I look at these numbers as curve-fitting. If you want to rationalize why you stay in Austin or North Carolina or someplace, this is great data to do it with.
Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
171–180 of 267 posts
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#172Weirdly Atlanta is not on the list, but this is why I'm probably never moving to SF. Yes, all the cool jobs are there, but for what price?
GA tech is releasing very high quality engineers and the startup scene here is great (Mailchimp and many others), and you live in a frikin mansion 10 minutes commute to work (if you live in Alpharetta). Tons of technical meetups and both thriving startup scene and established enterprise presence.
West coast based companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon et al keep trying to offer me jobs in SF like it's obvious that this is where I would want to move, I really don't understand why they don't open offices in Alpharetta. Dead cheap office space, great talent pool, and if you ask me - awesome weather. and they will have to pay me 50% less than what they would in SF, and I won't have to switch my 3,500 square feet house (which is 10-20 minute drive to a myriad of tech companies) with a 2 bedroom and an hour commute to work
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#173In Seattle, taking a 45 minute train ride can be the difference in 300K or more for buying a house. I wonder if other cities are similar?
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#174If 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 yo…
Very good points. It has really been baffling me why, especially in an industry like tech, where products for distributed networking and communications are developed, companies are so hell-bent on co-location. I have my suspicions that it actually has to do with tax code and incentives to have corporate offices in expensive locations, but that's just an untested theory I have at the moment.
I can understand it to an extent - tech is a pretty creative field and creative stuff definitely benefits from co-location. But most of what the average tech worker does day to day is execution, and there's no reason one can't execute from a chair in Anywhereville just as good as a chair in Palo Alto.
The irony about tech being so adverse to remote work is pretty thick, at least that's what my friends in other sectors who work remote with no problem tell me. Even companies who build tools to enable remote work often don't embrace it themselves.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#175In Seattle, taking a 45 minute train ride can be the difference in 300K or more for buying a house. I wonder if other cities are similar?
In the bay area you're pretty much screwed no matter how far out you go. But it's not just about cost of living, it's also about finding a place you can afford where you wouldn't mind sending your kids to school some day. That cuts the options down quite a bit.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#176Selfishly, I'm glad to see that Nashville isn't on this list! Though I'd be interested to see how it compares. There seem to be a lot of cities that offer good talent with a great cost of living - sort of cities poised for a breakout. I wonder what kind of critical mass you have to have in other areas - i.e. concentration of tech talent, infrastructure, educational resources, etc... to really be a great tech communit…
Haha me too! I think that it's rapidly converging on Austin though. Getting more expensive every year, more condos going up, etc.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Check out the size of the dogs being walked near Central Park. Where do these people live?! True, it's NYC is an expensive place to try and mix in all of the creature comforts of suburban life. The big dog, the fancy car, lots of square footage of living space. And to young kids, just out of college, who've never known anything other than suburban living before moving to NYC, these may seem like "baseline necessiti…
>> "Plenty of single people love life here on salaries of $45-60k, and are even able to save money." Here's some anecdata: I lived like a king on my $30,000 grad student stipend for years in Manhattan. And maxed out my IRA every year at the same time. The trick is just to get an apartment somewhere uncool, then you're rich.
Where in Manhattan did you live?
I'm going to guess Washington Heights.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#178If 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 yo…
Very good points. It has really been baffling me why, especially in an industry like tech, where products for distributed networking and communications are developed, companies are so hell-bent on co-location. I have my suspicions that it actually has to do with tax code and incentives to have corporate offices in expensive locations, but that's just an untested theory I have at the moment.
The most likely explanation is that it doesn't work. Bootstrapped companies are very strapped for cash. They often use a distributed team early on. if a distributed team worked, at least some startups would continue on the model - after all it's in the company culture and muscle memory. And we would hear about them. (especially when they succeed really big.)
We do, sometimes hear from them:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134592
I currently work at bootstrapped, distributed and profitable startup.
This year we did appx $15mm in rev.
http://www.inc.com/profile/buysellads (member of the Inc. 500)
Maybe it's the term I'm looking, but look through this: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=distributed%20bootstrapped&sor...
As you scroll down try to piece together the story you're seeing. Click through to the companies. As I read it, hiring seems to be one of their biggest challenges. They're just not growing as much as they would like.
18 people in an office can build a $1 billion company with 10 million+ users in 18 months. (instagram.)
What's the closest a distributed team has come to that?
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#179I remember once meeting an old high school friend in NYC. He was hanging out at one of those non-descript but unfathomably loud bars. Some of his coworkers stopped by. The conversation switched to the car one of them had bought. A Lexus SC430 convertible. He was complaining about how he never got to get out of The City and drive it enough. They were all super-sharp CS graduates working for one of the most successful…
>With the $125k-$140k salaries some software developers report making, they are barely getting to "enjoy" living in NYC. This is laughable, have you ever lived in NYC?
It sounds like they were trying to enjoy suburbia in NYC. Why in the world would you buy a luxury car here? As the anecdote points out, you're never going to drive the damn thing anywhere fun.
Re: Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
#180Weirdly Atlanta is not on the list, but this is why I'm probably never moving to SF. Yes, all the cool jobs are there, but for what price? GA tech is releasing very high quality engineers and the startup scene here is great (Mailchimp and many others), and you live in a frikin mansion 10 minutes commute to work (if you live in Alpharetta). Tons of technical meetups and both thriving startup scene and established ente…
and you live in a frikin mansion 10 minutes commute to work (if you live in Alpharetta)
Yeah, but then you have to live in Alpharetta. Would be nice to see more jobs ITP. I currently work for a large enterprise company, at an office in Roswell (our office was moved here from Alpharetta a few months before I started) and I see lots of people (including me) commuting up. I'm coming up 400 the whole way so it's not too horrible. But I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who have to use the east side of 285 (we have lots of people who live in or near Decatur) work from home a lot. Still, it beats living in San Francisco... I actually moved here from SF when my wife and I realized there was no way we could afford to settle down there.