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Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

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Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#61

Post by jiveturkey »

null0pointer wrote: post #5

At $5,500 per month is that to rent or buy? I currently spend about 25% of my after-tax salary on rent and I consider it too much for me. $66,000 => $264,000 after-tax. Californian marginal income tax bracket for $52k - $268k is 9.3% So $264,000 after-tax => $291,000 pre-tax (I know that's not how tax brackets work but I'm just estimating) And that must be base salary since you can't pay rent or buy food with stock o…

> On Glassdoor a SENIOR developer at Google in SF shows as only $170,000.

That would be the base, not total comp. Sr dev at Google is easily $250k.

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#62

Post by ummonk »

ummonk wrote: post #53
wffurr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your first year is tight, but then your stock grants begin vesting and it's basically extra income at that point if you sell immediately.

Large companies are starting to eliminate vesting cliffs, and moving to quarterly refreshers.

Can’t edit but meant to say quarterly vesting not refreshers.

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#63

Post by megaman8 »

titzer wrote: post #19

After 5 years there, my conclusion was that the Bay Area runs on human souls. It might not be like the black lung, dirt-faced dangerous mines of old, but if you end up working 10 or 12 hours a day, are caged, distracted, annoyed (but fed!) at work, go home to a meager existence, have zero friends, zero romance, and your mind is hijacked to the point where you literally cannot think about anything else and relax , the…

You can avoid many of these places if you let the recruiters, HR and interviewers know that your looking for a place with good work life balance. It is hard to find good companies to work for in the bay area, but there are a few that exist. Make sure you read the glassdoor reviews: don't pay attention to the star rating (those are completely messed up), but the truth tends to come out in the writings, especially the longer reviews. Read those very carefully. If the place is toxic, it often comes out.

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#64

Post by megaman8 »

claydavisss wrote: post #35

There's really no way to intellectualize it - people coming to the Bay Area in 2018 are suckers, plain and simple. You missed the boat - by years. Not only will you never afford a home here, you will piss away so much money on rent and other aspects of the absurdly inflated cost-of-living adjustment that you won't be able to leave and buy anywhere else either. If you're coming up on forty and still renting your prima…

What the article is saying is, If you are young and have no family, you can rent a room really cheaply say 1400$ for a 1 bedroom, or bunk up with a mate for 700$ (2 people renting 1 room), and save most of your income for about 10 years - durring that time you can save about 500K. Then after that, get out and go anywhere but CA. In the rest of the US, you can buy a house for 300K and have a nice life.

The trick is, to not settle down. Don't get a wife or girlfriend or friends. If you that, you'll be able to walk away from it all very easily.

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#65

Post by throwaway5250 »

If you don't have kids, and don't plan to, the Bay Area could be a fun ride. And if it turns out not to be, well, you can just lick your wounds and leave.

If you have kids, or think you might, you're doing them a grave disservice by moving to the Bay Area, given the alternatives currently available in America.

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#66

Post by dnr »

The author seems pretty confused about the geography of the bay area, and comes to odd conclusions because of it. First of all:

> Google programmers living two to three to a bedroom in Bernal Heights, not even that close to BART.

Why would Google employees care about living close to BART? They take the Google shuttle to work, and Bernal has great highway access, making it a shorter commute than other parts of SF.

Besides that, the people I know who have tons of roommates in SF do it because they want the experience of living in SF (culture, nightlife, food, socializing). If they just wanted to make money and save as much as possible, they'd live on the peninsula or in the east bay and have a more comfortable, and also cheaper, housing situation.

Even for people working in SF (SOMA), commuting on BART from Oakland is often faster than many parts of SF, and almost certainly cheaper. If you choose to live in SF anyway, it's because you want to be there specifically.

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#67

Post by nostrademons »

vostok wrote: post #15
nostrademons wrote: post #3

I'd say it's more like conventional factory towns from a couple centuries ago. I grew up in the Boston area, and on a recent trip back home, took my wife to see Lowell National Historic Park, birthplace of the industrial revolution in America. It struck me how similar the stories of the young women who went to work in the mills were to the young people who now flock to the Bay Area. Like today's workers, they were fl…

> Many of the women who worked in the mills would "retire" in their mid-late 20s or early 30s, having saved up the majority of their wages. Thanks for sharing. I was under the impression that this was a relatively new phenomenon with the advent of sky high compensation in tech roles. Do you happen to know how common it was for them to be making, say, $300k in inflation adjusted terms by, say, age 26? I'd love to read…

It was exhibit panels at a museum, so there's no online link, but looking up some historical prices:

Wages in the Lowell Mills in 1845 were about $25/month. [1] As of 1825 farmland went for roughly $5/acre. [2] So for every month you worked in the mills, you could buy a 5 acre farm. Save up for 10 years and you could get a roughly 600 acre farm, which is pretty substantial. Mill girls had very low expenses because their room & board was often paid for by the company and they didn't have time to go out and have fun, so they banked a lot of their earnings.

A house in Brooklyn went for $2500 [3], so if you wanted to be a city girl, save up for 8 years and you could own it free and clear.

It's hard to talk about "$300K in inflation-adjusted terms" because life was qualitatively so different back then. You couldn't buy an iPhone at any price, nor electricity, nor running water, nor basic sanitation and medical care. The poorest American today lives a much better life than the richest industrialist back then, except for having to look around him and see how everyone else is living even better ones. But by the standards of the day, someone who saved for 10 years in the mills could become quite wealthy, at least relative to the peers they left behind.

