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For anyone interested… We just moved back to Atlanta in September after five years in the Bay Area, to be closer to family, and to be able to afford a house, ev
by zellyn 11y ago
For anyone interested… We just moved back to Atlanta in September after five years in the Bay Area, to be closer to family, and to be able to afford a house, ever.
I was well paid at Google, and loved working at YouTube. I also severely miss our many friends, as well as beautiful San Francisco: I used to walk up Bernal Hill one or two days a week with my toddler. Pictures of oceans and hills and everything else make me sad…
That said, we could never afford a house in San Francisco. And to get affordable, we'd have had to have gone way out, and the commute would have been terrible.
I was lucky enough to find out that Square has an Atlanta office, full of very smart people, so I was able to keep doing Silicon-Valley-style programming, which is a big win.
- smrtinsert 11y agoPlease define Silicon Valley style programming?
- Fluid_Mechanics 11y agoProgramming with an inflated salary.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- muzz 11y agoYou mean market-based salaries
- hendzen 11y agoHow about programming with a market-based salary in an inflated market?
- bdcravens 11y agoDoes this really exist? If a company could meet the need cheaper, wouldn't they? Instead, you're either referring to using the wrong tool, and hence a high salary, or you're being relative to a given location. If that's the case, then pretty much everyone's salary is inflated, since there's certainly someone in the world who will do the job for $20k USD.
- askafriend 11y agoIt's useless trying to talk sense into someone who clearly has a deep sense of resentment.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jnbiche 11y agoYou realize that that sweet $140,000 Silicon Valley base salary at FaceGoogBox is worth less than that very middle class $80,000 in Atlanta, once you adjust for cost of living, right? If you want to buy a house, it's more like $40,000 in downtown Atlanta. It ain't poverty, but no one's getting dirty rich off of that kind of salary, either. Is someone making $80,000 for doing 60 hours a week of highly-skilled, highly-profit-bearing work "overpaid". In my opinion, that's underpaid. If anything, we've seen recent evidence that SV salaries are "deflated" compared to other industries and areas of the country, due to collusion, frequent targeted hiring of very young, often naive grad, inflated time at work, etc. I don't work in SV, for the reasons I outlined above, so this isn't some kind of self-justification. Edit: To be clear, I don't disapprove of people working there, I know it's beautiful and a nice place to live. I'm actually defending SV engineers from accusations of "inflated" salaries. It's just not a good place to go to get rich as an engineer with a family.
- bitwarrior 11y agoAccording to Wolfram Alpha, $140,000 is equivalent to $85,000 in Atlanta, once you've adjusted for the cost of living. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=$140000+in+San+Francisco+versus+Atlanta https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=$140000+in+San+Francis...
- chejazi 11y agoWolfram Alpha needs better marketing. This tool is amazing.
- rtkwe 11y agoI wish I could figure out how to get it to run each statement in parenthesis as a separate statement then combine them. A lot of time when I'm trying to combine a lot of different values it'll get confused and just evaluate one of them individually. Same thing with happens with units sometimes. Maybe I'm just not writing my queries just right but it's my major pain point with Wolfram Alpha.
- deleted 11y ago
- zellyn 11y agoI was afraid I'd end up in a corporate IT department in a big company that does something other than technology as its main thing. In Mikey Dickerson's talks about fixing Healthcare.gov he talks about two strains of programming: that descended from a more engineering mindset, and that descended from the IT department. (I'm paraphrasing badly: I'll try to find a better link when I have more time.) I guess I was using "Silicon Valley" as shorthand for the former.
- jerf 11y agoIf at all possible, you want to work where you're a net benefit and somehow directly visibly producing output the company is selling, not where you're a net cost. Note how the word "computer" doesn't appear in that sentence; it's not unique to computer programming.
- loopbit 11y agoSaid in traditional business-speak: Work in a profit center, not in a cost center.
- Toenex 11y agoThats a really nice way to phrase a sentiment I, and I would guess many other HN'ers have long felt.
- zellyn 11y agoI'm on the Shared Systems team at Square, and was on Abuse prevention at YouTube, so I pretty much seem to only land in cost centers :-) But I get to build RPC services and other cool infrastructure in Go.
