> $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley.
No, it's really not -- it's actually more like $77,000[1]. With the bulk of the difference being driven by housing prices. And $77,000 is actually above the average salary for a SE in Ft. Lauderdale (according to Glassdoor: $73,000).
So I'm in essentially this situation and I concur that my salary does not completely adjust to an SV/Bay Area salary. But there are also 3 things that do not seem possible at once despite the extra money which keep me from pursuing opportunities in tech hubs: I'm ~5 minutes from biking/hiking/outdoors, ~10 minutes from work, and have a house with a shop/garage. So far as I can tell if I were to move to a tech hub I might be just shy of doubling my salary, but it wouldn't be possible to have the 3 things mentioned regardless unless I spent so much on housing that I'd have an effectively lower income, though I'd definitely make substantially more if I sacrificed them.
You can get the ~5 minutes from biking/hiking/outdoors and ~10 minutes to work in Silicon Valley. I used to live in Mountain View and bike into my job at Google; it took 12 minutes. 5 minute walk and I was on the trail; 15 minute bike ride and I could be at the bayshore; 20 minute drive and I'd be in the mountains; hour drive and I'd be at the beach. I work from home now, but those numbers would be the same from my current place to any one of several hundred tech employers here.
Forget about having a house with a shop/garage unless you're willing to spend a million and a half, though.
Stevens Creek Trail for the one that's 5 minutes away. You're right, it's basically a green belt, but it's awfully handy for biking to work or just getting out. You can walk all the way down to the Bay, and then on to Palo Alto Baylands, for a close to 10-mile round trip.
20 minute driving time includes Rancho San Antonio, Stevens Creek County Park, Villa Montalvo, and Lexington Reservoir, all of which are perfectly adequate half-day hikes. Make it 30-40 and you also get the Los Trancos/Montebello/Russian Ridge area, Castle Rock, Almaden, Calero, Garin/Dry Creek, and Don Edwards.
Yes. The thing to remember about these SV people is that they're mostly single people or working couples who are living in ridiculously tight spaces like these "microapartments". [0] They're forced out after having a kid or two.
Almost anywhere else in the country, that $2200/mo will get you quite the spread; you can trade off between square footage, neighborhood, and commute time, but you're going to have very nice accommodations if you're willing to put that much money up. In SF, you're lucky if you can get a 1-bd for that, and LA is only slightly better.
While the price of goods doesn't fluctuate as much, housing is a HUGE factor. If you want something functional for a family of 4 (or if you just like a lot of space), you are going to be paying at least $4000/mo in these tech hubs, or living 60 min+ away.
Florida also has no income tax, v. California's rate between 7.5% and 13.3%. That is a big dent too.
One other note. If you have the skills, look for remote work in companies that pay rates that are higher than you get paid in your local market. It's a great way to make the COL differential work even more in your favor.
I have a lot of friends who live in Sillicon Valley and have kids. They don't live in "microapartments" (those aren't even legal to build, there are space minimums.) They mostly live in houses which they either bought or rent. If you have a job, you can pay for housing and everything else.
I truly don't understand why anyone would live in Florida unless they were growing sugarcane. The climate is extremely hot and damp, and there is Zika according to the CDC. So what is good about Florida?
For 5 months of the year, November-Mar, the weather in Florida is sublime. Highs in the 70s, lows in the upper 50s, and humidity in the 50-70% range.
True, in the summer it becomes a hellscape, but 5 months of paradisiacal weather is better than most people get. ;)
Florida has reasonably priced housing (for the most part), plenty of land, and with almost 20 million residents, there is tons of variety across the state; from most population centers, it's a relatively easy drive to more than enough to interest anyone, no matter what you're into (except maybe skiing).
It's very scenic with palms swaying, beautiful sunsets and beaches, many lakes and an abundance of interesting wildlife.
Florida also has no state income tax, strong homestead protections, pretty-OK gun laws, and otherwise mostly-sane state policies.
Zika is a non-issue at this point and there are only a tiny handful of cases of local transmission. Florida is a large state and only the very tip of the peninsula was impacted by local transmission. However, it's always wise to avoid mosquito bites.
For older folks, the weather is great compared to the northern states or countries (ex: Canada) that they originally come from. Lots of retirement communities that provide the social circle and activities they can engage in. No state income taxes is a bonus.
If they want a family they don't live right beside work in the middle of a busy and dirty city. They move out to the suburban south bay (which has more tech jobs) or east bay, have 30m-1hr commutes and are dual income families.
