They should've added Washington DC and Boston to this list.
I would have liked to see Detroit on the list, or more accurately the suburbs around it.
Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
111–120 of 267 posts
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#112This is happening more and more. WTF web devs? Me: Where are the charts themselves? Me: Oh, I'm using noscript. Me: Displaying PNGs now requires javascript.
Sorry, the trivial amount of people using noscript is simply unimportant to me.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#113I 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 T…
> 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.
I dunno if that's a great metric - or maybe it is and Austin's more expensive than you and I think. Cocktails at Gramercy Tavern are $14.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#114I'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…
Piling on, I live in Denver and maybe drive once a week tops. Even then, it's usually to get up to the mountains for skiing/hiking. (A huge consideration if you're considering where to live.)
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#115How accurate is glassdoor? If I look at my city, for my position, inside my own company it seems highly inaccurate. Either that or I'm paid half of what everyone else makes, which seems unlikely. According to this site indeed seems probably even more inflated. Then I can't figure out what the incentive to inflate your salary would be when reporting it to glassdoor unless companies are doing it themselves.
It's unlikely that it is inaccurate by that much. The company would not want to show higher salaries either (resentment).
You are probably underpaid.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#116When the final analysis results in 5-10k difference, I'm just going to live where I want
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#117Would be nice to see more SE cities in here like Atlanta, Miami/Ft Lauderdale, Tampa/Orlando, Jacksonville, Charlotte, NOLA, etc..
edit the software market is pretty hot up in DC/North Virginia too
Salary/COL is typically high in the bigger SE metros from what I've observed growing up in the region.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#118I'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…
Piling on, I live in Denver and maybe drive once a week tops. Even then, it's usually to get up to the mountains for skiing/hiking. (A huge consideration if you're considering where to live.)
I wouldn't tout Denver's public transit system as an upside of living here. It's just marginally better than the awful road system, so it gets the benefit of looking better by comparison.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#119This is happening more and more. WTF web devs? Me: Where are the charts themselves? Me: Oh, I'm using noscript. Me: Displaying PNGs now requires javascript.
Sorry, the trivial amount of people using noscript is simply unimportant to me.
This attitude is, quite frankly, pathetic. People have no respect for their craft.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#120If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue. You could live exactly where you wanted to live.
Want a 700 sq ft studio in Manhattan for $3k/month? Great. Want a 2000 sq ft ranch home next to a river out in the country with your own garden? Done. Want to just save as much as you can, with a cheap apartment in a cheap town outside a cheap city? You got it. Maybe you even want that $600k suburban McMansion to raise your family in. That's not a problem either.
Most readers are probably going to prefer urban environments, but that's because the demographic of software developers is somewhat self-selecting. When it's nearly impossible to get a job as a developer not in an urban environment, people who don't like urban cities are going to self-select out of the profession. The high achievers among them will instead choose to become doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. -- careers that aren't so location restricted, despite ironically being far less amenable to remote work. I had some really smart and hard-working friends growing up, and all chose to go into careers of that nature simply because they didn't want to be forced to move to a big city.