portland, and my house only cost me $350K or so. The cost of living is starkly lower here, and the city itself is much, much smaller and less hectic -- while still being big enough to have all the things you want and plenty of people if you want to be social. I can't see moving to SF unless I could earn $300K+, and even then it might not be enough to make me jump.
I really want to like Portland because it is so cheap and seems to have good access to outdoor activities. Unfortunately I can't get past the weather, and the stark lack of diversity.
As someone who grew up in Portland and still lives here. Please stop telling people about Portland. The traffic is already bad enough and I personally enjoy dreaming of owning a house one day that isn't in the sticks. Portland housing is sky-rocketing because of techies leaving the bay for cheaper housing.
It only makes sense to move there, if you have an incredible job offer on the table. Don't assume you might get one by moving there. If you have no access to some network there already, you much more likely will get access to some kind via amazing work and communication online, than by hanging out in a coffee shop in the Bay Area, burning money for rent and eating Ramen noodles.
Curious about how huge the difference in costs and life-quality might be? Play with https://teleport.org
It's always expensive to chase the hot thing. If you're an average joe, SFO is that thing that is best avoided.
I'm living in a median cost market in an expensive state and live like a king in comparison to someone in my job (senior tech role) in SFO, although my salary is 50% less. I won't be working for Google anytime soon, but I don't need $500k to live in the lifestyle that I want for my family.
If you want the northern CA lifestyle, wait for the real estate cycle to bust and save some money in a normal place.
Having grown up in Portland and worked with and for Bay Area companies my whole career, I'd say that I agree with the premise that for younger tech people it could be beneficial to move there- but not because of the money. Because of the size of the community and more diverse opportunities.
I thought PDX was a vibrant (albeit small) tech scene until I moved to Seattle. It was amazing how many more opportunities to meet and learn from interesting people there were across all tech stacks. Having enough friends down in the SF area I get the impression that their scene is even more lively.
As for bigger salaries, I think it's mostly hype. My anecdotal evidence makes me believe that there's likely more opportunities for early stage equity/stock type agreements than you'd find in other places, but my salary has always compared favorably to people in the exact same role living down in the bay- and that's before factoring in the cost of living.
Might as well live in Washington at that point. No state income tax, while there is Oregon state income tax. Then again, Washington has sales tax, whereas Oregon does not. I used to live in Portland, and some peopled lived / worked in Vancouver, Washington, and drove to Portland to do all their shopping, groceries included.
It's really cold and wet all the time. Non-compete agreements are valid so prepare to be screwed over if you change jobs. You don't have the California code on your side if you want to do a side project-- it will be owned by your employer. Amazon will work you like a rented mule and that bald guy in charge is creepy as fuck. Traffic in Seattle is worse than the Bay Area (yes really). They can't expand I-95 because they made the decision to tunnel it through a building (long story)
I've actually worked at Amazon in the past. My experience wasn't that bad. And I'm a actually a Seattle native! For some reason, the traffic there never really bothered me.
Funny thing. I remember reading about this a while back. There were particular regions in Seattle that would be unaffected. I'm not sure how accurately the predicted boundaries were, but I remember my apartment being 10 feet away from the boundary, in the unaffected area. My company, though, was on the other side. In essence, I was exempt from danger for half of the day during weekdays, and a full day during weekends.
I wouldn't worry tooo much about earthquakes in any country with good local building codes. Background: I am from Christchurch New Zealand; my parents live on top of the 2010 Canterbury earthquake, and my sister lives on top of the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake.
Avoid living or working in brick buildings (they fall apart).
If worried, perhaps avoid high tsunami risk zones (that lack high ground, roads are less useful since they will be unusable during large earthquakes).
If you catalog your risks, earthquake death or disability is probably low in scheme of things.
From my experience, if you work in software with a laptop, earthquakes are not likely to affect your work too much.
Unless you have a neurotic partner, in which case avoid earthquake zones, because they lose the plot when the earth takes control.
Meh. I was in the Bay Area during the 89' quake. I'm not terribly worried about what would happen here. I remember hearing "the big one" was coming for the past 30 years.
I moved from the UK, with my wife and two young kids, to the Bay Area in 2012. I'm an experienced dev; mostly hands-on architecture/development, but also leading teams.
Spending time there and experiencing the people and general fast approach to development has definitely help me and my career. It is, mostly, different to the more conservative approach typical used elsewhere. So experiencing the two and being able to use both, when appropriate, is helpful.
After two years we moved back to the UK.
Living and working there was amazing. But, overall it felt like it came at a too huge a cost (financially, work commitment, and commuting).
It looks like the salary differential of $33k listed in the article is gross earnings. After taxes this would just barely cover the rent differential of $1.5k/mo ($18k/year). Note that this is the best case scenario according to their estimates.
What troubles me is the use of median rent to compare housing costs. As rent increases, renters are likely to downsize offsetting some of the rent increase. I'd be willing to bet Seattle renters are able to get more space for the area's median rental. Accordingly, the salary increase probably doesn't cover the rent increase for a similar sized home.
A peculiarity of "median" is neither my income nor lifestyle are median. I'm currently thousands of miles from SV and earn and live at the 90th to 95th percentile depending on who's fuzzy math and crazy definitions you trust. So its interesting to know median expenses for something like coffee or restaurant food, but I'd never live in a median real estate so whats the standard of living like at the 95th percentile assuming I'd get a raise? Its pretty good for me and my family where I live...
Median would be relevant if you were talking about moving to CA to sell car insurance to tech people.
I incorrectly multiplied the tax rate to the salary difference, and said that this was a 5$ difference. This is totally wrong (as multiple people point out below). I'll leave my original embarrassing comment as a cation to not write stupid things :)
==
I just added in a mention of the tax difference. But the numbers are 13.3% in CA vs 0% in WA. That's significant, for sure. But 13% tax on $33k is about $5k. I don't think that changes the conclusion that the salary difference does (in many cases) cover the housing costs.
You're likely correct about the price for a similarly sized home. People who want large homes should probably not move to the Bay Area.
Where are you getting 13.3%? Most likely a software developer is going to be in the 9.3% bracket. And it is also a graduated bracket system so you are only paying that 9.3% on income over $51K.
13.3% is the marginal tax for people making over $1 million/year in CA. People in that income bracket are not worrying about whether they should move to the Bay Area.
Thanks for adding the note on the tax difference! That doesn't address my point though.
If the salary difference of $33k is the difference between gross salary, that $33k is going to be taxed at the marginal tax rate. My guess at a marginal tax rate would be ~40%. Accordingly, that $33k becomes closer to $20k after tax.
Edit: to clarify, consider a Seattle salary of $100k and a Bay Area salary of $133k. The take-home salary for each location would be:
Seattle : $100k*(1-0.4) = $60k
Bay Area: $130k*(1-0.4) = $78k
Leaving $19.8k in additional income to cover the median rent increase of $18k annually.
Works out to $9k according to this for a single filer: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#8TRRj... -- so your additional income is more like $11k, or just under $1k / mo. In my experience, the difference in housing is far more than $1k/mo, so you come out ahead in Seattle.
EDIT: Looks like I forgot about California's other taxes on payroll, so it's actually even more in Seattle's favor.
One nitpick: the 13.3% bracket only applies to taxable income of >$1M/year. The marginal rate that actually applies to most of the numbers being thrown around is 9.3%, which corresponds to the 51-263K bracket if filing a single return (103-526K if married filing jointly or HOH) - plus you can deduct these taxes on your federal return, to boot.
If you move to CA, you need to pay state tax on your entire earnings, not just your raise. 13.3% of 140k is more than 18k, which is certainly significant.
I believe you can deduct state from federal tax, which would save ~2.5% in marginal tax. In addition, social security phases out at ~120k so that's another 7.5% savings. So the difference is almost a wash if I understand correctly?
Taxes can be complicated but tax brackets aren't a complicated concept. Especially for programmers. Not understanding and planning around taxes is extremely unwise and inefficient. If you understand taxes and finances you can cut another 10-20 years off your working life.
You should write a primer. A lot of programmers get into the game pretty young and figure they'll deal with all of the financial planning stuff when they're older.
For clarity, I wrote up my thoughts here [0]. The issue I pointed out applies to Federal as well as State taxes. By my calculations, it looks like it's clearly not worth it to move to the Bay Area.
Downsizing is a plus, not something to be baked into estimates. If down sizing to having roommates in the Bay Area, then the only fair comparison is the same roommate situation elsewhere.
The idea is to normalize salaries by cost of living. If you have more specific information for each area (you have actual offers), then you can use that. However, using a lower rent for the Bay Area, for example, because you'll have roommate, may set you up to take an equivalently lower salary.
For example, if you're going from $100k/$2000 location to $100k/$3000 (salary / rent), but you set it back to $2000 because that's your rent with roommates, you've foolishly/ignorantly accepted a lower equivalent salary.
Compromise on neighbourhood. If you're in SF instead of living in the nice areas, go to Tenderloin, Hunter's Point, etc. You can find great deals in those areas.
Where do you imagine you're going to park it? It's 2 hour parking in resdidential areas unless you have a resident permit (not that there'd be any available), no overnight parking in commercial areas.
A paid parking space will run you the price of a 1-bedroom in a sane region.
Interesting that Bay Area hackers make more than local hackers when they relocate outside the Bay Area.
FTA:
A 2015 report by Hired found that when engineers from
the Bay Area relocate to other areas, they out-earn
engineers on the local market. Experience in the Bay
Area seems to advance careers. Engineers moving from
San Francisco to Seattle make an average of $9,000
more than others who get offers in Seattle. This Bay
Area premium is even higher in other cities: $16,000
in Boston, $17,000 in Chicago, and $19,000 in San Diego.
Bay Area hackers are more valued in different markets than local hackers. I would love to see the raw data for the "relocating" hackers and local hackers. Is it a question of applied experience opportunities in the Bay Area hackers? Is just startup afterglow? Are relocating hackers better than average pre-Bay Area experience to begin with and this shows up when they migrate away from the Bay Area?
This could also be an artifact of the metric. I call this the "Geico" fallacy.
Geico advertises that "People who switch to Geico save 15% or more". Notice that people who would lose money by switching to Geico should rarely switch. Accordingly, this metric will usually be positive.
Consider that people moving to a new city for a job may need more incentive to move.
I've always found those advertisements weird. If consumers are rational and have good information, then the average savings from switching is the same as "how much do you have to pay someone to switch to Geico?". The higher it is, the worse you should expect service to be!
Consumers don't have good information; applying for car insurance is a big pain, so they usually don't know. They probably apply once, then have the same car insurance for years... which might mean that they are paying too much.
Same basic problem as an employee who has worked at the same company for 10 years, and gotten their 3% raise every year - the market may have changed radically, but looking is a burden (emotionally, and otherwise) so they are unaware of that.
Enter a tremendous flood of car insurance advertising... to get people to actually evaluate if they are paying too much.
Most insurers actually increase premiums over time regardless of whether you make any claims. In the past they offered longtime customer loyalty discounts but as some point some bean counters looked into consumer psychology and noticed exactly what you're talking about so now it's up every year.
In practice it's quite difficult to compare insurers in this way since it's not that often you need to make a claim and online reviews are overwhelmingly biased toward negative reviews so they're all like one-star. As far as I can tell the correlation between price and service is not that strong.
For what it's worth, when I had to make claims with Geico it was fine. But I was clearly not at fault in either case so it was not a difficult process.
I also think part of their ability to offer lower premiums is generally having lower human involvement -- no independent agents, claims routed through Web site or call centers, claims adjuster on site in body shop instead of visiting you, etc.
Exactly! "Customers pay us more than our competition. They clearly love us and we're doing something right" is a nuanced point hard to make in an ad, but it needs to be made somehow. That's probably why Statefarm et al focus on their customer service in their ads, but those ads don't sound so catchy.
Not that I know of... the closest might be the Broken Window Fallacy (http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...), where only the effect of "seen" outcomes are front of mind and considered, but "unseen" outcomes are ignored even if they are more impactful to reality.
While I agree with the others calling this a type of sampling bias, I've seen this type of error frequently enough that I think it deserves a more specific name.
It could be as simple as Bay Area hackers being accustomed to higher salaries and negotiating higher (or not accepting lower offers) even in places with cheaper living expenses.
There is that, and the fact that in the eyes of prospective employers Bay Area experience is highly valued.
Honestly I don't think experience in Bay Area is necessarily better, there are great teams in Europe/rest of US and shitty teams in SV, but for some reason there is this Bay Area "halo".
Source: I've relocated to Europe after 3 years in Silicon Valley.
Maybe European companies see a Bay Area "halo," but I wouldn't say the same about American companies.
My company has software developers in Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, and Sunnyvale. From what I've seen it's a lot easier to bullshit your way into a senior software role in the Bay Area than it is elsewhere, so the rest of us tend to be a bit wary of the ones we don't yet know well.
It's easy to get a senior role at a random company in SV. There are many companies looking for senior people, provably more than there are candidates. However you have to check if they stick, and what they do. It's actually fairly easy to weed out the bad ones with a 45 minute interview if you don't let yourself be seduced by their ability to talk well. In my entire career I have only once heard of someone who seemed senior doing really well at coding exercises and then turning out to be horrible. I have frequently heard of people not coding as awesome as you expected but talking a good line and then being disappointed after the hire.
Perhaps developers in the Bay Area learn very quickly how much demand there is for their skills and that confidence translates directly to leverage during negotiations, regardless of where they look for a job. There's too many confounding factors to clearly pick out which are significant without much more precise data.
