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.
Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
191–200 of 524 posts
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#192I 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…
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).
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#193As 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 you…
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.
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#194I use this website to compare costs of living between countries and cities: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp Here's example for Seattle and SF: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... I'm wondering if anyone could comment if those numbers look accurate for those cities.
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 enginee…
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…
> 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)...
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Best is to move there in an RV :)
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.
Then use an autonomous RV. As long as it keeps moving around, you don't have to pay for parking :)
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is really insightful. Does this fallacy have an well known name?
Sampling bias, I think
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
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 For me, it's mostly been great.
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#199When 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.
Re: Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
#200I 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.
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 camar…
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.