Ask HN: How much do you save in the SF Bay Area with $120k salary?

But you get to write some cool things. The last three things I built were

A system that takes sensor data from wells across the world, runs them through a physics engine, and displays those results to users across the world in real time.

A web app that lets users easily write complex queries to retrieve cancer tissue information across multiple departments in a large research institution.

An app to upgrade an entire codebase using a compiler to figure out the semantic meaning of different code snippets and transform them to the new version.

So it's not all boring :).

And I haven't met a mediocre dev who was familiar with Hacker News. Honestly I've thought about replacing my tech interviews with one question "Have you heard of Hacker News?"

Because they don't want to spend 6 hours a day commuting?

As a white person, I occasionally experienced verbal aggression from Black people (didn't talk back, so it ended that way). I think the other way round is more or less a taboo these days.

- you will learn a lot at these companies

- you will work with very smart people, which is a great experience

- your expectations (toward yourself, your peers, the product you're working on) will be torn apart and recalibrated at a much higher level, which is a good thing

- working on products that are used by 100s millions / billions of people is a positive human experience because you're helping give people services that improve their lives (buying books so they can learn to program, building products so they can keep in touch with their loved ones, helping them find information on the web, etc.)

But, keep in mind:

- these are big companies, so the peopleware is slow: getting promoted takes time and depends on a myriad of factors outside your control; don't _count_ on it [in the first 2 years]

- the signing/relocation bonus won't be around in year#2, so dependending on how much of a refresher you get, you could make less in year#2

- stock prices fluctuate! it could go down 30% (as well as up 70%) in the next 9 months; as a rule of thumb, make sure your base salary covers living expenses

- as a rule of thumb, assume your refresher grant will be 1/2 of the initial stock grant, and has the same vesting schedule; use Quora to get more details on your specific company, or ask a friend who works there

- be sure to use the correct tax rates (also for stocks) when net'ing the offer numbers (look out for federal and state taxes, income vs cap.gains)

- if you're a software engineer, the offer numbers seems a bit low vs your 20 years of experience for SV, esp. the stock part

--- either this company pays less than others or they're under-leveling you

--- if you care, ask your recruiter what level they put you at

--- there's rational reasons for these big tech companies to under-level people with lots of experience, which is that they have their own internal stack and ways of doing things, plus they're very good at spinning people up in their bootcamp programs, so they don't care _that_ much about prior experience

- if you take the offer, you will probably soon meet people at the company (or in SV) who are doing roughly the same job as you are, are a _lot_ younger, but have _significantly_ better packages because they had better signaling (went to top uni, had competing offers); depending on who you are, this may end up bothering you

Another thing to consider: many of these companies also have offices in the US, but outside of SV, eg. Seattle, Washington, Texas, NYC, where I believe they offer roughly the same packages, but cost of living / commutes are much more reasonable.

Good luck!