131–140 of 288 posts
I remain surprised that Bay Area tech companies don't move to Sacramento. Near the Bar Area for quick access, near the state seat of power for lobbying, well away from major faults so less prone to earthquakes, significantly lower costs of housing (2 Bdrm apt would be about $1k) - so presumably could save on salary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are losing money, you aren't doing it right. Sure, maybe you would be better off somewhere where the competition isn't as hard, and the living costs aren't as high.
The whole context of this thread is insane rent prices, aka losing money.
I live in Detroit, own a 4bed/2bath and bike to work everyday for a mortgage that's less than 1/4 of the rent median SF 1br. SF is a cartoon world. Yes salaries are less here, but I feel so much more at ease owning my place and can live a pretty comfortable life. If worst comes to worst, there is always remote work.
Most of westside is starting to be as expensive as Venice/Santa Monica and these two aren't that different from SF in prices. Unfortunately, you don't get much besides weather and ocean breeze, unlike in SF where public transit and neighborhood cafes actually exist.
> "the rule of thumb is that you shouldn't spend more than 30% of your monthly take home on rent",
as they say, but that's just a rule of thumb. What actually matters is how much money you end up with. For example, assuming taxes remove 30% of income (probably close enough; would need to look up federal and state tax codes to be precise),
1. A Zynga employee makes 147,000, loses 30% to taxes, spends 3,545 times 12 on rent, and ends up with 60,360 to spare.
2. A RadPad employee makes 120,000, also loses 30%, and spends 1,475 times 12 on rent, giving them 66,300.
In other words, while the Zynga employee spends 47% on rent, and the RadPad employee a mere 23% - less than half! - the difference is much smaller than that would imply. At the end of the year, the RadPad employee has an extra 5,940.
Certainly a significant amount of money, and noteworthy in that the person has a lower salary but still ended up with more income after taxes and rent, but the amount is in the single digit percentage of the salaries we are talking about here.
More importantly, the problem becomes more obvious if we look at second place after Zynga. Doing the same calculation on a Google employee, then we get that despite paying 42% on rent, the employee is left with 71,128, which is more than the RadPad employee.
In other words, looking just at % of take home spent on rent is a useful rule of thumb, but looking at the actual money is better, and it can lead to different conclusions than the article would imply.
edit: Perhaps the best conclusion from their data is that it actually doesn't matter where you live, since salary actually compensates surprisingly well for location. Whether you work at Google or Zynga in SF, or RadPad in LA, you'll end up with +- a few % of the same amount of money in your bank account anyhow.
Which is silly....honestly companies need to start opening offices in more affordable areas. Colorado (Blouder, Denver, The Springs), Texas (Austin, San Antonio), Missouri (Kansas City, Saint Louis)....there are so many places you can put your employees that saves them money as well as your company a lot of money not only in Salaries because you'll be able to employees less but your rent/power/etc.
Boulder is one of the places I was looking to move. But looking at houses there it seemed far from affordable. Is that not the case?
If you want startups, Boulder or downtown Denver are pretty good, or if you want more established tech companies, Interlocken or the Tech center are where it's at.
I'm in NYC and I pay ~10% of after-tax income for rent. I visited a friend in SF recently and after hearing about his situation I concluded it would be very difficult for any company to get me to move to the Bay Area. It just doesn't make financial sense for me. NYC has plenty of tech opportunity, so that doesn't tip the scale either.
That's ok. When Airbnb, Square, and Stripe IPO in 12-36 months, all of the people currently flooding into SF to work for them will surely be able to sell their pre-IPO shares to ... Well, I don't know, honestly. I doubt that employee #1000 at Square would even be able to pay the down payment on a SF condo with their earnings. Also, just FYI: Seattle isn't that much cheaper than SF, the people are way meaner, traffic…
Visited Seattle for the first time yesterday (from Australia). I have to say that unless you start paying me off I'm going to start promoting it. The people were super friendly. The weather was great (two days of sunny blue skies). The food was great. Even the roads were easy to deal with I do take bitcoin.
Seriously though F* 405 traffic. The new "Toll route" is a nightmare and now everyone is using side roads making my drive to work from a quick 10 min jaunt into a 25-30 min parking lot.
This is not a great analysis. What they measured was average salary compared to average rent in the neighborhood where the company is located, not what their employees are actually paying. At Weebly I would estimate less than 10% of employees live in Soma where our office is.
I had thought your office was in the financial district on Pacific? At least that's what the window said when I walked by it every morning on the way to work.