On a side note: Calling them hackers when you clearly mean run of the mill corporate programmers seems like something straight out of an HBO show.
Oh, I default to using the hacker label as a compliment to programmers here on news.yc. I tend to assume (based on reading bits of code from various news.yc contributors) that many devs (carefully not bucketing myself in this group) here exhibit a level of mastery above a run of the mill corporate programmer.
I can offer only anecdotal evidence; take it for what it's worth (not much, I know).
I lived and worked in the Bay Area for a little over fifteen years, almost two thirds of it at Apple, and almost a third of it at a successful startup called Reactivity.
I left in 2006 because of some catastrophic health events, and have lived and worked in Arkansas since recovering my ability to work.
When I'm working, I find it pretty easy to command higher-than-average pay for this area. Of course, I fairly often work remotely for people still in the Bay Area, or in Boston or Denver, and naturally they're going to tend to offer me more than Arkansas companies would. But I can also command a pretty good premium in Arkansas.
I don't know how much you can take from my example. I'm an old-fart developer now, with a long resume that has a bunch of famous names on it. People who are impressed by those things will naturally tend to offer more money to get them. I've seen some employers in this area become visibly more enthusiastic because of some of the people I've known and worked with, or that I can offer as references. My assessment is that some of that enthusiasm has been respect by association.
On the other hand, there may be some real quality differences in engineering culture, and some fraction of the premium may reflect that. Some of the markets I've worked in outside Silicon Valley have significantly different standards and practices, and the differences are not often for the better. In some cases they've verged on infuriating or clown-car laughable. Maybe some fraction of the premium is employers paying for people they expect to know better, and maybe they're not entirely wrong.
A lot of employers look at previous salary to determine a base point for a new job. Coming from somewhere with a high salary makes it much easier to "justify" asking for more.
It's not a big mystery. They ask for higher salaries, because that's what they are used to and end up getting paid more. It's not because their skills are more valued.
When people compare salaries / the cost of living in different cities, they often fail to account for the fact that many people don't spend their entire salary in the local economy. If you are trying to save money (or pay for college, donate to a cause, or buy a Ferrari) this costs the same no matter where you live. You should only apply the cost of living adjustment to housing (and maybe food). When you do this, living in the Bay Area starts to make more financial sense.
We lived in the Bay Area for 3 years. Prior to that, I agreed with you. Living there changed my mind.
More of our salary went to the local economy than I expected. We have a bunch of kids, which amplified the effect, but I am astonished at how much money it took to not feel like we were struggling to stay above water. Babysitting, gas, food, clothing, activities were all extremely expensive. Even insurance was high.
The things that didn't go to the local economy still cost more — because taxes. We bought a car from Minnesota and paid a huge amount of excise tax to the state of California. Almost everything we ordered from out of state was subject to high local sales taxes. Income tax didn't help either — our higher salary put us in a higher tax bracket. The top $50k of salary only netted us $25k in buying power, which was eaten up by rent.
There's a stage-of-life effect. Bay Area is great for young people, where cost of living is a much lower proportion of income. All the excess goes straight into savings or discretionary consumer goods, where a Bay Area dollar is worth just as much as a Rust Belt dollar. It's much less great for a family, where you have additional food, housing, childcare, and health costs that rise along with cost of living.
I don't think that's entirely true. Housing and food are still the highest spending categories. Most of the excess goes to taxes, I think. Families just make it more obvious that's happening.
NYC is much more reasonable than the SF Bay. Manhatten itself is incredibly expensive, but it's fairly easy to live frugally in the NYC area. There's basically nowhere to go "in the bay area" to save much money.
You're not wrong about NYC, but the bay area is really broken.
Yes, this is absolutely true. Your car, clothing, computers and gadgets, and most of your groceries will be a lower percentage of your discretionary income in the Bay Area than in most other places. Your housing and gasoline will cost more, and maybe your car insurance.
However, the caveat is that housing is so expensive here that it's difficult to save up for a down payment on any kind of housing on a single engineer's salary. A 20% down payment on pretty much anything is more than $100k, and even a highly paid engineer will need a long time to save up that kind of money while also paying high rent. An 80/10/10 mortgage or some kind of mortgage with PMI is easier to achieve, but those have significant drawbacks.
So, if you have significant cash savings, or a home somewhere else you can sell, you can achieve home ownership in the Bay Area (but it will probably be a smaller home than the one you have now). If you don't aspire to home ownership, you'll be fine too -- a software engineer with an average salary can afford to pay rent here, and people who say otherwise are simply incorrect. But if you are just starting your career and move to the Bay Area planning to buy a home anytime soon, you're going to be disappointed.
Given that many people predicate their quality of life on home ownership, that's a pretty big caveat.
It takes about 2 years to save up $100K on a typical Bay Area engineer's salary, if you're fiscally prudent. Figure that $150K/year after taxes is about $110K/year, and live on $60K/year. That's eminently doable even in the Bay Area.
The problem is that $100K is a very low estimate for a down payment in the Bay Area these days. Most people I know are getting parental help to put down $500K down, because with housing prices running around $1.2M, that's what's necessary to get under the $700K jumbo mortgage threshold.
> It takes about 2 years to save up $100K on a typical Bay Area engineer's salary, if you're fiscally prudent.
I'm not sure what you think an average salary is. If you think an average engineer can save $50k cash per year out of his/her net income, you're way above the average I had in mind.
Let's assume an average salary of $120k per year gross. That's about $6k per month net for a single person who takes the standard deduction, assuming no 401k contributions. That's a net income of $72k per year. If that engineer saves $50k, that leaves only $12k for everything else. Saving $100k in two years on that salary, which I think is pretty close to the average, is just not doable.
EDIT: Should have been $22k left over, not $12k. Still not enough to live on considering the cost of rent.
When talking about saving, if you're working somewhere established, you also need to take into account bonuses and RSUs or whatever longer-term retention plans are in place. The size of these boggled my mind coming from the middle of the country as much as the base salary numbers. You should never plan on living off of them, but if you can toss 15k or more (and I've seen much more than that) into your savings just from non-base-salary comp, you're pretty nicely ahead of the game.
Whether or not the established places will toss so much money around if the hiring competition from startups dries up if there's a crunch there, well, that's probably a legitimate question, but I'm not sure that job losses of that size would only hit the Bay Area.
Yes it's expensive, but also yes there really are quite a lot of jobs that pay more than well enough to make up for it.
Why? Fully contributing to a 401k (assuming no company match) would put your "take home" at ~$79,200 instead of $72k following your tax rate (which I assume is roughly correct).
> That's a net income of $72k per year. If that engineer saves $50k, that leaves only $12k for everything else
$72k - $50k = $22k, not $12k.
So with no 401k, you'd have to live on $22k to save $50k/year. When contributing to a 401k, you'd have $29k to live on, which sounds pretty do-able. Add in the fact that you would probably invest these savings, and you can hit $100k after 2 years by saving a bit under $50k each year.
Saving $100k in 2 years is not as outlandish as you make it seem.
How exactly do you figure increasing your take-home pay by contributing to a 401k? Did you forget to subtract the money that's actually going to the 401k instead of your pocket? Even at 90% tax rate, all you are doing is sparing that 90% on the money you are contributing. In other words, you are only actually paying $10 for every $100 you put in, because that other $90 would have gone to the tax man anyway. But you are still losing $10 of your take-home pay.
> How exactly do you figure increasing your take-home pay by contributing to a 401k?
I guess it depends what you mean by "take-home". The original premise was "saving 100k in 2 years". I hope we can agree that saving money in a 401k is saving money, regardless of whether we agree it's "take-home".
I assumed we were talking about money for a home down payment, which would not normally go into a 401k. Getting it out would require a 401k loan, and a 401k loan for a six-figure amount is almost always a terrible idea. The only other way to get it out would be to take an unqualified distribution and get hit with a significant fine.
Most 401k loans become due in full if you leave your job. That traps you in your job until you pay it back, because if you had enough cash to pay the loan outright, you would not have needed the loan in the first place. Unless you have an unusually good severance agreement with your employer that would enable you to pay back the loan if you leave your job or get fired, taking out a 401k loan is a bad idea.
I disagree that $22K net is not enough to live on. It is if you go the multiple roommate/1+ hour commute (i.e. East Bay)/never go out lifestyle. It's not a ton of fun, but it's doable.
Sorry, I live here. I have an average salary for my experience. I can barely save $20k/yr.
My rent+util is about $2000/month. I live in a very /cheap/ 1-bedroom with creaky carpet floors, no insulation, and near train tracks that's far outside SF. (Belmont)
Altogether I spend close to $4000/month if I don't do anything special. /Everything/ is more expensive in this region. Food is expensive for no apparent reason other than to gouge customers. ($6 for a few sticks of butter? When I was in Seattle, it was $2-3.) I eat less fruits here because the prices are high year round. My job doesn't provide lunches, so I have to eat out everyday I'm at work. I mean, even cars cost more here just on Craigslist. In the same way there's an Apple tax, there's definitely a Bay Area tax.
I cannot possibly save $50k/yr for a house. Oh and $150k/yr is not $110k/yr after taxes. It's more like $94k.
I'm saving maybe $20k/yr right now. Ain't even contributing to retirement. Just trying to save for who knows what until I can get a job that pays 50% more.
Huh. We just moved out of a 2/1 in Belmont, 1 block off El Camino next to the Safeway, where we were paying $2050. Sure, once you add utils in it's more, but not a lot more. Splitting the rent with my wife, my share was basically what I was paying in rent for a 'fancy' apartment I shared with a roommate in Santa Clara 10 years ago.
Granted, the house was a good deal, but should be able to swing a 2/1 for 2500 or so.
It's cheaper to live in a larger place with roommates. You pay a premium for single bedroom and living by yourself. I lived in a warehouse with 5 other people for a while to save money.
From a certain point in life living at your own place (no matter if rented or not) with no room-mates is non-negotiable, given the financial means to do so. I'd rather live in a studio apartment at the edge of the city (been there, done that) rather than sharing a villa in a beautiful neighborhood with 5 other strangers. If it matters I'm in my mid-30s now, but started feeling that way immediately after I broke up with my wife 5 years ago.
According to PayScale[1] and Glassdoor[2], average/median salary for software engineer in the Bay Area is around $110K, so it's tough to believe $100K is "the bare minimum".
EDIT: And to add more to the conversation than that curt response:
When I compare take-home pay among various jobs I tend to ignore bonuses (because they're subject to your employer's whim--you don't necessarily get them) and I tend to ignore equity (because it's typically temporary--once you vest it no longer adds to your yearly take-home). To compare apples with apples you can only really compare base salary.
That is nuts to only compare base salary. At the big 4, base salary will be <60% of total comp. It's possible that Goog will hit really tough times and no longer pay the annual bonuses and it's possible they don't offer equity refreshes. But it's much more likely that Goog's business will hold steady (or grow) and the company will want to continue attracting candidates. It's much more likely that employees get refreshes so that their pay in years 2,3 and 4 are higher than the pay they were promised at sign-on. However, it's possible for pay in the 5th year to drop if the initial grant is huge.
I think it makes sense to discount those factors, but ignoring them entirely is disingenuous.
A company offering $100k in salary + $20k in bonuses and $80k in RSUs is paying significantly more than one offering $120k in salary with no bonus or RSUs.
Also, Glassdoor tends to skew low. Here's a more reasonable database of new grad offers which average $109k base for public tech companies. [0]
Like I said, $4000 on a regular month. I spend more many months because of trips, stuff breaks, etc.
Most new grads here make $90k-110k from what I've seen. Yes, you can make more. Yes, there are companies that pay stock on top of that. Those people are not me.
I make ~$110k. Minimal benefits. No stock. I happen to work for a big company too. Not every company here pays well and many low ball as hard as they can. (And succeed at low balling)
Before this job, I made $65k. Companies low ball hard and if you can't interview well, you take what you can get.
You claimed that you make an average salary for your experience, now you're admitting to being lowballed. Which is it?
If you're not a new grad and you're only making $110k, then yes you are making under-market. I'm not disputing what you make (that'd be ridiculous), but your assertion that you're making a standard salary.
> It takes about 2 years to save up $100K on a typical Bay Area engineer's salary
Have you actually done this? Know anyone who has?
This seems completely implausible, outside of some extreme frugal lifestyle cases (I'm talking "eating garbage dumped by grocery stores" level frugal)...
I actually saved up $100K in about 18 months, working at a large Bay Area tech company and living in Mountain View. I don't feel I made significant compromises to do so, either: I had roommates for 6 of those 18 months but lived in a 1BR afterwards, I had friends (many of whom I still keep up with), I owned a car and got out on weekends. I did cook the majority of my (non-employer-provided) meals at home, and my friends tended to like relatively cheap activities like LAN parties, board games, and hiking rather than expensive meals out. I didn't go on any major vacations, but my family lives back East, and so that includes rather expensive airfare at Christmas, Thanksgiving, and 4th of July to see them.
Paycheck calculator shows me that $120K [1] in CA leaves you with $6,220 after-tax monthly income. If you really made about as much, and managed to save ~$5.5K a month, then you spent only ~$660 a month, which is just impossible, sorry. Even if you're sharing a 1BR with several roommates, which, by the way, is not really an option for many.
[1] Googling "average software engineer salary california" shows figures ranging from 107k to 135k, 120k seems to be more or less the median of Google's figures.
It was 2009-2010, so rents were lower, but my paycheck was lower as well (I started at only $100K/year base, compared to the ... well, much higher amount a few years later). After taxes and 401k, I netted $5400/month. 18 months encompassed 2 bonus cycles, so about $40K of that was bonuses, after tax. My rent was $900/month with roommates, and then $1400/month in the 1BR, and total monthly expenditures were about $2K. I was packing away about $3.5K/month; 18 months of that is $63K, +$40K from bonuses = just over $100K.
