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Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

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Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

#101

Post by wspeirs »

Spooky23 wrote: post #98
SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I 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…

The life hack to actually come out ahead is to avoid these places and find a good opportunity in a cheaper place. I don't know a lot about Austin, but I'm familiar with NYC, and I think that example works too. If you define the "cool" part of NYC as being in Manhattan, once you have a family it's irrelevant, because you can't live there... like 98% of everyone else, you end up in Jersey, the boroughs, or Long Island.…

Yea, NYC has a HUGE advantage because of the train system going into and out of the city. You can easily commute south to Jersey or north to Connecticut. Each stop going away from NYC drops ~$20K on comparable houses (with a few exceptions like Greenwich). I've heard in the bay area the train system is terrible.

Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

#102

Post by cozzyd »

johnward wrote: post #96
tootie wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how "put up with car culture" is a thing for our generation. Previous generation it would be "put up with not being able to drive". I'm fighting a losing battle against life in the suburbs but my one hope is that by the time I give in, I can commute in a self-driving car.

That's only a thing for people who live in NYC, Chicago, and maybe the Bay. The rest of us still need cars. I live pretty far away but my commute to Pittsburgh is ~2 hours each way.

And Boston, Philly, and most of the rest of the world :)

Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

#105

Post by apaprocki »

Anecdote: The "average" salary reported for New York is very close to the entry-level starting salary for college graduates at most large (names you've heard of) tech employers in NYC. Companies routinely check what each other are doing and adjust entry-level pay packages yearly to compensate for competition, inflation, demand, etc. which makes data from each successive previous year not as relevant for someone interested in making a decision now. I do not think it is hard to imagine that more senior employees that are currently not interested in another job do not have any incentive to report pay to these sites, particularly if their pay is higher than what the site is reporting. (i.e. selection bias)

Related -- I believe the distinction between "engineer" vs "developer" being discussed here lately is less relevant than people think. Many people choose their own title when reporting information on sites used as sources in the article and companies may choose to post job listings using a completely different title. Even if the data could be traced back to an actual official title at each company, a large well-paying (or low-paying) company in a particular city could skew the entire number based upon whether they randomly refer to their employees as developers, programmers, or engineers internally. Similarly, a social trend to prefer "engineer" could skew all the anonymous reporting on these sites but actually had no bearing whatsoever in how salaries are determined. Given the noise in the data, I don't see how distinctions can be drawn from the outside.

Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

#106

Post by jghn »

m0th87 wrote: post #63

I'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…

"outside of NYC or Chicago"

I've been carless in Boston (technically cambridge and somerville) for 15 years now and it's not at all been an issue.

I'm not some wackadoo outlier either, I know tons of people like myself.

Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

#107

Post by V-2 »

kokey wrote: post #84
notahacker wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

£18k/year in London, I suppose you didn't live alone, that's the only way to make ends meet on that budget.

I did live in London on my own, on a budget tighter than that. Admittedly, a few years ago

Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

#108

Post by tomkinstinch »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #68

For 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 l…

Homeowner's insurance is also to be considered as a non-negligible fraction of the monthly cost of a house. When I bought a house in 2008 in upstate NY, I was moderately surprised to see that with taxes and insurance my monthly payment more than doubled from the amount I was to pay from mortgage alone (granted this was at a time with a historically low interest rate).

Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers

#110

Post by PeterisP »

Murkin wrote: post #56

Can 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 ?

As a freelancer, "hour worked" and "billable hour" are two very different things. If you're billing $x/hour, then you're earning much less when you count in all the hours that are work that's required for sustainable freelancing but aren't billable - finding clients, negotiating with them, making proposals for prospects that in the end don't become clients, handling your business/taxes/legal/advertising/etc.

Taxes/etc are a different issue on top of that, but a freelancer should expect to work many hours at a high rate, and many hours at the rate of $0/hour.

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