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In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

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Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#381

Post by ryandrake »

ajmurmann wrote: post #280
kmonsen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert, but from my experience this is not true. If you do well in Bay Area (lets say ~500k total comp) it will be hard to match that in another area even including cost of living.

How do you get to that level of compensation? Are you just referring to "luck" with stock or cash salary? If it's not stock what skills pay that much?

You don't. It's kind of a "HN trope" that the typical Silicon Valley engineer makes that much in total comp. Everyone on HN seems to know that one guy who's brother's nephew's roommate works at Google and makes $400K, but it is a far, far, FAR outlier in terms of total comp for a mid-senior level engineer at a mid-tier company.

There seems to be ample [1] data [2] about [3] this.

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-senior-soft...

2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Senior_Software_Engi...

3: http://www1.salary.com/CA/San-Francisco/Software-Engineer-II...

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#382

Post by baddox »

kmonsen wrote: post #223
phkahler wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That sounds great, but one of the common rebuttals is that the job market (remote or otherwise) may be more challenging outside of the Bay Area. It amazes me how many people in tech can't do simple math. Hint: The Detroit area job market is on fire, but you will pass it over if your idea of compensation doesn't take into account cost of living. I'm sure there are several other cities that can say the same.

I'm not an expert, but from my experience this is not true. If you do well in Bay Area (lets say ~500k total comp) it will be hard to match that in another area even including cost of living.

You don't need anywhere near $500k in SF to have more disposable income than most other places. That is, if you don't have any dependents. Things like food, entertainment, and rent are high in SF, but on average software engineer salaries I still think you'll come out ahead of most other places until you have to start paying for child care, education, etc.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#383

Post by leonroy »

scholia wrote: post #252
_ao789 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After living in 'cramped old london' for over a decade (still), I can only dream of the luxury of 800 Sq.m. Where do I sign up? :) fitting multiple people/families into anything less is just bad living standards as far as I'm concerned. You work hard all day long to go back to such a depressing existence. Time to start living fellow HN'ers!

Which is why Londoners move to suburbia...

Time was Greater London was suburbia.

Does that make Luton, St Albans etc. the 'suburbs' of London?

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#384

Post by souprock »

ransom1538 wrote: post #46
archeantus wrote: post #6

Wow, this resonates with me. In 2013 my wife and I were living in the Bay Area and had just welcomed our third child into the family. I was making 105k/yr at Apple (which seemed like a ton at the time!) but I felt like I was saving very little of that. I was approached on LinkedIn to take a job with matching pay but that was fully remote. I could live anywhere I wanted in the entire country. I jumped at the chance an…

Did the exact same thing this year. Moved to Oviedo, FL from SF: 1) no state income tax, 2) public schools in my neighborhood are equivalent to a private school in sf [i] 4) weather is great 8 months out of year, 5) beaches you can swim in, 6) rent is ~1/4 of what it was in SF, 7) cuban food, 8) as a resident, kids have year round disney passes [i] http://school-ratings.com/Florida/schools/Carillon_Elementar... WARNI…

The tech market exists.

The "can you lift 50 pounds" thing is so that you can't usefully sue them when they ask you to move your own PC or monitor. Especially at a non-union job site, the nearest available person tends to do that kind of task. Nobody wants to have to schedule a union-approved object-lifter person to show up.

Just a bit to the southeast of you, the tech job market is booming. It sort of focuses on the MLB airport, with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, but there are others too. The area has Thales, Raytheon, Harris, and numerous cyberwar startups. Obviously, you do need to enjoy designing things that cause destruction, and it is mighty hard to pass the background checks if you have foreign relatives.