You must admit that $40k bonus after tax is a huge, atypical amount of money. It makes your effective yearly income to be about $156k.
It reminds me of the mrmoneymustache.com guy, saying "anyone can retire early! Just look at me, all I had to do was get $1M in stock from Cisco!"
No disrespect intended for you; I'm sure compared to some of your friends you lived frugally. The point I'm making is that to duplicate your living standard today, very few comparable developers would be able approach your level of savings.
It's over 2 years. $20K or so after tax per year. A bit over $30K pre-tax.
Not sure what typical bonuses are these days, but I don't think that's out of line for a big tech company. Certainly stock grants can be much more than that, but it usually takes more than 18 months for them to amount to anything.
Thanks for sharing numbers. Wow, that's an amazing bonus, and you should feel fortunate! This is coming from someone who does work for a big tech company. I've never seen anything remotely close to that.
I will unequivocally state that a total comp of $150k+ for a new grad is at the very least, the top 5% of software development salaries for that level of experience.
was the op a new grad? sorry, I missed that. yes, $150k for a ncg in the first year is high. but honestly not that high, and for a 2nd year... doable from my experience [1].
Yes, doable at Google, a company known for being at the top of the market in compensation.
The whole point of the original statement was "I made $X and saved $Y, it's not that hard." But when you examine the X and the Y, they are not representative at all!
It has similar merit to a lottery winner saying, "why can't you win the lottery too? All I did was buy a lottery ticket."
Google pays substantially more than that - matching that number does not put you at the top of the market. Companies paying that much include many of the largest tech employers in the area. Compensation for job switchers has been increasing rapidly since the no-poaching ring was busted, but you have to know to ask for it. Lots of people are anchored from that period and don't know what they are missing.
Well, good for you. I don't think your situation was "average" really, but kudos on the savings :) Coming from a guy in NYC whose monthly expenditures are through the roof...
- rents $2000K/mo 1BR apartment (single but wants some comfort in the Peninsula, no hellish commutes from East Bay)
- transportation $200/mo
- free lunch (and possibly dinner) at the company - eating out and groceries $300/mo
- entertainment $200/mo
That's $2700/mo. Let's round it up to $3000/mo because you're a well paid software engineer and can spend $300/mo on top of what I listed whenever you feel like it.
So far, $36k expenses + $50k savings and you still have $8k left to go on ski trips to Tahoe, Outside Lands and other non-frugal lifestyle expenses.
A decent 1BR on the peninsula (in San Mateo, Redwood City, Mountain View, etc.) is likely closer to >$2,500 a month plus $200/month for utilities/renters insurance. For transportation, I pay $200/month for a 15 year old Civic with liability insurance. If you have a moderately nice car that isn't paid off, you are going to pay >$200/month (especially if you commute daily). If you cook moderately nice meals and drink some alcohol, that food budget is likely going to be >$400/month. Plus going out to happy hour once a week, which isn't that uncommon, can easily cost you an extra $30-50 a week (or more). A good number of people have college debt as well, so add a monthly payment for that. I agree with you that saving is definitely possible when single and making >$100,000. I just think you low balled most of your numbers to prove your point.
If we're talking about low balled figures, I guess we need to consider the income side of the equation as well. The original question depends a good deal on what kind of job you're doing in the Bay Area. If it's someone coming to the Bay Area to work for Google/Facebook or similar, the figure I used is way too low, for example.
"A decent 1BR" - It all depends on the definition of decent. I pay $2k for a 1BR walking distance to Redwood City downtown/Caltrain.
But forget about renting an apartment, if you want to save and you're single, having roommates allows you to rent in the Peninsula for much less than $2k/mo.
Also, I added $300 discretionary spending which lets you to cover some of the things you described, and you're left with $8k at the end of the year.
Can you easily save $50k while spending $3k on rent+utilities to live in a fancy apartment in the Peninsula ? Maybe not, but you certainly don't need to be "eating garbage dumped by grocery stores".
> Maybe not, but you certainly don't need to be "eating garbage dumped by grocery stores".
Nice strawman :) I was specifically talking about the situation conditional on saving the 100k in 18 months, my comment was a response to the comment above it.
Separate point: your figures seem very low. I thought SF is roughly equivalent to NYC in terms of cost of living. In which case 300/mo is a zero off as an estimate for all food expenses.
Sure, I did this (and more if you count my 401k). I don't think I was that frugal: I certainly didn't want for anything, and ate my fair share of sushi.
Like the article mentions, saving a lot is easy if you're fine with a roommate and living in a non-luxury apartment, but if your housing standards are higher than that then it's tougher.
This is, of course, at the compensation levels talked about in the article. Some companies (early stage start-ups, banks) pay much less.
I went from a net worth of <$50k at age 20 to >$150k at 22, while never being particularly frugal at all. Heck, I didn't even have roommates. My monthly spending averaged $4k/m.
NYC, not SF, but the difference isn't huge.
Most people are atrocious with their money by either overspending or under-optimizing.
OK, it all depends on what the cash flow looks like :) You're leaving out that one very important piece of the puzzle...
Also, the average apartment in Manhattan (if you do rent without roommates) is pretty close to your cited figure for total monthly expenses. Which means you either lucked out, or seriously compromised on your living arrangements.
> OK, it all depends on what the cash flow looks like
I was making $150k/yr, which is pretty standard for a developer in NYC.
> Also, the average apartment in Manhattan (if you do rent without roommates) is pretty close to your cited figure for total monthly expenses.
I take it you don't live in NYC. The average is a useless metric because it's distorted by millionaires and billionaires. Just go on Craiglist and you'll find plenty of suitable apartments in the $2-3k range.
Nobody I know pays more than $3k/m for their apartment. Heck, my friend just rented a beautiful luxury single-bedroom for $2.8k.
In my case, I chose to go for a non-luxury apartment for $1.8k/m. This was definitely a deal, but even though it wasn't luxury there was plenty of space and I even had a back yard.
> Nobody I know pays more than $3k/m for their apartment.
Few people I know pay under. We live in parallel dimensions I guess.
> In my case, I chose to go for a non-luxury apartment for $1.8k/m.
I don't know what NYC you live in, but this is non-existent AFAIK. I know someone who went all the way to Rego Park (this is really far from Manhattan) to rent a 1BR for $2.5k.
I did it, paying $3400/month rent & supporting a family. Salary took care of living + unexpected expenses, and stock grants/purchase plans took care of the saving + knowing where to keep the money (thanks, years of scraping by on non-SF-ludicrous pay packets).
edit I don't know what a 401k is good for (I already have two retirement saving schemes in other countries), mostly did staycations since SF is such a tourist destination.
When you say a typical engineer's salary, I feel like you mean a high performer at Google with a rich family.
I make about that much, at a company without free food perks that doesn't give me amazing stock bonuses (my social skills are too bad to negotiate them…) and I live frugally but could never save that much after $2k/mo rent! And there's no huge parental loans for me.
Even with generous wages house prices are rising faster than salaries. And let's be frank about this, when well-paid sw engineers are feeling the squeeze, imagine how awful the economic situation is for anyone in a less fashionable job. There are lots of people who work just as hard as any coder and whose jobs are just as necessary to a livable economy but who face certain economic ruin if they lose their lease - hence all the pressure for a $15 minimum wage. Meanwhile a lot of people who already own property fight tooth and nail against any large-scale building. It's a vicious circle.
A single person does NOT need to spend 3600/month in SF. That's crazy. A studio/1 bedroom can be had for 2500. And if you're willing to compromise on location (i.e. "the ghetto") you can get under 2K.
Families that need 2+ bedrooms and a good/safe neighbourhood are screwed though.
Yeah, a lot of times people seem to talk past eachother because to them, SF = bay area. In reality it's a small portion of the population and even smaller portion of the land mass of the actual bay area.
Even San Mateo, which is not very far away, costs a lot less. And if you work in SF and commute from the East Bay via BART, which isn't too bad, you can save even more.
You would have to be extremely well paid and frugal to save $100K in two years. Sure, it's do-able, but wow. Of course, this is HN, so there's always someone who knows someone's brother's roommate who makes $150K/year at Google but that's a pretty high salary. And to be able to keep $50K of that given the cost of everything? I don't see how it's possible unless you are single, have no kids, no existing debt payments, don't put anything away into IRAs, 401ks, etc. and are are extremely frugal.
But if you do and are, you have $100K. Congratulations. That does you no good when homes are $1M+. Keep saving.
I agree with your premise but I suspect your numbers are a bit off.
Regardless, whether it's 2 years or 3 years, to do the lifestyle you're suggesting takes and incredible amount of willpower to be willing to sacrifice and prioritize. It's passing up that cell phone upgrade. It's cutting discretionary spending to zero. It's passing on happy hour and bringing lunch every day.
While feasible, it's hard.. but suffering for two years to benefit for a decade. Quite possibly worth it.
It's worth pointing out that is just for the down payment. If you want to get ahead in life you need to be "saving" that much and more every year. And oops, your expenses just shot up dramatically because now you're a home owner.
BTW everybody knows about mortgage payments/rent but many forget about property taxes you have to pay as a homeowner. That's about 1.5% of your house purchase cost every year. Of course, there are tax deductions for that but even after them it's still non-negligible chunk of cash on homes approaching $1M.
When I bought my first home my loan (P+I) payment was $1300 per month on average (paid every 2 weeks), which was not only affordable but cheaper than what I was renting at once you accounted for interest deductions! But the taxes were somewhere around $500 a month after the township raised local property tax by the maximum year after year. Due to average daily balance laws and escrow regulations, we often had a substantial amount of money "invested" in to our escrow account.
There was no amount of deductions to make this home an asset. It pushed a good quality home at a great price to something that now remains completely unoccupied.
My situation is 100% atypical - but I more meant to illustrate how big of an impact property taxes can be.
Don't forget about home repairs and renovations, HOA, and services like gardening, etc. depending on what you buy.
It is easy to end up spending double rent on a comparable place. The difference is for now at least the home you buy can grow nicely so you need to do the math on rate of return for that vs other uses of that cash.
And closing/financing fees! If you end up taking a job out of area and decide to sell(understandable as now isn't the right time to be purchasing a rental) you're out the fees.
Oh yeah, those. You pay through the nose when you buy and when you sell. Can easily knock several percentage points off the price you thought you're selling for, or add the same to the price you though you're buying for. One has to be very careful to include those in all calculations. Renting is mostly flat-rate experience, and owning has much higher variance of payments. But owning has its own benefits :)
Those are all expenses your landlord has to pay if you are renting. If those costs plus mortgage is double rent than either landlords are hemmoraging money or something is seriously fucked up with the housing market.
True, but when you rent, the cost is obvious and stated upfront, however ownership has many hidden costs that are not apparent when you consider only purchasing price.
Your comment doesn't really make any sense, because there is no benefit to having a conforming loan. In fact, there are drawbacks. Recent data showed that jumbo loan rates were LOWER than the equivalent conforming loan. We bought with 10% down on a jumbo and because it's not federally-backed you don't have to pay PMI. Mortgage, taxes, insurance, that's it.
Also, I don't know anybody who got that kind of parental help or put $500k down.
That was the reasoning given by a coworker who did this, and he put $500K down. I personally know at least 3 people who've bought Bay Area houses/condos in the $1.1-$1.2M range with multi-hundred-K parental help.
From TFA "the jumbo loan is supposed to come with a slightly higher rate". IMO the rate should be a LOT higher; otherwise PMI is always a losing proposition. Bizarre market forces indeed.
It was certainly surprising/counterintuitive that jumbo rates would be lower than conforming, but even when they're not, it sounds like they're incredibly close.
That said, if someone wanted to throw $500k at me to buy a house, I wouldn't turn it down :)
You should not buy a home unless you are going to live in the same place for 10+ years. Especially if you get a rent controlled apartment, owning a home does not make financial sense in the bay area.
The other big thing to help with home ownership is to get married. With double the income it is a lot easier to save for a downpayment.
If you're a HENRY (High Earner, Not Rich Yet), and have a good credit score (>740), you might qualify for a mortgage with 10% down payment without PMI/second mortgage.
With a frugal lifestyle, 10% should be doable in a couple years, especially if you're okay with living in the East Bay (so the house price is somewhat reasonable).
I'm certainly not agreeing with the value prop of the Bay Area, but PMI is actually not such a bad deal if you have prospects. It's not very much extra a month, and now you can get it removed after you have 20% equity in your home by request.
Seattle has no income tax, and sales tax doesn't apply to most food from the grocery store, so taxes in Seattle really depend on how you choose to spend your money.
Lyman Stone has a good blog post[1] suggesting that it's rational for Millenials loaded down with student loan debt to live in high cost-of-living regions, for exactly this reason. The high nominal incomes give them more power to repay their student debt, which is not cost-of-living adjusted.
This worked for me. I borrowed way too much money going to school. As a fresh MBA grad in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California, with few marketable skills, I couldn't find any career options that would offer a starting salary that came close to covering my costs.
My big break was finding a job in San Francisco. I charmed my way into an entry level sales gig with a base salary of about 35K USD (in 2004), and was soon making at a 70K-ish "annual run rate" (stealing that from startup PR lingo). And that job did all of the lead generation for me. I wasn't able to find a job like that outside of a big city.
Even when I was homeless for a bit a few years later, I chose to stay in San Francisco over moving in with my suburban LA parents because there I saw more opportunity in San Francisco. For me, it was riskier to play it safe in the burbs than hustling in San Francisco. It's better to burn out than fade away.
