Ask HN: Potentially Moving to SF / SV with a Family

Just the difference in your housing costs (about 30k after taxes) wipe out your salary increase. On top of that it sounds like you'd be losing a 2nd income as well by moving so it looks like a net loss. On top of that other things in the area are going to be some what more costly.

Always be looking, and don't relax your criteria (compensation, work/life balance) because its remote.

Just because a position is advertised as on site doesn't mean you can't negotiate it to be remote.

Here are some remote job resources I keep bookmarked:

https://remotebase.io/

https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

https://remoteok.io/

https://weworkremotely.com/

https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote-developer-jobs

https://www.wfh.io/

https://jobmote.com/

Salary negotiation cheat sheet: http://salarytutor.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Salary-Tut...

A family of 4 in the bay area with household income at $105350 is low income (http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/22/in-costly-bay-area-eve...). At 150K you'll be living in rented accommodations with $3K - $3500 in rent per month.

If you consider that your wife will start working, please be aware that daycare starts at about $1.5K++ per month (it might be advantageous for your wife to be a stay at home mom below a certain salary level).

I would recommend targeting a 200K+ total household income for this to work for you.

$130k - $150k isn't really big money around here. You'll be able to live, but I suspect that you'll start to feel pretty quickly that your quality of life has been overall compromised since leaving Ohio. Real estate is the biggest expense — a $3k apartment won't even be a nice one, but you'll feel it everywhere — expensive meals, goods, lots of taxes, etc.

Long term prospects for property aren't great either. Property prices have been trending for a while in only one direction (straight up) and properties that would be considered very modestly nice in other cities are easy $1M+ in and around SF. Real estate agents play bidding games so everything goes for well above listing prices. NIMBY practices and regressive taxation laws (Prop 13) guarantee this isn't going to be fixed anytime soon.

As someone with a daughter, it's also worth considering that the public schooling system is in a pretty bad state. It seems that almost everyone will either use private if they can afford it, or move out to Marin or the South Bay so that their kids can go to a functional school. Don't take my word for it though, I have lots of anecdotes, but have never needed to seriously look into it, so do your own research.

Another big factor to consider is just the city itself, and how nice it is to be here. A combination of huge wealth disparity, unaffordable real estate/rent, poor treatment for the mentally ill, and moderate weather means that the number of deranged people that you'll meet on the streets and public transportation is way above average. Property crime is essentially rampant at this point (mostly in the form of smashed car windows and bike theft), and the police force is quite ineffective, so I don't expect that to go anywhere but up. If you're a reasonably sized guy it's all mostly tolerable (in that you don't really fear for your well being), but I'm not sure it's an environment that I'd want to raise children in. As far as I can tell, a lot of other industry workers just seem to take Uber/Lyft everywhere to avoid it.

All that said — SF is a fun city, and the nature around it is beautiful. It's one of the very few walkable/bikable cities in North America, which is great. As a tech person, it's also neat to be right in the thick of things.