If that sounds appealing to you and you can do low-level hacking (you won't freak out over assembly language), send a note to acahalan at gmail.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#385

Post by leesalminen »

sigstoat wrote: post #343
leesalminen wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Color me a NIMBYist, but I love the height restriction. It gives me amazing views from my little apartment. Edit to add: An image from my balcony [0]. [0] https://storage.googleapis.com/lee-salminen-fileshare/IMG_24...

hmm, i can tell exactly what building you're in. and it makes you one of the new people who've crowded in and made my grocery store obnoxiously busy. :(

Heh. I hate what's happened to the King Soopers up in Gunbarrel. Been here since 2012, which predates the new apartment complexes. Not exactly "new" but I will concede you deserve to have a more NIMBYish attitude than I.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#386

Post by archeantus »

tropo wrote: post #365
matwood wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully 8k sqft was a typo. I feel like 2500sqft is too much sometimes.

It's Utah. You know, Mormons. The bit about them having huge families is real. With one kid or wife per bedroom and 1000sqft for kitchen/dining/whatever, you have room for 28. (4 wives, 6 kids each) Making the non-bedroom part of the house more luxurious and adding a bathroom to each bedroom, you have room for about 16. You can hit that even without polygamy. He may be counting a large garage. That could be 1000sqft…

Mormons aren't polygamous. Please stop spreading this narrative that you know isn't true.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#387

Post by tropo »

archeantus wrote: post #386
tropo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Utah. You know, Mormons. The bit about them having huge families is real. With one kid or wife per bedroom and 1000sqft for kitchen/dining/whatever, you have room for 28. (4 wives, 6 kids each) Making the non-bedroom part of the house more luxurious and adding a bathroom to each bedroom, you have room for about 16. You can hit that even without polygamy. He may be counting a large garage. That could be 1000sqft…

Mormons aren't polygamous. Please stop spreading this narrative that you know isn't true.

Only 95% of Mormons are in "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints".

Fundamentalist Mormons are still Mormon, and yes, 10,000 to 30,000 of them are in plural marriages.

Also, note that I didn't mean it as an insult, and I quite like large families. Even the mainstream Mormons tend to have large families.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#388

Post by praneshp »

anon374939 wrote: post #19

After two years in San Francisco, I had to move back to my small(er) home town city because I ultimately realized there's little to no future for me in a city like San Francisco, despite making 250k/yr. I'd have to make at minimum $1M per year for a similar lifestyle (and even then, the stress of living in the bay area will reduce years from your lifespan... what's each year of your life worth to you?).

Because you asked: Actually, I'm happy to give up a year or two of my lifespan in exchange for a much more urban lifestyle in a place a lot of our (wife and I) friends live. Assuming a regular lifespan somewhere into the 70s or so. I'd die earlier of boredom in a small town (I'm from one in India). Of course I might feel another way in ten years.

When I was driving to work, I felt that the stress would give me chronic stress issues, or make me drop dead one day at 40. That I am not ok with.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#389

Post by zenlikethat »

xxpor wrote: post #226
tastythrowaway wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what were you doing/where were you working that you were pulling in 250k?

Is 250k considered unusual in the bay area for a BigCo for someone for someone 3-5 years out of college? If that's the case, choosing to living in SF is even crazier than I thought.

That seems a bit high-ish for that year range but achievable at BigCo (if you negotiate savvy).

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#390

Post by vonmoltke »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #315
ryanSrich wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. I just looked at Redfin and the average house costs around $1.2mm. How would anyone making $130k with 4 dependents buy a house? You seem to fit that criteria so I'll ask you. How on earth did you afford that? Because based on my simple math there just isn't enough money for it to be possible.

Simple, you don't buy a house. At least, not unless you can afford to pay cash. For most people, buying a house on a mortgage is financial suicide. It only makes sense to buy a house on a mortgage if the price-to-rent ratio is under 25. Anything over that and you could rent the same house and invest the money you save and come out ahead. The price-to-rent ratio in San Francisco is 45.88, meaning that a house that ren…

Something seems way off on those SmartAsset numbers. There is no way you are renting a $600k place in Manhattan or a $195k place in Dallas for only $1000/month.

Ante for renting a standalone place in Manhattan right now is around $2500/month, but I can buy places for as little as $500k (if I don't care about space). Some condos in Manhattan don't even allow rentals.

We just sold our house in Dallas for $220k, and I guarantee we would have been renting it out for a hell of a lot more than $1100/month if it came to that.

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