The way I see it, if you wanna make it as a professional, and you don't have a reasonably understood career path to follow, it makes sense to go where the money is. You can live financially cheaply in most places, and you'll have to decide how much you're willing to work for it. For me, living in San Francisco is, and has been, worth it.
Which leads to a funny observation -- I have never seen so many expensive German automobiles in cheap apartment complexes in my life. Driving elsewhere makes you wonder where all the fancy cars went.
I agree 100%. Right now in SF and get paid relative to SF. If one day I return to the Midwest (or almost anywhere else) what I have in the bank has more buying power.
Never thought of it that way. Percentage of income consumed by state and local taxes, housing, etc compared and average gross income would show the whole picture.
So a recruiting agency who makes money from placing applicants in the Bay area, a place with a shortage of developers, writes an article to convince more developers to move to the Bay area ? Yeah, totally trust their data and the data they selected for this article!
I didn't get very far, but their first section has a huge disconnect between data and the text. Text:
> So assuming you’re looking throughout the Bay Area for a good deal and you’re comfortable renting rather than buying a home, as most of us are during the early stages of our careers, higher Bay Area salaries at least cover the costs of higher rents.
Data:
> engineers at top tech companies in the Bay Area stand to make between $15,000 and $33,000 more per year than engineers at top tech companies in Seattle.
and
> median rent is about $1400-$1500 a month (or roughly $17,000-$18,000 a year) higher in the Bay Area than in the Seattle metro area
Somehow $15k-$33k marginal income "at least cover" $17k-$18k. That's just outrageously untrue, even if you ignore the fact that it fails to cover any of the numerous other ways that SF is more expensive (food? local services? CA income tax?) or the fact that you have to pay taxes on the extra money (which brings $15k-$33k down to $10k-$22k, assuming a conservative marginal tax rate estimate of 35%).
Even assuming they aren't missing anything, cherrypicking data, etc., their data doesn't come close to supporting the claims they're making. Claiming bias seems like a pretty generous interpretation here.
"You don't know what you don't know". We have no idea how they selected, curated, pruned, or otherwise "cleaned" their data set to meet their needs. What we can say, definitively, is they DO have a bias to encourage more developers to move to the Bay Area.
"Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say."
- William W. Watt
"If you are interested in moving to the Bay Area and joining a successful company or a tiny startup, Triplebyte can help you find a job. Give our process a try here. "
This whole dialogue shows a very laborer-centric view of the world. What is missing from this entire conversation is the concept of being an employer/founder or independent consultant. If you want to bootstrap a startup, the Bay Area cost basis is going to destroy your nest egg until you can raise capital. Also, this conversation implies that you are employed 100% of the time, ignoring any cases where you quit, are fired, or the "rocketship" startup you joined doesn't work out.
To add a personal case: I lived in Boston working full-time (and all the time) for about seven years before getting sick and having to take a year off of work.
When you game out salary vs cost of living for a region, you tend to make an assumption that you'll be employed 100% of the time. But once you break that assumption, it can change the dynamics considerably. The $2000/mo you spent comfortably on rent while working full-time quickly becomes an uncontrollable drain on savings when you stop.
For me, I decided to move to a place (CO, an hour north of Denver) with a lower cost of living (and for me, a better quality of living, too), a place where I could live comfortably even if I didn't (or wasn't able to) work full time all the time. And if I do work full time, I could potentially "retire" in my 40s if I wanted, where "retire" probably means "work on whatever I want without needing to get funding," and/or "be a parent," etc.
I did the math on this about 1.5 years ago and came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth it. I was, at the time, in a CTO-level position at a VC-funded startup and so had plenty of opportunities in the Bay, but in the end opted to live in a quiet country town about 2.5 hrs drive away and work from home in a lower-key role.
I have a 3yo kid and another on the way, and I do not regret my decision for one second, particularly when I hear horror stories from my stressed-out friends in SF/SJ. Also we can easily pay the mortgage on one salary and my wife is able to finish her PhD without us going into debt.
For us, it wasn't just about salary vs cost of living, but also about the stresses of big city life, competing for limited places in overtaxed childcare, sitting in traffic for hours every day, and being surrounded by other parents enduring the same tortures. No thanks.
I ended up in Los Angeles because, despite being an expensive city, rents were cheaper than the Bay Area, and the salaries being offered were equivalent. I have a great place in LA that would easily be 50% to double the price in the Bay.
This wasn't the only reason but it was one of the biggest. Another reason being that I wanted to work in tech as it relates to media and content, and there were many more options to choose from here.
for those who don't know, quality of life in LA is entirely dependent upon your commute. your life can either be the single best big-city experience in the country, or a hellish, dystopian nightmare that will send you into a suicidal depression.
My plan is to find a remote job to avoid having to commute, rent a house in the San Gabriel Valley, and then spend my free time enjoying delicious Asian and Mexican food.
your life can either be the single best big-city experience in the country, or a hellish, dystopian nightmare that will send you into a suicidal depression.
Same, but I bought a house. Just outside of LA there are cities with some of the best public schools in the state (and some the country), and you don't have to pay $1.5 million+ for a house in the district.
I'm seriously considering moving to the San Gabriel Valley for when I have to move next year. Specifically, I intend to rent a house.
Monterey Park is basically my ideal location, though I'm plenty willing to live in some of the other nearby suburbs. For example, I saw a really great house in Temple City listed on Zillow, and I came really close to asking for a transfer to my company's LA office because of it (and the only reason I didn't is because our LA office is at LAX, and I'm not looking forward to that commute... I'll have to change jobs or go remote if I want to live in the SGV).
Paragraph 2 -- if you pick a winning startup (uber, etc) then the bay area is great! Well, yes. The problem is picking that winning startup, and really, if you're good at that, stop wasting your life as an engineer and go invest money for a living. We shouldn't expect eng to be able to pick better than vcs, and their hit rate isn't great.
It also uses pre-tax salaries, not after tax salaries, where Seattle has a large advantage; even at $120k, you get $5k more in cash in Washington state. Which may not sound like much, but you should view it not as 5/120 but as 5/80 (roughly your take-home pay).
The discussion of housing (where exactly is that sub $800k housing in sfbay) ignores commute times and costs. Sure, if you want to live in outer sunset or east bay and deal with horrid commutes, there's cheap housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, housing will likely be much more expensive.
The author also pays no attention to the effects of having to reset your social network / family to exploit moving to sfbay, banking the higher salary, then moving away. That's a large price to pay if your plan is to get to your mid 30s then move elsewhere. And hard to achieve buy-in from significant others who may similarly not be stoked about losing all his/her friends.
And finally, it finishes with a discussion of the two most generous employers, google and fb. Who, yes, are generous but also not representative.
I don't know if the article was really talking about "winning" startups. Growth+revenue aren't really representative of whether a company is "winning"—they're just representative of a company that's properly doing the thing investors want it to do, growing at the expense of all else.
If you're an investor, you need a company to succeed in a long-term sense: to pay out at the other end of the bet that started it. That's hard to predict: it's like looking at the fitness of animals in an ecosystem and trying to predict which one will end up with the most great-great-grandchildren.
But if you're an employee, you just need a company to be growing, and to be throwing money around in the process of doing that. You aren't looking for a fit animal, you're looking for a fat animal. Animals might get fat before they get fit, as before puberty in mammals—and investors try to encourage startups to "bulk up" to kickstart their metaphorical puberty. But unhealthy animals also get fat, and to a predator, they're just as edible.
If your goal is to "eat a lot of salary", you just need a company who's known to be throwing their fat around, not a company who will dominate their niche and sire a thousand children.
That is a good point. I do think though that even growing startups prefer to pay in equity though, at least until you get to the pseudo-IPO ultra late stages. As recently as a couple years ago, AirBnB gave me a fairly cash poor offer, but wanted me enough that when I turned it down both my future manager and a VP eng tried to get me to reconsider.
The salaries here do cover the higher cost of living, and if you are able to capitalize on the additional opportunities that are uniquely available here, you could end up doing much more than covering costs.
This conclusion is patently false. The article mentioned but failed to calculate California state income tax.
That $15k-33k salary differential is going to be eaten by at least $12k in California income taxes. That leaves $3-21k to cover the additional rent expenses which is $250 - $1750 per month. The difference in median rent is almost $1500 per month. The article itself already admits that Seattle is better if you wish to own rather than rent housing.
EDIT: The salaries at Microsoft (Redmond) are comparable to the salary figure for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, and Uber. The salaries at Amazon are $5-10k lower but make up for the difference in stock.
I'm estimating stock and cash bonus to be 40% of salary (which is conservative for Google and Facebook, I think). California state income tax on $160k is $12k.
This article seems to assume you're single and not in a hurry to start a family. I'd be interested to read an article "Does it make sense for a programmer with a wife and kids to move to the bay area". I secretly suspect the answer will be "no", since no matter how you slice it, a 4-bedroom house in the Bay Area won't be reachable until you are well on your way to, say, 40 or so.
I interviewed over phone and skype with a Bay area company not too long ago. In between interviews, since things were going well, I started looking for places to live. I have 2 kids, and currently live in a 4200 sq ft house in Texas. I was more than fine with downsizing, but not at the cost of eating up all my salary to live with my family in an apartment that was barely acceptable when I was single. My kids are currently in a top school district here, and to send them to a top (public) school in the Bay area was insanely expensive. The salary I would have received ($130k range) was no where near enough to get me into a 2k sq ft home near good schools. As I researched areas, I just couldn't understand how the salaries were so low, and the cost of homes/apartments so high. But if you have no family to support, take on roommates and are fine with 500 sq ft to live in, then it will be mostly ok to live there.
I had almost the exact same situation, except I'm up in MN. Top notch schools and no crime, 4200sqft home, etc etc. The salaries in SV are way too low to ever consider a move.
Not disputing your conclusions, but I wonder what the hell people do with 4200sqft houses. I grew up in a very normal 5 bedroom multi-level house, 4 person family. It was 2400sqft. So were everyone else's houses. My house in the valley is about half that size, for 2 of us. Given infinite money, sure I'd like a bigger house. 2k, maybe 2500. I just cannot fathom why anybody would even WANT 4k+. I hear of people living in 6000sqft mansions and it just seems so insane. Especially when they're paying $500/mo on A/C in AZ or TX. Just all seems so wasteful in a way that expensive real estate isn't.
You fill it full of junk. If you are a single male not addicted to vanity you can likely fit all your belongings in the backseat of a car. My largest belongings were the computer and the truck load of military clothing. Women tend to accumulate more stuff than men regardless of vanity. When you get kids people just give you more stuff than you need (or want) for the kids. The only limitation on the ever increasing accumulation is the space available.
Honestly, the two biggest rooms in this house just store stuff. I can absolutely live without that space. I do enjoy having an extra bedroom to use for... fill in the blank. I bought my house as a foreclosure for 125k and now Zillow lists it for 235k (a bit inflated). The value of my house is about the down payment on a house in San Jose and what I paid is half that.
I have a 2900sq ft home in Texas and we spend next to nothing on heating and AC. Our electric bill per month averages around $160 and peaks around $200 in the summer when we run the AC a bit harder. More than half the expense there is all the electronics in the house, primarily: kitchen utilities, computers, and large screens.
I get what you're saying, we were in a 1800sqft home before this and a 780sqft home before that. After the first month or so in a space this size, it doesn't feel that big. You just get kind of used to it, although you kind of appreciate the space. The only time we notice the size of it is when we get back from a vacation. Also, once you have kids, homes feel much smaller. Before kids, we lived in a 600sqft rental duplex and a 800sqft loft and they both felt like more than enough room.
As for energy costs, in MN homes are very well insulated, you frequently have a fair amount of trees providing shade, and you have a basement that's 30-40% of your sqft, so heating and cooling costs aren't quite as dramatic, even when it's -20F like it will be this weekend.
> After the first month or so in a space this size, it doesn't feel that big. You just get kind of used to it, although you kind of appreciate the space.
Who does the cleaning, you or your partner? I never got used to cleaning a larger space. It is definitely a huge waste of time, vacuum bots only help marginally. Also annoying is walking or especially moving something from one end of the dwelling to the other.
We finally gave up on cleaning our 1150sqft house ourselves and hired cleaners. I feel like a failure, being unable to keep my own personal space clean, but the extra time is nice.
Went to an open house once in a huge ranch. When we decided to leave, I noted how long it took us to walk from the bedroom to the front door. Man I'd hate to dash back in the house "really quick" for something I forgot. I guess that's a first world problem though!
Personally, we wanted the neighborhood, and also both my wife and I grew up very poor (i.e., we'd never lived in a really nice house). So we bought a mid-size house in a really nice neighborhood (over bought a little). That's why I am personally very happy with downsizing. But not at the cost of paying 4x what I am paying now.
But as already said by others, you fill the space and get used to it. There are times it's really nice to have so much space (holidays with family, birthday parties), and other times it's not (cleaning, a/c). Having a dedicated movie theater room is nice too.
I lived in a 600 sq ft. mobile home in the bay area with my wife and son. It was a bit cramped but not too bad. Now we're in Munich in a place that's...maybe 900 sq ft.? And it feels like a pretty good size, just wish we had a garage. 4200 just blows my mind. To me, I think having that much space would feel like a burden.
No, 4200 isn't mid-size to me, it's mid-size for the neighborhood. It's a freaktastic mansion to me. I grew up with 6 people in a 1000 sq ft space (we moved a lot, so sometimes more, sometimes less).