Conditions were horrible - quality of life for mill girls was usually a lot worse than the farms they left behind. That goes for middle-class kids who become programmers in Silicon Valley as well. ;-) But economic gain is different from quality of life: part of the reason wages were high was because they needed to be to attract people from their old lives and put up with the new one, and one way to do that is to say "Well, when you're done here, you're gonna be the big man/woman in your old village."

Also, we tend to judge the past by the standards of today, which isn't really fair. The choice these workers had wasn't "Work in the mills or live in the post-WW2 era of 40 hour work weeks", it was "Work in the mills or work on the farm."

[1] http://courses.wcupa.edu/johnson/lowell1845.html

[2] http://www.afrigeneas.com/forumdarchive/index.cgi/md/read/id...

[3] https://247wallst.com/investing/2010/09/16/the-history-of-wh...

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#68

Post by nostrademons »

vtange wrote: post #59
nostrademons wrote: post #3

I'd say it's more like conventional factory towns from a couple centuries ago. I grew up in the Boston area, and on a recent trip back home, took my wife to see Lowell National Historic Park, birthplace of the industrial revolution in America. It struck me how similar the stories of the young women who went to work in the mills were to the young people who now flock to the Bay Area. Like today's workers, they were fl…

But how does the scale compare between the two? It would seem like tech work lifts much less people up the chain as factory work did. And in less proportion too: A factory in the industrial era could employ thousands at a time from a population of hundreds of thousands whereas now we live in a world of millions and tech comparatively employs a couple hundred.

It's similar in percentage terms, perhaps even a bit more concentrated. Lowell, Massachusetts had a population of 20K in 1840, with maybe 6000 working in the factories. Total U.S. population was 17M at the time. Compare with Google alone having 60K employees spread out across dozens of offices.

Lowell was the only such center of manufacturing in the country at the time, much like how Silicon Valley is considered synonymous with the tech industry. There are other tech hubs, though, and other companies, and tech is already starting to bifurcate into sub-industries. I'd actually equivalent 1840s Lowell to the Massachusetts Miracle of the 1970s, when the MA economy was rescued by the arrival of info-tech firms like DEC, Stratus, Wang, etc. (ironically, DEC was started in a former textile mill, and Wang Labs had its headquarters in Lowell). The current point in history seems more like the 1880s or 1890s, when the center of industry had moved to the Great Lakes region and the basic technologies had bifurcated into the steel/oil/shipbuilding/railroad industries.

We think of factory work as employing the whole population because the oldest folks alive today only have memories of the 1920s and onwards. What are these big industries that lifted people up the chain? Automotive, aerospace, airlines, oil, manufacturing, plastics, chemicals, retail, consumer goods, media. In 1880 the car hadn't been invented. The plane hadn't been invented. Plastic hadn't been invented. Radio hadn't been invented. TV hadn't been invented. The department store hadn't been invented. Consumer goods required all of these.

Similarly, I suspect that the great industries of the information age have yet to be invented. Or they're in vary nascent, experimental forms today, like drones and cryptocurrencies and hyperloops and robots and self-driving cars (which'll probably end up being pods, eventually).

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#69

Post by nostrademons »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #20
nostrademons wrote: post #3

I'd say it's more like conventional factory towns from a couple centuries ago. I grew up in the Boston area, and on a recent trip back home, took my wife to see Lowell National Historic Park, birthplace of the industrial revolution in America. It struck me how similar the stories of the young women who went to work in the mills were to the young people who now flock to the Bay Area. Like today's workers, they were fl…

I would hope it's not like that. Not after reading a quote someone posted about Lowell just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060336

The interesting thing about that quote is that her family would've been fucked - even more fucked - had the Lowell factories not existed. The source of her family's misery was "a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be sup- ported, a brother’s ambition to be aided", all of which are pre-existing conditions that ultimately result from life (and perhaps some poor financial management).

Similarly, I think we're fucked today, and the source of our fuckedness has nothing to do with technology. It comes from overpopulation (there are now 7.4B people on this earth, compared to 4.5B when I was a kid and 1B when my parents were kids), and climate change, and resource depletion, and living like the good times will always go on rather than investing in the future. Life requires resources - when the planet has more lives to support and fewer resources to support them, the standard of living will necessarily go down.

Re: Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

#70

Post by vostok »

nostrademons wrote: post #67
vostok wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of the women who worked in the mills would "retire" in their mid-late 20s or early 30s, having saved up the majority of their wages. Thanks for sharing. I was under the impression that this was a relatively new phenomenon with the advent of sky high compensation in tech roles. Do you happen to know how common it was for them to be making, say, $300k in inflation adjusted terms by, say, age 26? I'd love to read…

It was exhibit panels at a museum, so there's no online link, but looking up some historical prices: Wages in the Lowell Mills in 1845 were about $25/month. [1] As of 1825 farmland went for roughly $5/acre. [2] So for every month you worked in the mills, you could buy a 5 acre farm. Save up for 10 years and you could get a roughly 600 acre farm, which is pretty substantial. Mill girls had very low expenses because th…

> A house in Brooklyn went for $2500 [3], so if you wanted to be a city girl, save up for 8 years and you could own it free and clear.

That's fascinating and does sound roughly analogous to today.

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