TBH the harder part of the bay area and kids is actually finding an affordable place to live that have good schools.
>TBH the harder part of the bay area and kids is actually finding an affordable place to live that have good schools.
Translation: it's expensive to live where rich people live. "Good schools" is a flimsy proxy for wealthy, exclusive suburbs.
Where I'm from, "good schools" is a nice way of saying "it's a white neighborhood". I would not feel good about letting "good schools" influence where I live, or buy a home.
> Where I'm from, "good schools" is a nice way of saying "it's a white neighborhood"
Eh. The Bay Area isn't where you're from. Actually, relatively few people in the Bay Area use the term "good schools" at all because they tend to have few children and the idea of school quality isn't on their radar.
> wealthy, exclusive suburbs
Honestly if you wanted to say Bay Area residents were coding racism into how they talk about where they live, you could point to the San Francisco fetish where people AVOID suburbs like Oakland and the East Bay, though honestly that's _actually_ because of all the public-transit-accessible hipster coffee spots in the one and the violent crime and strip-mall Starbucks and sprawling freeways with hours-long commutes to work from the other.
> Where I'm from, "good schools" is a nice way of saying "it's a white neighborhood"
There is no need to inject race. Plus, in the bay area, many good schools are comprised of mostly minorities.
Good schools in the bay area just mean good schools, as based on standardized testing methodology, class sizes, dollars per student, extracurricular activities available, and acceptance rates to selective colleges.
You can definitely pay a lot of money to send your child to good private schools.
"Good schools" has been code for non-integrated schools for a very long time in this country. It might be true it doesn't mean that in the Bay Area, it doesn't mean that in my specific neighborhood either, but pretending like the comment is "injecting" race into the discussion ignores American history.
> "Good schools" has been code for non-integrated schools for a very long time in this country.
Citation needed. I have lived in this country for a long time, and have never hear it used in this manner, and Google searches turn up nothing.
> pretending like the comment is "injecting" race into the discussion ignores American history
"Pretending". Way to jump to conclusions. If you're proposing that an innocuous phrase like "good school" is forever tainted by history, that is a small and petty view of the world. That's like saying "honky tonk" has racist connotations because of the word honky.
Here for instance was a fair housing organization filing a lawsuit suggesting that real estate agents used "good schools" as a proxy for race in attempts to racially steer buyers.
I'm not suggesting saying "hey they are doing a great job over there, my kid goes to a good school" is enough to assume that the person is saying their kid goes to a white school, but in the context of a discussion about real estate pricing, distance to city centers, etc, the term "good schools" has connotations.
That you are unaware of them is fine, but it wasn't the original commenter that injected those connotations, they've been around for a long time.
> Its in the normal lexicon enough for Urban Dictionary to consider that the top definition
Urban dictionary and one isolated lawsuit doesn't a pattern generally make.
I can accept that this term has been used in a certain way as a code phrase signifying something else, but that's been true of so many phrases and terms that it loses all significance. (Is nice restaurant also coding for no minorities?)
The original statement that's objectionable is I would not let "good schools" influence where you live and buy a home, which is ridiculous. Taking school district reputation and test scores when buying a house is neither racist or something to be ashamed of, no matter how many quotes you put around "good school".
The average income of a programmer is as relevant as the average income of a musician. It will not tell you anything about how much Lady Gaga makes, or the fact that the richest man in the world is a programmer. This kind of averages could possibly be relevant for bricklayers, but even in that case I doubt it.
The according to the BLS, the median wage nationally is $100,080 and the average is $104,300. I'm not convinced a 4% difference takes away a whole lot of value, especially when salaries are close to a normal distribution.
I'm willing to bet that as you limit you data set to a smaller region, salaries normalize even further.
Even the medium isn't truly informative in terms of purchasing power within a geographic region.
It really boils down to your relative earning power vs your professional peers (including non engineers) in the direct geographic vicinity of you, in a supply constrained bidding war situation like desirable real estate.
Let's say the average primary care physician's salary has been matching inflation for 20 years while that of the software engineer has outpaced it. Well even if a physician is doing just fine vs his physician peers, the rapid rise of sw eng salaries and the dramatically increased number of such people will have reduced his or her relative earning power and the standard of living he or she can afford, over said 20 years.
No, it's really not -- it's actually more like $77,000[1]. With the bulk of the difference being driven by housing prices. And $77,000 is actually above the average salary for a SE in Ft. Lauderdale (according to Glassdoor: $73,000).
[1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...