But, you are right, this much space does feel like a burden frequently, which is why we are moving and I plan on downsizing. A little.
Dedicated movie theater WOULD be nice -- I realize if we had kids combining a living room + entertainment room + playroom is all a bit much. And it would mean either no office or no spare bedroom, if one of the room was taken up by kids.
Of course, it wouldn't take 4x the space we have now to get all that, but I definitely get it a little bit.
> but I wonder what the hell people do with 4200sqft houses.
tools & supplies for a variety of hobbies that involve the physical world. guest bedroom(s) for visitors. a decent kitchen so two can do real cooking at the same time. book cases. a laundry room that doesn't involve limboing under ducting.
Yea, you have to set your expectations lower here in the Bay Area. A 2K square foot home is absolutely ENORMOUS out here, especially for a single family. And good school neighborhoods are extremely expensive. You're not going to afford that combination working at ANY tech company besides maybe a few outlier high-salary companies.
I'm a senior engineer. I don't want to move to the Bay (not even in the US, and I love where I live), but I really wish I could make the money I can make there.
I'm somewhat pondering an Evil Scheme where I start a one-to-one "subcontracting" firm, where a plain-bad programmer who would never otherwise make it in a startup environment can hire someone [me] to do all their work for them—and maybe even guide them through their interviews with a concealed earpiece. Basically, the company would have "actually" hired me, and the person in the startup's office would just be serving as a human proxy for my skills.
Of course, that's effectively just a hack to get around the idiotic policies companies have against hiring remote workers for local salaries; and one that would cost quite a bit of salary (the proxy would still have to get paid, after all.) But I bet it would still turn out better than a non-Bay-Area wage.
We (family of four, parents 40ish years old) are fortunate enough to be somewhat location independent with the stipulation that we have to be in US/Pacific timezone to keep sane hours. We looked at the Bay Area one more time this year before choosing Reno. Much lower taxes, much better housing choices at our affordability level, general convenience and outdoor recreation in and around Tahoe were the attraction. This area has long been a landing spot for retirees from the BA but it's now booming with younger people and families. It's improving quickly. For someone who owns a business and has some location independence, it's a great choice. Also commercial rents are much more startup-friendly if you need offices and such. A meeting in SF is only a 4 hour drive away. Daily flights to SF and San Jose if you're in a hurry.
Yeah I agree. I am single, healthy, and car-less. I pay $1500 a month rent for a pretty nice place, and have a avg software engineer salary, and I feel very comfortable, even paying for a large student loan. The real kicker is that I was living in this same situation for $50k salary before it doubled, and still felt I had some disposable income that I could save up. However, I can't imagine still feeling comfortable having all of the expenses that come with a family. I think that's what triggers the threshold for that extreme cost of living in SF. But again, for a young person with a tech salary and the very minimum in financial obligations, I think living here is easily doable.
I wonder how much weather affects success, both for companies and individuals.
I worked as a Data Science engineer in Seattle (startup), and just moved to San Francisco this year (Google). I know this sounds trivial, but I think the more pleasant weather in the Bay Area is beneficial to my career. The lifestyle aspect is just icing on the cake.
I can't get up in the morning when it's rainy and cold. Of course, I do show up to work, just a little bit later in the day than if the weather was pleasant. I'm less refreshed. I think less clearly. I work less efficiently. I make more mistakes. I feel less healthy, because grogginess and caffeine consumption is positively correlated. That's the effect weather has day-to-day. Week-to-week, month-to-month, I can't help but avoid having S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in Seattle. Occasionally, I'd have an Existential Crisis, to use the term lightly, questioning whether my work is meaningful, whether I've sold out on my passion for programming. It helps that I work at a Google, but San Francisco weather definitely makes me feel more excited for work.
Maybe things will change when I want to own a house. Until then, even if my take home pay minus cost of living in the Bay Area is lower than Seattle, the Bay Area is still a better payoff, both in finances and purposefulness.
"I wonder how much weather affects success, both for companies and individuals."
Weather has a very big influence on how one feels, but every person has different preference. I, for example, can't stand heat and sun (I get headaches, sleep problems, find it harder to focus etc). I love colder climates and it would be be very hard to convince me to move to CA, while I'd happily move to Norway or other northern country anytime.
Did a summer internship in Redmond, and realized how much the weather affects my happiness and psychological well-being.
While SFBA weather is way better than Seattle, I still find it a bit cold/dreary for my liking. I really wish the tech hub was in San Diego instead, I'd move there in a heartbeat.
If I ever create a startup, I would definitely move to SoCal. It's cheaper. There's more diversity. The restaurant scene, in my opinion, is better, too.
Oh I love SoCal. It's just that my current employer is based out of San Francisco, and there is more opportunity in the company. I definitely try to be headquartered in LA if I ever form my own startup.
I moved (internationally) to the bay area. In my specific circumstances I would not say that it was financially clearly a good thing to do, due to the MUCH higher costs of living.
However as a place to live it is quite nice. Technology is everywhere. You can go to a free meet up and literally see the creator of the language doing a talk (e.g. Guido tomorrow with the baypiggies). It has A LOT of opportunities to pursue the career that interests you. It's warm, close to the coast and a manageable drive to skiing in Tahoe.
[3] We find that engineers often under-value startup success
(growth rate, revenue) when looking for jobs, and instead
place an emphasis on brand-recognition, or whether they find
the subject area exciting. Now, I don't mean to judge anyone
for this — working in an areas of passion may be great
choice. But if your goal is to maximize your financial
outcome, looking at startups more like an investor and
picking a company in a big market on a promising trajectory
is likely a winning strategy. The Bay Area, with a large
number of startups, is probably the best place to do this.
Investors diversify their portfolios by investing in a number of startups and also in more reliable investments like well-established companies. You can't treat a job that way - there's no way to diversify the hours of day into several different companies with different risk levels. What the author describes is gambling. You bet all your resources (time, in this case) on one horse and hope it pays off big. That's not a good strategy. If you want to "invest in startups", then do that. Use Republic or start a VC. Don't gamble on a single startup and lie to yourself that it's an investment - treat it as a gamble, and only bet as much as you can afford.
I had a friend who moved from start-up to start-up every 12 months after his initial tranche of options vested. He knew how much cash he required to live (with a little buffer for emergencies) and then traded cash for more equity in his salary negotiations with a view to building a diversified portfolio via sweat equity. He did this for 5-6 years, and one of the companies has already exited with another looking likely within the next 12 months. He obviously left a lot of (potential) money on the table by walking away at the one year mark, but he figured having a handful of smaller bets was better than going all in on one company and it looks like that strategy is going to work out pretty well for him!
That sounds smart! It would take a stern constitution to cope with such frequent changes, but it sounds like a decent way of diversifying if you can stick to the strategy.
Towards the end he did admit that he was overlooked for a number of roles because of the "flight risk" warnings on his resume, but the market was frothy enough that it didn't impact him too much given he was damn good at what he did and companies needed talent.
> Investors diversify their portfolios by investing in a number of startups and also in more reliable investments like well-established companies. You can't treat a job that way - there's no way to diversify the hours of day into several different companies with different risk levels.
It is definitively possible to diversify: Just do an agreement with other programmers to put all (or, say, 50%) your incomes into a common pot and distribute the content of the pot among all peers. Just set up terms and conditions and let everybody who is part of this agreement sign them.
The parent wanted to diversify. Diversifying means that one gets a smaller part of the winning ticket - not nothing, but also not the complete piece (just as the investor only gets some smaller part of the profit than if he invested all the money in the winning company). If this is not what one wants, one should not claim that one wants to "diversify the job among many opportunities", but instead honestly say that one is simply jealous of the success of other people that got the better ticket.
I am not sure it is a good idea to pick your employer like an investor would.
An investor in startups is going for high risk, high reward investments. For every individual investment they make, the chance of any sort of return is quite low; they make up for this because the rare startups that succeed make enough to compensate for this low success rate. Since they are making a lot of these high risk/high reward 'bets', they can be fairly assured they will receive the expected value in return.
As an individual, you only get to place one bet on your employer. For most startup employees, that means they are very unlikely to get any sort of payout because of company success. It doesn't matter that the 'expected value' of working for a more-likely-to-hit-it-big startup is higher than for another company, since the probability is that you will not hit it big.
As an individual, you are more concerned with things like salary, working conditions, and personal enjoyment of the work. Those are the things you are CERTAINLY going to experience; the tiny chance of huge success is most likely not going to affect you.
I think there is a good analogy to poker here; in Texas Hold'em, two aces are the best starting hand. There is almost no situation where it is best to fold them before the opening flop; your expected value is always positive against ANY other combination of opponent hands.
However, there are a few cases where even though you have the highest expected value for your hand, it is in your best interest to fold. One such case is if you are playing in a tournament, you are in the money, and two people with much larger stacks have already gone all-in. In that case, your best bet is likely to fold; even though you have the highest odds of winning the hand out of everyone, if you LOSE, you are out and can't keep playing. Even if you win, you will still have the smallest stack and are unlikely to move up any spots and win more money; if you fold, though, someone else is likely to be knocked out and you can move up.
It seems counter intuitive, but this holds because expected value only works as your primary decision making point when you can make many bets; if you only get one bet, lower risk with lower reward is often better for you even if the expected value is lower.
Think about it this way; lets say you only have $1,000, and you need it to pay your monthly rent (if you don't pay, you will be kicked out and be homeless). Someone comes up and offers you a bet; you bet $1000, and you get a 1% chance of winning $200,000. In terms of expected value, this is a great deal! If you made the bet many times, you will expect to win $1000 for each bet made! However, 99% of the time you are going to be homeless. For most people, the choice is to go against the expected value and play it safe.
I never understood this mindset here, maybe because we didn't have it in Houston where I grew up before moving out to the Bay Area for an engineering job. I found a nice small but profitable company and am quite cozy here, but people are always telling me I need to do the 2 year startup hop. It seems like gambling to me - 2 years of my life again and again in the hopes I'll strike gold? I'd rather slowly and steadily squirrel away savings and grow my 401k and other investments while actually enjoying my work.
> I'd rather slowly and steadily squirrel away savings and grow my 401k and other investments while actually enjoying my work.
I call this the startups::"active investment" versus slow-and-steady::"index investment" comparison. For the majority of software engineers who are not rock stars with commensurate 400K+ total annual compensation plans, it's not clear to me participating in the startups/SF-Bay ecosystem is statistically worth the financial instability risks, just as for the majority of retail investors, index investing is currently the most statistically consistent path to wealth accumulation.
If you are a "retail" engineer (perhaps there is a signaling indicator like if you aren't negotiating a compensation package directly with VC's or founders and not their representatives, then you're "retail"), then like most retail products, the vast majority of your value, half and more, is reserved for capital holders. It is your call whether or not if there is any statistically increased long-term job precariousness involved with accessing that startup/SF-Bay ecosystem, and if the tradeoff is worth it to your personal situation.
The way I look at it: Your career is time boxed like a baseball game. You only get a few at-bats then you're done. So you can use your chances to swing hard for the home run, or you can go for the safe base hits. But you don't get 100 chances.
Investors on the other hand get thousands of at-bats. They're only limited by the amount of money they want to invest, so they can diversify all they want.
> The Bay Area, with a large number of startups, is probably the best place to do this.
This is the bit I take issue with. I've done the whole startup thing, worked for 4 different companies in under 2 years, and it worked out great for me, but I did it in the Tennessee Valley, not Silicon Valley.
The Bay Area is not the only place with startup jobs. It's just the place with the biggest multi-national corporations still pretending to be startups.
You might expect that companies in big markets with great growth would be more competitive (more people would want to work there, and it would be harder to get an interview / offer). But we see that this is often not the case, making it a great strategy.
Our next blog post is going to be about this (how engineers decide between offers, and how they can perhaps do it better)
When I, as an engineer, look for a new job, I never even run into growth/revenue figures. Companies like to put those numbers into the decks they show investors, sure, but I've never seen a company put them into the job ads they run. It's hard to compare what you don't know.
Also, a lot of the time when I'm working at these startups as an employee (rather than a founder), the ongoing success and cashflow of the business are made utterly opaque to me and every other employee. Which means, if a potential hire came and asked me whether the company I'm working for has good growth/revenue... I wouldn't be able to tell them. I'd have an impression, but it'd be just that: an image created by the salesmanship of the business side of the company. Which means that asking others when I'm looking is just as useless.
This doesn't factor in stock compensation AFAIK. For instance, I started at Amazon at around $90k in salary plus signing bonus of $20k so like $110,000 my first year out of college back in 2013. I made about the same in 2014. In 2015 I got promoted to SDE2 and my salary is closer to $118,000. But additionally I also got like $60k in 2015 in stock and this year my stock compensation is just about $100,000.
I'd imagine this is the case for a lot of tech companies so comparing salary alone probably isn't going to make a good argument one way or another.
Also taxes. WA has no state income tax so add an additional 10% income buying power
But there has also been an incredible growth in amazon stock value during that time. This isn't going to be typical of someone starting to work for Amazon today (or another tech company) as your stock grant was most likely calculated at a much lower stock price then it is now while theirs would be calculated on today prices and we don't know how the future will go. Experience definitively varies.
Not underestimating, worked there and believe in the company. But speaking from experience, the stock can take dives from time to time based on market whims as it happened when I left and t my RSU vested below their estimated price. Which sucked as I needed cash at the time to move. The thing is you can be lucky or unlucky with RSUs during short or long term periods.
Keep in mind stock vests after some time and then you're back to base salary. I've found the practice of yearly "evergreen" grants to be rare even in the Valley.
