Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines
pedestrianobservations.com

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 fleeing political instability & violence (for immigrants) or economic stagnation and lack of opportunity (for domestic migrants). Like in the Bay, they were thrust into a melting pot of cultures that sometimes stirred conflict but usually ended up broadening their horizons. Like in SF, they lived in small tenements or boardinghouses, often 2/room. Like at tech startups, they worked long hours in often alienating conditions to make capital owners rich.

The interesting thing about it was that despite all the hardship, it was very often the right choice financially for them. 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. They were then free to do things like become a pastor (the 1840s equivalent of living a life of spiritual enlightenment), or get an education (nearly unheard of for women in those days), or marry above their previous station and have a family, or return to their hometowns and buy up large swaths of farmland that would've been out of their reach had they stayed on the farm they grew up on.

The people who really got screwed by the industrial revolution were those who didn't take the factory jobs in poor conditions - the small homesteading farmers, the artisans and craftspeople, the local merchants. They were largely wiped out as the new means of production spread throughout the world, bankrupt dinosaurs who eventually had to sell what was left of their homesteads when the dust bowl hit almost a century later. Most of them ended up catching the next wave, though, migrating to California or the Great Lakes and getting jobs in the new aerospace, defense, and automotive industries.

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 options.

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

So can someone either tell me where can I get a $300k job as a MID LEVEL developer or tell me how on earth the author considers $5,500 per month an affordable housing cost?

Side note: My marginal income tax rate in Australia is 37%... I feel absolutely robbed looking at these California tax rates

> $5,500 a month at market rate, which is affordable to a mid-level programmer at a large tech firm living alone

I understand what you mean that roommates are the only way it could make any sense. But I'm trying to understand where the author is coming from.