NOOOOOOO. Don't tell anyone. It is terrible here and there is lots of sadness from all the rain. I hate Seattle. 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.
My 167+405 commute is ~75 minutes. I have to admit I'm glad the toll route doesn't extend down my way or I'd be tempted to use it.
It will, in a few years. The plans are already set and they've held the public meetings on it where the public doesn't get any chance to change the plans.
I always see articles like this and I wonder...who is winning here? I'm waiting for an article to break out the stats on who owns which property in these types of areas. What % of housing is owned by the government, foreign investors, domestic investors, institutional investors, real-estate holding companies, and the actual inhabitants of the property? For all we know, the whole story could just be that tech companie…
Long story short: people that own single family homes in SF are winning the most because of the massive gains in value and we don't have to pay increased property taxes because of proposition 13. Basically anyone who currently owns property in SF is a "winner" and that includes the many small time property owners that own the 2-6 unit buildings that dominate the city. The rent money is flowing to those people. Who pr…
Local and elderly. Prop 13 is basically wealth transfer from the young/newcomers to the old-timers.
That's nothing. In 1998 (I'm pretty sure) Seattle had 96 days of light drizzle with nary a ray of sunshine. The suicide rate went up massively, and I decided to move to CA as soon as I had the means.
I remember that winter well. I was founder-CTO of a Silicon Valley-based startup, and we were working on a big deal with Microsoft. After they hired away the first two people we put on the project, I stepped in, and spent several weeks a month up in the Seattle area. I still remember telling the board, "the only way they'll be able to hire me is to buy the company!" and we all had a good laugh. Which is of course wha…
Hey Jon - I don't think I've seen you since you ran those Ad Astra hackathons inside MS. Hope you're doing well!
The problem is they explicitly had to create something like Bay Area. They needed the engineers to be @ place. And the same can happen anywhere if you recreate the Bay Area. Solution: remote work Honestly...160k salaries for some sw roles are silly. But there is need for them because the costs of living are so high. That's plain bs.
> Honestly...160k salaries for some sw roles are silly When you think about the value that a single SWE can create it's not that crazy
That's not a fair way of looking at it, though, from a business-owner's perspective. You need to look at the overall market, and you can find equally good developers in cheaper parts of the country for fractions (50-60%) of that cost.
This article is missing one really key point about working for these unicorn companies, the stock that goes along with salary. The article is comparing salaries of mid-senior level engineers and that $120k-$150k salary also often comes with $200k - $1+M in stock. As a SF-based startup founder and having been in tech recruiting for years, the clear upside of working for a unicorn is the stock with much lower risk of d…
Unless you're getting actual, liquid, tradable stock, it's fictional compensation. You can't pay rent with "upside".
I have a new hypothesis that I may actually try out: it's the business people that should be in the Bay Area but the engineers can be elsewhere. A lot of the companies having a great deal of success are iterating on the business model, customer acquisition and user experience side of things far more so than on the technology or engineering. I am hypothesizing that it is those people that benefit from being in the Bay…
they tried this with outsourcing and it didn't work.
Offshoring/Nearshoring works great if you're not an idiotic manager.
The crazy thing is that it will be very hard to find a decent 1 bedroom for even that price, realistically you are looking at $3.5k to $4k.
That's only true if you need to live in new construction. My previous apartment was an old crappy 2BR on Capitol Hill, with Cascade views, from 2012-2014, for $1500. Currently I'm paying $2200 for a 2BR house with a nice yard in the Central District. If anyone wants to rent a nice 3BR house north of the UW for $3-4K, email me, I know of one for rent.
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…
Everybody is running with your Seattle humor but your comment on IPO'ing is worth discussing. 1) The reason a startup is appealing is because you're supposed to make a great low 6 or even 7 figure sum once your company goes public. 2) To achieve success you're supposed to work intensely hard and smart (@pmarca) for a short period of time (3 - 7 years) and then if you've picked successfully you'll create a really nice…
>while you're peers who graduated will only be up to around $50K in their contributing 401K's
I'm saving quite a bit with my $bigcorp job, and at the current rate, I'd be way over that in 3 to 7 years.
The reasoning here seems wrong. Yes, > "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 3…
You are underestimating the taxes. The simple way to get the after-tax income is just divide the annual cost of the 1-bed apartment by the % of salary and multiply by 100. The google employee only keeps $56k after paying for the 1-bed apartment, if my calculations are correct (compared to $59k for the RadPad employee).
If you do the calculations with 2-bed apartments the numbers are much worse for SF. Google employee gets to keep $39.5k, compared to $53.5k for the RadPad employee!
I'm reasonably sure that a decrease in CoL would be adjusted into the salary, or at the least, any company in a lower CoL is less likely to give a competitive salary.
So if you are living and working in SF and making $150K (plus bonus, stock options etc) and you decide to move to, say, Phoenix and buy a house for $140K, they'll say, "OK, minimaxir, we'll be cutting your salary to $90K to reflect the vastly diminished cost of living, although of course we'll be able to give your desk to a new hire and save money on office space!" -- ?? Seems unlikely. If you're contributing, no rat…
You can't make a statement like that without facts to back it. The truth is that companies do this all the freaking time. Besides that, it has also been common for a decade+ for CA-based employees (both LA & SFBA) to sell their artificially inflated house and quit their job to move a lower COL state (often Texas, Washington, Oregon, or North Carolina, all of which are much cheaper and have lower income tax schedules). If they stay with their existing company, their salaries are frequently decreased based on COL calculations. Otherwise they use the previously mentioned tactic and quit for something different, using their current salary as a negotiating point.