Counterpoint: Globalization is real. Top tier accelerators accept companies from outside of the Bay Area and tech hubs these days. You can work for a tier 1 early to mid stage startup in a tier 3–4 startup ecosystem if you look hard enough (I do).
(The Triplebyte recruiter didn't seem super enthused with that being my response to why I didn't do their process.)
If you are young, single and in tech, then it makes sense. You don't care if you share an apartment or even a room, you'll make good money and you'll acclimatize to how ridiculous the prices are over a few years.
If you are older, and you have a spouse and/or kids, then it makes less sense. It actually makes no sense if you're coming from a low cost area, and more sense if you're moving from NYC to Bay Area. If you're coming from a low cost area, you will suffer, because even if you owned your house outright, if you sell it it may be a decent downpayment, and then you'll have to spend a lot of money on mortgage. Plus school, commute, etc. I wouldn't recommend it in that situation.
This analysis is very low quality. Engineers move to the bay area not for salaries, but for equity and RSUs. It's not unusual to make your salary again in RSUs, which are usually not that risky. Equity is a mixed ball, however. But these two factors are the unique element in the Bay area, and why you should move there. If you are an engineer in the bay area without loads of equity or RSUs, you're getting ripped off.
The analysis is low quality for a lot of reasons...
1. It motivates moving to sv because there are "lots" of successful startups. Is the rate of successful startups higher than elsewhere?
2. Average reported salary is a garbage statistic. Compare median values, between jobs of equal "status" (Google != j-random shipping company... Compare Google sv to Google Seattle within job title groups)
> 1. It motivates moving to sv because there are "lots" of successful startups. Is the rate of successful startups higher than elsewhere?
Probably, yes, but hard to say since a 2–3x "acquihire" can be a big success for another a city but considered a failure in SF, so how "success" is defined is different.
Even with that, the probability of hopping on a rocketship is still very low < 1%. It might be higher in the Bay Area than elsewhere, but I felt the article was disingenuous if the intent was to suggest an engineer has good odds of picking the right rocketship at the early stage. It's not science.
Totally fair point. CA state income tax may take an additional 13% out of the Bay Area numbers. I'm adding this into the post now... Thanks for pointing this out!
Not if rent/property prices are a major economic factor for you. Obviously you can find deals if you know someone or get lucky, but housing prices have gone back to pre-recessionary craziness. As a homeowner I regularly get mail from real estate agents offering to get the best price if I want to sell; over the last 5 years prices in my neighborhood have increased 300%. Yes, three hundred per cent. A small one bedroom apartment in this nice-but-not-fancy North Oakland neighborhood typically starts around $2000/mo.
There's just too much money chasing too few housing units, and while I am seeing a fair amount of new residential construction in the last few years it's only a fraction of the amount demanded.
Divide yearly salary (before taxes) by median rent (40 = bare minimum to rent an apartment, 60 = comfortable, and 100 = luxurious living).
Once you're making enough, it's about realizing the chances you'll be able to buy a house or find a compatible (and attractive) romantic partner are low.
Before the rent situation got completely out of control, it was easy to recommend at least living in the Bay Area for a while (just to see if you like it or not, and to have experienced it), especially if just out of school, but now things are unclear.
Many (of the better) tech companies have their headquarters in the Bay Area, and it's been commonly said that working out of any other office is a poor experience.
(Perhaps you have heard about...) ...the guy on Reddit who calculated that it would be cheaper to commute daily to the Bay Area from Las Vegas by plane than to rent an apartment in San Francisco?
However, I am going to nitpick the title:
Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
This question really ought to be:
Does It Make Financial Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
I will also suggest that there are facets to this question that really are not covered by the article. I am keenly aware of this because I returned to California as soon as I could for health reasons. My health is simply better here ("here" being California -- I am not in the Bay Area currently).
My condition can be very expensive and very debilitating when it is not well controlled. So, while I am horrified by real estate prices out here, for me it makes more financial sense to be here than to be someplace that keeps me too sick to work while running up medical expenses.
There are many reasons to want to live in a particular place. While criticism of the insane cost of living and insane pace of inflation is totally valid, I think it is problematic to boil down a decision about which job to take or where to live to these (specific) financial metrics (of salary and rent). Life is multifaceted. Such decisions do not hinge entirely on money.
1. Bay area is extremely tolerant of immigrants and of different people.
2. Bay area is an excellent place for raising kids. The opportunities for your kids to learn are simply endless. There are excellent colleges near by and some of USA's best high schools.
3. Your experience as a programmer in bay area will always be valued more than your experience in Denver other things being same.
4. Job hopping is easier, finding another job when fired is even easier.
5. Skewed gender ratio means women might get more attention.
6. Networking opportunities are unparalleled in the world.
Disadvantages:
1. If you don't like racial, ethnic diversity then you might be uncomfortable in bay area.
2. If you are a single male finding a girl would be harder in bay area.
3. Competition is cut throat and sometimes it is stressful.
4. Job security is less as there are more people out there who can replace you.
5. California's tax policies and other government policies are very tyrannical and sometimes pure nonsensical. The Liberal state is far too liberal with your money.
6. Housing is bad.
7. Everything is expensive.
There is no doubt that the big four (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook) and hot tech startups like Airbnb pay really well.
However, I think that "normal" companies in the Bay Area pay normal salaries.
If you are a normal software engineer, who wants to have a family, you are better off in Zurich. Here you can make similar money and have lower living expenses.
Disclaimer: I run coderfit.com, a platform which should become hired.com / triplebyte of Europe and I live in Zurich. Read my story about Zurich that I wrote two years ago: "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech" - https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...
I, myself, moved from the Midwest to a very high COL East Coast city 7 or 8 years ago. My salary has pretty much doubled, though I imagine at this point it is about $40K more than I could get back home.
But I live very frugally, and I have saved a lot of money. The plan is to soon get out of here and buy a nice place somewhere cheaper (South or Midwest) with cash and not worry about making the same salary.
OTOH, I think many people end up losing out financially in places like NYC and SF. If your salary is only $40K more than it would be in Omaha, after taxes, you're probably looking at only $30K. If you rent a typical corporate apartment, you're probably now underwater.
I think we're going to start seeing more and more people refusing to move to SF, NYC, and DC if salaries don't allow similar lifestyles as $20K less in middle America.
I have already blacklisted SF, SV, and NYC for cost of living reasons, DC for typical job quality, and Chicago and Detroit for corrupt and bankrupt local government. The spouse has blacklisted St. Louis for arguably insane reasons, but it's out of bounds nonetheless.
That leaves plenty of places to live, but not very many that are well known for having a lot of good software jobs.
I don't really want to live in a broom closet with 3 other people that already get on my nerves in the space we're in now. It doesn't matter if you are willing to pay me more if I can't maintain the same standard of living on that.
It's easier to compare against Seattle: The housing is still very expensive, and you get only half as many sunny days.
Why not compare to someplace like Austin? Most people can afford a real house, it's very sunny, great grad school, great culture, great startup scene.
The SV big company advantage is not true. Most of the same big tech companies have a presence in Texas. And guess what. If you work for Microsoft, Amazon, etc, you get all the same stock compensation, same retirement matches, and your resume sparkles just as brightly.
The biggest advantage for SV that they don't even mention is making deals. VCs/Funding, partnerships, contacts, etc. All of these exist elsewhere just on a smaller scale. However this stuff is mostly an advantage if you start a company.
Austin's tech scene is weaker than Seattle's, and it's missing certain amenities that strong programmers in the US seem to like, like decent transit (Seattle isn't great but it's decent), being in a politically progressive state, and having lots of interesting outdoors stuff nearby.
Also the weather between Austin and Seattle is basically a wash, while Austin is sunnier it also gets very hot in the summer.
All good points. But please note Austin is very progressive. It's an oasis of free thinking within a conservative state.
Also the utility of transit is location dependent. Would I live in Manhattan and own a car? No way, but Texas cities are very spread out. Most parking is free and everyone has a garage.
The outdoors are mostly great, but I admit tall mountains and ocean cannot be beat.
> It’s easy to hear data and stories like these and conclude that programmers moving to the Bay Area are suckers. After all, salaries have not risen by 70% in the past four years. But what this analysis misses is the extent to which this place and time is exceptional.
The author lost me right there, even though I did make an honest effort to read the article to the end.
(1) There are plenty of "brain centers" in the world. The fact that they don't tout it day and night makes them no worse than the Bay Area. In fact, as an European, I am more likely to move to Gothenburg, Oslo or even Reykjavik than the Bay Area -- on this basis alone. Most of us Europeans strongly dislike touting. In fact it says a lot to me and many others how the Bay Area gets the most press coverage of being the "tech innovation center of the world". Center of what? The 99% of failed startups that want to disrupt markets that didn't exist yesterday? Center of "work 16 hours a day for the measly promise of 1% equity if we ever take off"?
(2) "Amazing place and era to live in" is a good inspirational motto... and it only works until you get your first burnout and wish to just make good money and be at peace, and have time for your other hobbies, significant other or whatever else. I feel sorry for all the tryhard after-teens who are about to find that out the hard way.
(3) Company valuations in billions rarely mean anything. I am too lazy to dig around but I clearly remember there were cases of several companies being valued close to 1 billion, only to be sold for ~30 millions several months later. This is hype, it's produced by the investors and VCs themselves, they profit from it, and it has almost zero real-world credibility. I might be oversimplifying this; but I am convinced I am not that far off.
(4) The historical flashbacks only make the author want to desperately justify how cool is it to live in the Bay Arean. No, sorry; I'd honestly prefer 14th century Venice compared to San Francisco. There were tangible things to see there, for example Michelangelo's art. What can SF show you? Zombified devs hurrying for their commute, hellbent on zombifying themselves even more in the name of a cause that's 99% likely to fail?
I wonder if you have ever been to the Bay Area. It sounds like your entire conception of it is from HBO's Silicon Valley. Most developers in the Bay Area are working 9-10 hours per day, not 16.
> Most of us Europeans strongly dislike touting.
This is a Scandinavian trait, not universally European. It's not even universally Scandinavian.
You're mad about something, but I can't figure it out. What is it?
Me being mad -- that's partially true. Mostly I am just sick and tired of the fake positive SF press coverage. It's so forced you can just smell the dollars spent to write the article. Or the lack of any personal life of those who praise their employer and job.
Apologies for the mistake -- I mean "Most of us Eastern Europeans strongly dislike touting", by the way.
It's a fact that I have never been to the Sillicon Valley. And after all the forced press coverage I don't want to either. I realize this is a bias, but hey, if the Bay Area residents don't like it, you should do some policing of the press hype.
About the statistic -- it's very likely we're both wrong. Let's not go there, none of us has solid data to support their claims. I am sharing intuitive impressions and I am not claiming them to be hard facts.
I hope it's clear that I don't mean that in the blunt literal sense.
But IMO counter-articles on Medium with a much milder tone and stripped of screaming marketing hype would go a long way. Help spread the right message about the Bay Area.
I'm not parent poster but I do find Americans hype everything up, including their cities; probably that has a lot to do with all the media/tv/film here too, anyhow it does become annoying (and I'm American).
> In fact it says a lot to me and many others how the Bay Area gets the most press coverage of being the "tech innovation center of the world". Center of what?
It's the center of successful consumer-focused tech companies. A huge percentage of the megahits of the last couple decades have come out of the bay area.
This article focuses entirely on cost of living through home pricing, however there are many additional areas impacted. First, perhaps most importantly, Washington does not have state income tax. Additionally, there are differences in price of groceries, restaurants, etc that are not considered here.
Even for home pricing comparison is not apple-to-apples. In Seattle, you can still buy descent house in 10-rated school area for $500k. In Bay area you can probably buy house with 30% more money but it would be no where close to what you can in Seattle area.
I just left Seattle a year ago, be careful about confusing Seattle Metro with Seattle. Seattle is surrounded by water and its mass transit system is nascent, so it's pretty hard to live too far outside the city to take advantage of the cheaper real estate.
Seattle city proper prices are getting ridiculous and I suspect they will catch up with the Bay Area quite quickly and maybe even surpass it.
Seattle doesn't come close to the level of tech/economic output that the Bay does, but the output is more geographically dense. Amazon is, effectively in downtown Seattle. The most far flung tech outlier is Microsoft a mere 20 miles away. Expedia moved all of its staff from Bellevue to downtown. I would venture to put median home prices closer to 600k than the 450k reportedly here.
I think it makes sense for programmers or anyone else in this universe to do what they love to do and want to do. If moving to SF is the best way for you to do that, then sure, move there.
But I don't think it is. A place with much lower cost of living might give you much greater freedom to explore your interests and hone your skills, develop your talents, let you wander through your own ideas, implement your own projects, grow as a developer in a way that working for a company would not.
I'm a believer that more interesting things get done when talented people are left on their own to explore. Maybe down the line you get a job in SF after all that exploration is over. But I'm not sure that exploration ever really ends.
I haven't seen anyone else make this point, but the other vicious cycle to consider is the 7-10 year downtown cycle that the Bay Area goes through (1991, 2000, 2008, 201?). When this happens, the tech companies gleefully (privately) and sadly (publicly) lay off all their middle-aged employees (many now with families), and many smaller companies just fold or get bought. Those people have to hunker down or sell their assets and get out (this was me, 1998-2013 worked/lived in BA).
Then 2 years later, it's all back to hiring and partying, but for recent college grads and twenty-somethings who are suckered into the cycle and are unaware of the history.
Go to the bay area, spend a few years becoming ridiculously skilled and invaluable to your organization. Then tell employer you'll be moving to X and telecommuting. X being somewhere with a lower cost of living, and someplace you love (nice beaches, near family, etc).
