Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people

newsletter.goodtechthings.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 59 posts

Re: The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people

#21

Post by SoftTalker »

bgentry wrote: post #6

The TV show Silicon Valley lampooned all these ideas a decade ago. The weird thing I’ve noticed is that when Bay Area tech people watch that show, they don’t seem to understand that they’re being made fun of. They think they’re being celebrated. That’s how thick the bubble is. I've never met a person who didn't understand that this show is satire. Every single tech person I've talked to about Silicon Valley thinks it…

Everyone I knew who watched the old Office Space movie thought it was funny; I never liked it because it was too much like real life (at the time). Same with the TV show The Office.

Re: The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people

#23

Post by lesuorac »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #7
itake wrote: post #3

There are obvious exceptions to everything. But I’ve lived in Atlanta, Orlando, SF and Seattle. Moving to SF was a career multiplier. I instantly doubled my salary. Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities. Walmart was started in Arkansas. Warren Buffet famously lives in Nebraska. But the Tier 1 cities create more wealth for more people than Tier 2 or…

How much more are you spending (on non-avoidable cost of living stuff) now that you live in SF, though? If I hypothetically doubled my salary _and_ my expenses, that hardly seems worth it. Although NorCal is gorgeous.

Pretty much if you ever double your salary you will come out ahead as everything else doesn't double. (And even if it does, your savings also doubled so you can retire to a lower cost of living and come out ahead).

If you go from say 120k to 240k in salary your housing may go from say 1k (12k/year) to 3k (36k/year) but at the end of the year 120k-12k is 108k while 240k-36k is 204 which is a net gain of 96k!

Of course you still need to eat and stuff but when you check out the "Regional Price Parity" [1] you'll see that nowhere do things actually become twice as expensive. So you're really getting a 2x boost in salary in exchange for a 1.3x increase in expenses.

[1]: https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-par...

Re: The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people

#24

Post by jpollock »

pyb wrote: post #18
jnwatson wrote: post #5

At Google, HR has dictated to our team "no Bay-area hiring" for over a year now. It seems at least one company agrees with "There’s no surplus value in hiring in the Bay Area".

What's HR'a rationale?

The engineering pool is broad enough (or the Bay Area shallow enough) that they can hire everywhere and get the same quality of engineer.

Since the wages paid are based on _local_ prevailing wage, and the Bay Area has the highest prevailing wage, Google will get cheaper engineers.

This also avoids the US immigration system, which is a terrible, expensive, stress inducing (performance sapping) thing for staff (and businesses) to interact with.

Finally, by distributing engineers to other countries, they counter some of the political "They're not _local_" arguments being made in various countries.

Re: The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people

#27

Post by tayo42 »

jnwatson wrote: post #5

At Google, HR has dictated to our team "no Bay-area hiring" for over a year now. It seems at least one company agrees with "There’s no surplus value in hiring in the Bay Area".

Doesn't Google want everyone in an office? How does that work?

Re: The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people

#29

Post by dilyevsky »

Arainach wrote: post #4
itake wrote: post #3

There are obvious exceptions to everything. But I’ve lived in Atlanta, Orlando, SF and Seattle. Moving to SF was a career multiplier. I instantly doubled my salary. Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities. Walmart was started in Arkansas. Warren Buffet famously lives in Nebraska. But the Tier 1 cities create more wealth for more people than Tier 2 or…

>Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities. Salary or takehome? Sure, your net in SF will be higher than Orlando or London, but looking at resources such as levels.fyi, internal salary sharing sites at large companies, etc. the math for Seattle comp with no state income tax is pretty close to bay area minus tax.

Seattle has enforceable (and readily abused) non-compete and also virtually non-existent startup scene

Re: The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people

#30

Post by harrall »

sodality2 wrote: post #14
spondylosaurus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more are you spending (on non-avoidable cost of living stuff) now that you live in SF, though? If I hypothetically doubled my salary _and_ my expenses, that hardly seems worth it. Although NorCal is gorgeous.

> If I hypothetically doubled my salary _and_ my expenses, that hardly seems worth it. Although NorCal is gorgeous. All else being equal, the improvements in other non-financial areas (chances to grow social life, many more attractions, etc) should make up for it. The savings gap hopefully should widen as well (unless it's a deficit, in which case, cut expenses).

Altho I want to state the perhaps obvious that different big cities have very different subcultures.

Portland vs. SF vs. Nashville vs. NYC.

I would not limit yourself to just one specific big city.

Post reply on HN