A shame Detroit was not included. Salaries are similar to Chicago and CoL is much lower, although probably not as low as Raleigh.
Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
61–70 of 267 posts
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#62Can someone explain the numbers, I see averages of $100K/year for developers and then keep hearing of freelancers raking $150-$200/hour ($300K/year). How can this be ?
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Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#63I've lived in several of these cities briefly (Seattle, Austin), and a long-term (Raleigh, NYC).
If you can put up with the car culture - which you have to if you want to live outside of NYC or Chicago - Raleigh is a great city. Very low cost of living, a burgeoning downtown night-life and cultural scene, and very warm, likable people. Austin has a much better downtown, but I'd be concerned about traffic moving there, which is not a problem (yet) for Raleigh.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say Berlin would look good, cost of living there is decent mainly due to the reasonable rental costs and good transport, and the demand and job mobility that has improved a lot there. Dublin also wouldn't rate too badly. London would probably look more like New York.
I wouldn't be surprised if London came out bottom. Anecdotally, salaries are lower and rent higher as compared with both NY and San Francisco. Taxes are obviously higher as well.
Glassdoor suggests "software developers" or "software engineers" in London earn around $60k, which would put it far below the salaries listed here.
In the absence of the COL index for the UK we can use the "London living wage" - supposedly a baseline for a minimum acceptable standard of living[1] which translates to £18k (a little under $30k). The tax paid on the amount earned in excess of this living wage is around £7k ([1]Since it assumes dependents it's quite a generous minimum standard; indeed excluding tax payments from the equation I've never spent more than it whilst living in London on substantially higher income. But it's also almost certainly less generous than the COL assumptions for the US cities.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#65I suspect the cost of living data for Austin trails reality by some significant margin. The sources don't indicate the age of the data, but even if it's only a couple of years old, it's going to be wrong by enough to be a factor. I have lived in Austin for a couple of years, and also lived here (and owned a house here) about 8 years ago. The cost of homes here has gone up tremendously since then. I was shopping for a…
So the question is, how much does that Mountain View place cost today? You don't need 1 million to buy a decent house in Austin. In SV/San Fran, good luck.
In a lot of places even 1 million isn't a decent house, once you try and accommodate kids.
If you consider sqft of home/land, amenities and distance to highly rated schools, Austin can be 10x less expensive, and it's easy to show examples of this.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#66I'm curious if the salaries include stocks and other compensation - my stocks are a large portion of my compensation package, and I work for a major company, not a startup. It makes me wonder if this might skew more in favor of west coast, where (I think?) those compensation schemes are more common - as where I'm at, those numbers all seem really low compared to what most people I know make.
There is a lot of selection bias in the type of people that post on those sites. The salaries are almost always deflated. Software engineers making $200k+ aren't posting on indeed.com.
The salaries are probably pretty accurate for people that need to look at job boards to figure out whether they'd be best moving to a new company or city though. If you're in the relatively small subset of software engineers eligible for roles paying north of $200k, the opportunities to radically improve your disposable income and lifestyle are searching for you.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#67One thing I have noticed during a recent job search - I used the cost of living calculator from bankrate.com[1], relocation from city A to city B from wolframalpha [2] and the salary information available on websites like glassdoor, indeed and salary.com to get an estimate of a par salary at different locations for a particular position. In these websites, I noticed that indeed.com has extremely optimistic estimates…
There's probably a huge difference in salary ranges for someone with minimal experience and someone with lots of experience, and this isn't even counting if you're really good or just mediocre.
Personally, with 10 years of experience, if I was to move to Chicago right now, I would expect to make more than $114k due to the highish cost of living. There's no way in hell I'd move anywhere to make $74k, let alone $62k per year.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#68For those that wish to own a home, make sure to consider property taxes.
Texas has no income tax but very high property taxes at ~3% per year of home value. So a 350k house will add ~$900/month on top of a mortgage.
SV has a much lower rate but you'll probably pay more than Texas in absolute terms because 350k houses do not exist there.
Colorado is a nice balance. Home prices in between SV and Texas, but one of the lowest property tax rates in the country.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#69I suspect the cost of living data for Austin trails reality by some significant margin. The sources don't indicate the age of the data, but even if it's only a couple of years old, it's going to be wrong by enough to be a factor. I have lived in Austin for a couple of years, and also lived here (and owned a house here) about 8 years ago. The cost of homes here has gone up tremendously since then. I was shopping for a…
This is a common refrain, but one I consider misguided, having lived in Austin since the first .com collapse.
While Yes, housing costs have moved up, others have remained flat (so relatively compared to other cities, have moved down).
As silly as it sounds, my favorite metric is "Cost of Drinking". Find the fancy cocktail bars in any city's downtown. In Austin, nothing on the menu is above $12 at Midnight Cowboy or The Garage. Now compare that to the other cities on this list.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#70A shame Detroit was not included. Salaries are similar to Chicago and CoL is much lower, although probably not as low as Raleigh.
I would think people would pay to get out of Detroit.