Arkansas and other places where land is effectively free work differently than California. You buy a starter home straight out of college, maybe you improve it, it'll probably increase in value marginally over the next 5 to 7 years. Then you sell it and put what you've "earned" into your next house.
My friends back in Oklahoma are on their third or fourth houses (we're all around 35) at this point.
In the Bay Area, you probably don't buy a house until you're 35. In fact, you have to get a bit lucky to be able to do it then.
Houses aren't retirement plans in most places. And I think that's good.
If you have ever seen hermit crabs do a multiple shell swap, that's about how it works. In areas where housing is cheap enough to have younger homeowners, the sale of a big home can often depend on a chain of other sale contingencies that depend on whether a first-time homebuyer can scrape up a $15k down payment.
So you have the 1/1 homes for young singles, 2/1 homes for young couples, 3/2 and larger homes for families, and then maybe a step-down option for empty-nesters.
My chain broke in 2007, when I got canned in a buyout, had to move to find work, and couldn't sell either the 3/2 or the previous 2/1 (rented out) at a decent price, and all my accumulated equity vanished. I would probably also be on my 3rd or 4th house by now if I hadn't been busted back down to tenant.
I definitely can't afford SV home prices, even with a higher salary. I need at least a 3/2, and don't have enough millions in the bank to get one anywhere near SF Bay.
Homes aren't the retirement plan around here, but the retirement plans definitely factor in not paying rents or mortgages after about age 55.
Yeah, but in the bay area you can live in a small apartment, save a ton of money that you put into stocks, and then eventually use those investments to buy a house outright in a cheaper part of the country when you move.
> Houses aren't retirement plans in most places. And I think that's good.
Absolutely; the fact that they've worked that way in some places is completely poisonous. For one thing, it's obviously not sustainable; you can only have the inflation-adjusted average value of a home double so many times before it's literally impossible for anyone but the actually wealthy to afford. Secondly, it creates a strong incentive to oppose building more housing, which causes all kinds of problems.
I'm just not sure if the cost of living is worth the pay increase both from a service provider and business owner perspective....
Arguments like network effect, "being in the ecosystem" or near physical vicinity of other SV startups seem to be the face value but these are only superficial items.
I almost feel like with the connected world, as long as you are in a fairly crowded North American city, it shouldn't matter....unless your customers were all focused in SV area.
I'm not a city slicker or a instagram traveler so please feel free to offer any alternative view. Maybe being in SF is important but I'm too biased (haven't left Vancouver for 20+ years)...
There are already a bunch of valid arguments made here. Double salary, double career opportunities vs 2-4x expenses for rent and food, opportunism all over.
But the biggest contra argument I had was the Diablo nuclear power station directly at the coast (protected by 6m walls) and directly near the a huge fault which will hit soon. The other 3 corners of the Pacific ring of fire already hit their 9.x in the last decade, San Fran not yet. And this will be in the country, not 50 miles outside. If so you get the Diablo meltdown by tsunami, if not something much worse. And then the career in this company will only be short term.
I paged through - the rent price estimates in Seattle strike me as low. Obviously I don't have strong statistics to back this up but when I looked for one bedroom apartments a year and a half ago everything was at least $1700 and many were not in the city center. Prices have increased considerably since then.
I'm married with 4 kids. We like living in roughly 3,000 square feet of housing with on roughly a quarter acre of land, so I'm going to guess in absolutely no universe could it ever make sense for us to move to the Bay Area.
Depends. My old boss (also married with 4 kids) did it. He lives in Pleasanton in order to afford a house and commutes to Mountain View. Has to get up very early to beat the traffic though. The upside is that, while I obviously don't know exactly how much he makes, from what I know about people at his level at Google, he is undoubtedly doing quite nicely.
It depends. If you're just starting out, it could make sense to move to the Bay Area to work for a big name company that will teach you a lot and make you look better on paper. You'll even get a higher salary to use as slight leverage when you decide to work in a different city. Yes, rent in the bay is expensive. But, at least a lot of things will cost the same. An Apple product will cost the same whether you live in the midwest or the bay. A vacation will also cost the same no matter where you live. Just a different perspective of looking at this argument.
I find the Silicon Valley tech industry degenerate, and I honestly have no desire to be part of it. I'd rather work a corporate job at a traditional company than have anything to do with SV. I'm not fond of the general non-tech atmosphere in NorCal either... the lack of quality Mexican food puts me off in a big way.
On top of that, NorCal is the most expensive part of the US. Even SoCal is considerably cheaper (and I'm honestly considering moving to SoCal when I have to flee Texas next year).
Yes, If you have never been around Silicon Valley culture do experience it. The culture and knowledge sharing is invaluable.
If you have a family do not go to Silicon Valley.
Loved living in the Bay Area.
Hated the commute. Hated the prices of everything.
Loved the culture. Loved the crazy you can only find in SF ( altho much of that is moving to places like that warehouse which burned in Oakland ) Loved the beautiful ocean beaches.
Rent prices... well... you will lose money moving to the bay unless you get a ludicrous salary.
Single.. I wouldnt hesitate. Married with kids. Stay away from The Bay.
It's kinda bad that the article fails to mention the possibility of working at Google or Facebook in Seattle. You can get nearly as high comp without the taxes and high housing costs.
When I started my career I ended up in Austin, Texas. At the time, I didn’t know much about the place (and it was much smaller than now) but it really is a serious tech hub. Even at its current absurd rate of growth and increasing cost of living, it is more affordable than the Bay Area and has enough else going on that it isn’t an exclusively tech climate. Politically, Austin is like a blue bubble in a red state so it is more California-like in that sense too.
I have been in Bay Area for little over 3 years with a fairly stable company. The opportunities are many in all technical fields(pro) but again it comes with the cut throat competition(con). One has to compete with people from FB/Google or new grads who have mugged all DS questions. My interest to stay in Bay Area is with the hope I could be able to join one of the companies which will be Uber/Airbnb of tomorrow and gain great experience and $$$.
DC/NoVa is hurting for programmers. Particularly if you can get a clearance, there's no shortage of work out here, at a (somewhat) cheaper cost of living.
I lived in NoVa for a bit, and found that employers would strongly rather you already have clearance, and don't really care if you're clear-able. Most places I looked had no uncleared work to fill so they'd literally have to hire me and sit me behind a desk doing nothing for months waiting for my clearance. That was usually the deal breaker.
I'm currently probably not clearable anymore (married a foreign national) so it's less relevant for me now, but I agree it's a nice area.
My direct experience is that the companies that cover cleared engineers pay slightly below average salaries and jack shit for variable compensation (bonuses, stock, and such). Plus, you can't talk about all the best work you did when you interview elsewhere, so you sound like a faker to interviewers. I'm glad to be free of the shackle of my clearance.
That's nice to hear. I've recently been contemplating moving from the DFW area to the VA area to be closer to family. Would also love some land/trees, which is lacking around here and becoming even harder to find.
Doing some goal factoring and trying to really understand what reasons would keep you in Bay Area is a good excercise. I'm guilty of noticing being stuck in this artificial prison quite late myself. :)
https://medium.com/teleport-stories/another-kind-of-silicon-...
> At Triplebyte, we help engineers around the country (and world) get jobs at top Bay Area companies
I admit that I stopped reading at this point. Maybe I read that wrong and they meant "in addition to other areas", but from the way it's written it sounds like a conflict of interest. It's going to be difficult to make an objective assessment of the pros and cons of living in the Bay Area if your business depends on people wanting to live in the Bay Area.
> Examples of topics we would like to cover include the salary differences between the SF Bay Area and other locations (does it make sense for engineers to move to SF?), the prevalence of remote work (is it harder or easier to get a remote job?), gender/age bias in hiring (How common is it?), and how credentials impact hiring decisions. We have insightful data on all these topics.
Reading the article, they analyze data they show on charts. You could make the same conclusions they're drawing by also looking at the charts. Sure it's a shameless plug, but it definitely doesn't discredit their analysis.
Not necessarily. Most technology companies I have found won't care too much about credentials. It all depends on what you're applying for. For instance a finance or insurance company may still care but the makers of New App 13 probably don't.
Now the government still cares. They care a great deal which kills prospects around the MD / DC / VA area. I was a contractor with only a 2 year degree so most companies were legally not allowed to charge more than about a junior level's worth when I first started. That was difficult. It was even more awkward when I was in charge of leading the technical side of a multi million dollar government project and my company couldn't bill for me beyond a Software Developer 2.
The Bay area mostly doesn't care BUT (and this is a HUGE BUT) many companies, like Google, make their hiring determinations based on the knowledge of very scholarly topics. So it's kinda indirect.
I've done well without a degree in Cambridge, MA of all places. The problem solves itself in any market with a lot of tech companies. If some companies are leaving good talent on the table, others are going to pounce on it.
I laughed too - but also wouldn't mind working professionally in a Clojure-oriented shop despite having some freedom to use Clojure now. But I'm a lone wrangler of parentheses in my current role and if I could (in my location) join a team of better Clojure hackers, I think I could take my skills up a level or two even if all I had was the opportunity to talk shop in the hallway.
If one plans to take full advantage of brain, entrepreneur, capital and customer concentrations then yes. Otherwise, scarcity elsewhere make for increased career leverage (at varying income / cost of living ratios) elsewhere.
If you want status, sure. But, if you're relatively good and want money, then no.
Economics is about supply and demand. And, every city in the world wants high-end developers. Many companies are willing to pay a lot because they have a shortage. But keep in mind that they're looking for someone who's good in more than just programming.
I always feel like these articles are one sided - jobs and money. Those things make life easier but ultimately are not the things that make life worth living. This article hits on none of the reasons I moved here after several prior extended stays in the City. For what I want out of life, it absolutely made sense for me to move here - even with only $2K in cash, no job, and no place to live at first.
I came here for the things you can't easily put a price on - like the weather, local arts, music, and culture. Also driving into the mountains, or down the coast of California. Chicago is no slouch for fun but cold days like this make me glad I'm not waiting for the 'L' outside anymore. SF weather is generally magical.
Being in a top US city still gets me direct, reasonably priced, and frequently scheduled nonstop flights to family/friends in places like Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Seattle - not always attainable in some of these smaller tech hubs (like Portland, or Austin.)
When people move here, there is a constant worry about how much money they will make or what company they work for - I didn't sweat it.
Within a month after arriving, I landed a great career. I spent the last two years exploring other hobbies and interests, and nurturing healthy new friendships.
Biggest tip I can give - It's nice to get to know people who've been around here for a while, they've seen it all before. Show an interest in your local community. Volunteer your time but branch out of tech. Get to know people here in all walks of life; show compassion You just may be liked enough by some old school San Franciscans that refer you to one of their friends; who rent you their old place (with parking and views on Twin Peaks) for $1200. It worked for me.
San Francisco is not an expensive city because of tech alone, it's always been a bit on the expensive side; as there's no place in America like it.
Of course this is my experience. I merely bring it up just as a reminder that there's so many things to focus on when decide whether or not moving here is worth it. The questions that guided me in my decision to move here were:
What are my goals long-term?
What made me decide to move here?
What is my contribution to the local community and society - outside of working in tech?
Will I ultimately grow as a person; both personally and professionally?
Is there enough other activities around that will keep me from being bored that I'll enjoy?
Well, their entire goal was to determine whether or not it was affordable/made financial sense.. But as a fellow bay area resident, I can't disagree with you on quality of life.
Holy crap, direct flights are critical. My family lives in San Diego now, and they have to multi-hop to go ANYWHERE. What a bloody nightmare. I fly nonstop out of SFO or SJC any time I travel. Last time I needed to take a connection, last week, was a total nightmare. Flight into Chicago delayed due to equipment problems, would have missed connecting flight, rebooked through Houston, THAT flight was delayed due to other issues, missed my connecting flight, spent hours waiting for rebooking and luggage and hotel vouchers. Just enough time to take a shuttle to the hotel, grab a crappy post-10-pm meal at the motel diner, sleep 6h, get up before daylight to catch ANOTHER flight, which finally got me there. You can tell I'm still not over the miserable experience of having to fly somewhere without a major hub.
Hear-hear on "there's more to life than money", but would still argue many of the things you list ("weather, local arts, music, culture") can be quantified to far larger extent than most bother.
Here's one attempt, as an appropriate illustration for the Bay Area: https://teleport.org/cities/san-francisco-bay-area/
(skip the top for startups, worst for housing and unfold the leisure, culture and tolerance categories, for example).
A major selling point for Seattle over SF is the complete lack of state income tax. Losing an extra 10% of your money before you receive it is pretty painful, and it's especially painful if you get stock options and cash them out while an SF resident.
One thing the article is missing and not factoring in is home ownership. It can be a tremendous form of "compensation" as well provided you can weather out any downturns (10 years will probably be sufficient).
With high salaries you have high tax brackets. Probably 40-50% total marginal tax rate with state, federal, and all the misc taxes. Being able to subtract your mortgage interest and the fact that your "rent" is going to pay down equity, on paper at least, your living costs are actually lower. Even more so if you have roommates.
Factor in 4-10% appreciation with leverage (10% down = 1000% leverage) so that becomes a 40-100% annual ROI.
Work in the bay area for about 10 years when you are young and then sell your house. You can buy another house somewhere cheaper for cash and then retire.
Might also be possible to just rent out the house in the bay area. The rent should cover rent some place cheaper and have plenty of additional cash flow to live on each month.
Well, they mentioned home purchase prices, but they also think the Seattle Metro area has average $400k houses which anyone living there would laugh at. Somehow I think "metro area" in Seattle has longer commute times than "metro area" in SJ or SF. There's just no way the average in Seattle metro (with equivalent commute) is half.
The comments are full of opinions. It would be interesting to know experience of anyone who has moved to Bay area, have family and does not have double income :).
If you are going to transfer somewhere at the same pay rate, transfer somewhere cheaper and nicer than Seattle. Lots of options (I'm partial to northern New England, personally, as I like having proper winter).
Funny, when I saw "nicer", I sure as hell didn't expect it to be followed by "New England". Fortunately, there's a region for everyone, but man, as someone who moved out of Seattle for better weather, New England would be a huuuge downgrade.
It's much easier to justify keeping the salary with a move to Seattle, since the pay rate difference isn't as large. It's also much easier to then find a new programming job if you lose one in Seattle.
Chiming in to respectfully disagree that New England winters are better than Seattle's. Seattle has a more temperate winter with fresh powder 90 minutes to the east, if you're into that sort of thing. Snow should be on a mountain with ski lifts, not in your driveway :)
Nashua has a lot of tech companies if you would be ok with a smaller urban area close enough to Boston to enjoy the city too.
Personally I just moved from Seattle to Boston. I'm conflicted on the two places. I really liked the outdoors areas in Seattle, commute was shorter and rent was also cheaper. But Boston has a lot of cool things too, food better, more interesting activities todo (other than outdoors but you can find it NH) and cycling infrastructure is poor compared to Seattle.
I'm not native of either place (from Montreal) so my experience is based on a few years of living in both.
Boston isn't exactly better in terms of winter sunlight that's for sure. Both are grayish in winters but summers are great (less humid in Seattle).
What did it for me is proximity to family. Being in the same timezone is huge.
Cool fact I learned recently, Boston-Cambridge-Nashua, MA-NH area has one lowest unemployment rate for any metro area at 2.6%.
The problem is salary for tech workers in Montreal are way lower than other NE cities. 5 hour south and you make 2-3 times the salary you could make in Montreal (from personal experience) but cost of living does match that increase. You are better off net in the US. I know a few people that spent time working in the US and returned to Montreal with a good amount of savings which lets them live very comfortably.
Providence has been perpetually on the cusp of having a tech scene for about 20 years now; it's starting to take off a bit, and still reasonably cheap even in the beautiful areas around Brown/RISD.
There's a lot going on just under the radar in the smaller college towns. Amherst/Northampton MA, Burlington in VT, Hanover/Lebanon in NH. A lot of what's going on is in fairly small shops that don't have job postings, but would create a position for the right candidate, which makes it hard to find them if you're not in the area, unfortunately, but there are definitely some medium-size firms, too. These have a very different feel from Boston, though, so maybe not what you're looking for.
I also know a few folks who live near me (Hanover/Lebanon) and commute to Boston or NYC (2-3 days a week, WFH the other days). This is a pretty sweet deal if you can make it happen.
Yes because the bay area doesn't have earthquakes... Honestly, you are much less likely to die in Seattle's only real weather threat, then the myriad of unsafe conditions in other parts of the country.
I know someone who bought a house near Seattle, and they've accepted that they're pretty much guaranteed to die if they're home at the time that it hits due to the home being built on a hill.
Because you're working for the same company, in the Seattle office. Additionally, a lot of the difference is from income taxes that you no longer pay - something that companies take into account when making the initial offer, but not generally when doing transfers.
If you got a boost from transferring from San Fran to Seattle, overtime it would even out during merit pay-raises. Companies that are large enough to support development offices in both Seattle and Bay Area, are large enough to have a very formalized process for raises, which take into account your current pay vs the local market rate for that position.
From what I've heard from friends at big companies, the primary variable in the merit process is your current Salary - it does take the other things into account, but almost never enough to make as much of a difference as your current Salary. That's why people stress that it's so important to negotiate your starting salary higher, and not expect to get paid better once in the company.
I do not understand the obsession the software industry has for locality. Wouldn't it make sense for people to work anywhere? Haven't Bay Area companies heard of something called the Internet?
If you have to have people in the office to make sure they're working, you already have a fundamental hiring problem.
> I do not understand the obsession the software industry has for locality.
For many types of problems, collaborating in person works far better than collaborating online. Lower friction, easier to have a conversation, easier to sit around a computer and experiment, and generally easier to handle things in a few minutes that would take longer otherwise.
Really? Debugging a kernel is hard yet the people building Linux are located all over the world. You don't really have the option to "screen share" when testing some kernel features, yet Linux is one of the best kernels in the world.
Yes, let's all keep believing that. If companies realized that all programmers can actually work decentralized, we might not be able to command a decent salary as it becomes a global race to the bottom...
As a developer, I've specifically pushed to maintain a co-located team, precisely because the type of work my team does works far better when co-located.
I do decentralized development regularly, and for some kinds of work it works fine. For other kinds of work, it makes simple tasks take an order of magnitude longer.
The Linux kernel does distributed development quite successfully, and scales extremely well. However, it does so partly by sacrificing some forms of coordination between developers; for instance, kernel maintainers don't consider duplicated effort to solve the same issue a problem, because the overall process still scales even if some individual developers end up wasting their time.
On the other hand, the development of any one individual patch series to implement one feature typically occurs either by one developer, or by a set of co-located developers in one organization, not by geographically distributed developers. And some other kinds of work, such as backporting or rebasing a series of patches, doesn't work well when geographically distributed.
You can work decentralized but it's not particularly great, especially because remote communication isn't a solved problem. You communicate a ton of stuff in an actual face to face conversation through a variety of different ways and even video calls don't really capture that.
Supposedly this has already happened with offshore development, and yet, here we still are, paying top salaries for US developers in the midst of a tech shortage.
I worked at a 100% telecommute shop local to Chicago for 10 years. We also used offshore development firms on some projects, and I can tell you, if anyone ever seriously had the idea of replacing us with them, they were quickly dissuaded by the experience of working with these firms.
Most programming is work that can be done in a decentralized fashion. Some can't be. In either case the salary commanded is influenced by a number of factors other than supply (quality of the supply, for example). So I'm not sure a "global race to the bottom" of the apocalyptic kind you imply would result in such a realization.
I want to work with my team in person. That has nothing to do "making sure they're working". It's just easier, for me, and presumably many others, to be able to collaborate in person.
Maybe there's a future where seamless video conferencing, Beam robots, and better text communication could replace in-person conversation, coffee and lunch chats, and other office-place experiences. I've tried, and I don't think we're there yet.
But that provides a better incentive for remote teams. I agree that teams work better in person, but when you have separate teams, working on only tangentially related things, it makes sense to separate them out.
Obviously for small startups this doesn't make sense. But mid to late stage, opening a satellite office for development somewhere else seems like a no brainer. I assume I'm missing something though.
Our secret sauce is one thing. Exactly one thing. What do you mean "tangentially related" we'd outsource anything unrelated.
The exit strategy is to be bought by a multinational megacorporation not to have two offices, or even ten. There's sort of a financial fund raising dead zone between having one office and being purchasable and having 500 offices and buying little companies. Very few companies jump that gap and its safer to try and get bought that to try and become Google2.0
Satellite offices do make sense, however, I wouldn't want to be in one at this point in my career. I'm only a few years out of school, and not 100% settled into what I want to do. Being in a bigger headquarters (or a major non-HQ office) is important for me to socialize with other teams, find out what they're doing, and possibly switch to those teams.
It does make sense to separate teams who do different things but these teams do have to align and communicate occasionally. Meeting up in person in a meeting room is an incredibly convenient way to do that.
Having people in the office supports communication at much higher frequency and much lower latency than any video-conferencing method, not to mention that video-conferencing is uncomfortable and sometimes hard to hear. It's also vastly easier to simply walk over and look at a coworker's screen rather than trying to screen-share, and it doesn't require you to stop anything you're doing. Additionally the sense of camaraderie supports motivation and helps to assuage the crushing boredom of what is for most of us a profession of financial convenience after we failed at our actual dreams.
I don't know about that. I've done hundreds of hours of pair programming with Google Hangouts and usually it's pretty good.
Google Hangouts is decent for every type of sharing except "let another user control my computer directly".
I can press a button and usually within a few seconds I can see the chat recipient's screen on my end. Now I can watch his screen and we can pair with voice chat. I have my own screen to do occasional Googling and pasting info to chat if needed.
Basically I would find that far more efficient than unplugging my laptop, walking up to someone's office, plopping down, having to Google something while we pair, and now show him my laptop because there's no way to get it on his screen without duplicating the search work on his machine.
Today, the internet can't compete with face to face communication. Even with Skype etc. I think this is the reason rather than keeping tabs on the work you are doing. This may change in the future of course if we can get VR to a real level of fidelity.
> If you have to have people in the office to make sure they're working, you already have a fundamental hiring problem.
It is possible to be remote and have your screen recorded to make sure you are typing for 8 hours, vs. being local and just being trusted to get on with it.
I'm a big proponent of remote working, but I can see how some early-stage startups need a lot of face to face interaction, not just with other devs but all the way up to the CEO.
But yeah, your everyday, run-of-the-mill corporate coding job can easily be done at home. The problem is a trust factor with these companies: they don't trust the tools that enable remote working as much as they don't trust their ability to manage their remote people.
wow, this article, and the discussion in this forum is doing a great job at substantiating an idea that's been swirling around my head for a long time now.
i personally have made a lifestyle choice not to work for any company that won't allow me to work largely remotely. i often apply to great companies who do interesting stuff and pay well, and then i hear "sorry, we don't do remote". that can be very frustrating. i'm losing a contract right now with a company that decided they were going to switch to a non-remote policy. that too was very frustrating. but the kind of data that's pointed to here really shows that the joke is on them.
think about the cost base of a completely centralized non-remote company: a large share of their employees' salaries goes into their landlords' rather than their own bank accounts. a large share of their time goes to crazy commuting routines rather than actual work.
tell your employees "okay, you make $140000 dollars now, but $30000 goes to your landlord for the privilege of being in the BA. work remotely, move to wherever you want, and we'll pay you $125000". both the company and the employee have $15000 to gain. that's 12%!
tell your employees: "okay, you do 8 hours of work now, and you do 2 hours of commuting each day. why don't you work from home for 9 hours instead." both sides win. the company gains an hour of work, and the employee gains an hour of time to themselves. if we subtract holidays, sick days etc. so that we assume that a year normally has 220 working days, that's 220 hours over a year.
cumulatively that adds up as follows: $140000 over a year for 220 x 8 hours equals an hourly rate of $80. $125000 over a year for 220 x 9 hours equals an hourly rate of $63. That's a 21% cost advantage for the company, and more money left over and a better life for the employee. Over a base of $125000 that 21% advantage is $26250 a year per employee.
i find it really funny how the word "coffee" keeps being brought up by people who deny that there's an economic opportunity here. when i lost my current remote contract, the argument was something like "sorry, our culture is such that so much information exchange is taking place over a coffee, and so many decisions are being taken over a coffee that we can't have you working for us if you can't be a part of that". someone in this discussion thread suggested that it's important to be able to "have coffee" with investors and co-founders. i get the point that we're all meant to be social creatures, and it's nice to be able to have coffee with people. but i'd seriously question the business acumen of people willing to value it to the tune of $26250 per employee per year.
the other thing i find interesting about this article and the discussion thread is that it's another example showing how markets always find a way to get into an equilibrium that rules out the possibility of any such thing as a "free lunch". the article mentions the idea of "building equity." my own first job was in a high-paying finance role, working with lots of other young people who come in with extremely naive ideas around the notion of building equity. "i'll work like crazy for top dollar until i'm 35. if at that point i want to deleverage my lifestyle, i'll always have that option. i'll be able to move to a trailer park and never have to work again in my whole life if it turns out at that point that that's what i want to do. by building equity i'm just expanding my options, never reducing them". the point i'd like to make is: earning more is easy. building equity at a higher rate is hard! the point of departure for your thinking might be "move to the BA because of the higher salaries". but then you start to think things through: "higher rents, higher costs of living, higher taxes, higher risk when you should find yourself out of work for a month, bad situation if you're foreigner, build a life there, then lose your job", and you inevitably conclude. "well there's no such thing as a free lunch in the BA either."
The answer "it depends" is a cop out. There's no analysis, because even a cursory look gives a logical answer.
Moving to a high cost area to gamble for a position that might help your career in the future, given any unemployment for more than a month makes the living arrangement untenable, is a high-risk gamble. The idea that working for a big company changes your employment chances is about the same as what school you graduated from. It gets you an interview, you were probably going to get anyway in another geo-location. In a lower cost area (even relatively lower like Los Angeles) you end up with lower chances for a startup (with a brand that might eventually become household) but the experience isn't much different and landing your interviews are a cakewalk…talent pools are smaller everywhere else in the world. The positions you might qualify from, are about the same from some no-name sports gambling company as "I worked at uber for a year". Your experience at your role is what matters, you're a worker not a business consultant. The answer is a definitive no, and the headline is baiting a false equivalence, hence Betteridge.
"The Bay Area in the early 21st century has produced an astounding number of successful tech companies. Uber was valued at $60 million in 2011 and at around $68 billion in late 2015 [1]; Stripe at around $500 million in 2012 and $9 billion during its most recent funding round; and Twitch at just under $99 million in September 2013, before Amazon acquired it for $970 million less than a year later."
^^^ Is not a selling point. Those are anomalies. How about the hundreds of other companies that are going under consistently everyday in the bay area. If I want to work for startups why would I not move to some where like Austin Tx? Get good experience, have a reduced cost of living, and have no state income tax?