- lucaspiller 11y agoI work at an NGO that manages investment in farming. We have beuracracy bigger than most governments. Still get to write cool stuff in Go, Node, Elixir or whatever else takes my fancy and tinker with IoT hardware during work hours :-)
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- bdcravens 11y agoI suspect this refers to the languages and frameworks in vogue (Rails, Node, Angular/React/Ember), emphasis towards open source, and using Apple hardware. There's still a ton of work done in unsexy companies on Dells and HP using PHP/ColdFusion/.NET/etc.
- zellyn 11y agoNot at all. See my other comment.
- Godel_unicode 11y ago> ...unsexy companies.../.net... At unsexy companies, and at StackOverflow
- throwaway_xx9 11y agoGoogle's HQ is in Mountain View. Why did you have to live or buy a house in SF?
- Negative1 11y agoHe worked at Youtube, which is actually in San Bruno. Living in SF is the trendy thing to do so he probably felt the 'real' experience would be more worthwhile (which it sounds like it was). From the southern part of SF (not South San Francisco, that is different) it's not a crazy commute to San Bruno. To Mountain View it would have been hell.
- zellyn 11y agoI'm about the furthest from "trendy" you can imagine. But our quality of life living in Bernal Heights was amazing.
- cbhl 11y agoHousing prices in Mountain View are just as bad as those in SF. Also, YouTube's head office is closer to the SF airport.
- muzz 11y agoIf only there was a bus straight to campus that went to like 5 counties...
- dragonwriter 11y ago> Also, YouTube's head office is closer to the SF airport. Which is also not in SF.
- artmageddon 11y agoIt's geographically close enough.
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- beachstartup 11y agoin my personal experience, sf is better to visit than to inhabit. los angeles is the opposite.
- djrogers 11y agoAgree 100%. I will say though that there are many suburbs of SF that are way better to inhabit than visit, and give SoCal a run for it's money (cycling through vineyards on the way to downtown Livermore for example)...
- enjo 11y agoReally? Los Angeles seems like an awful place to live. I've been spending quite of time there recently. The hours that people spend in their car is absolutely horrific.
- beachstartup 11y ago> The hours that people spend in their car is absolutely horrific here's a tip: don't do that. problem solved.
- Balgair 11y agoMy pop bought his place in the east bay right after Viet Nam for ~70k. They pay ~100 a month in taxes and whatnot as the mortgage was paid years (decades?) ago. The exact same footprint ranch house next door just sold to a couple with a little boy. She is a 'local' teacher, he is a recruiter in tech somewhere in SF city. Take a guess how much they paid for a 3 bed, 1 bath on 1.7 acres about 1 hour (on a good day) commute for him. Yeah, 850k, and that was a steal. The mortgage alone is, what ~3k/ mo? Taxes and everything else push this up to ~4.5k to 5k/ mo, right? And this is going to go for how long? Oh yeah, 20 years. My folks have no illusions that this sweet couple and little Benny next door are going to be there anymore than 5 years. Even all the way out in the East Bay, it is just not possible. Get out now before this bubble pops again. Beat the rush.
- brianwawok 11y agoHow are there taxes so low? I know in Chicago if you were old past a certain age you got some tax breaks (MAYBE at some point a tax freeze). Does SF have some kind of tax rate freeze? But ya, live is too short to spend a million bucks on a 2 bedroom house.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 727374 11y agoCA property tax increases are limited to 2% a year and only get re-assessed after a change of ownership or new construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
- Balgair 11y agoBingo. Prop 13 is the elephant in the room that is not mentioned. All discussions of CA property markets have this giant red flag in them. It very much distorts the free markets.
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- azth 11y ago> I was lucky enough to find out that Square has an Atlanta office Was the salary the same, or was it adjusted?
- Xcelerate 11y agoIf you don't mind me asking, how does your absolute salary fare when moving to a lower cost of living region? Do employers tend to keep you at the salary you had, or does it take a hit (even though it is supposedly "equivalent" in some sense)?
- zellyn 11y agoMy base salary went up slightly, and my total compensation went down. We'll see how the options turn out.
- suyash 11y agoHow did total comp went down if base went up? What was it that went down specifically?
- vonmoltke 11y agoOutside of a few hot areas, total compensation for even the best people is usually 85% base salary.
- suyash 11y agoHow is that possible? example please
- diffraction 11y agoPerformance bonuses?
- harmegido 11y agoI'm actually a stock trader, so it's even more skewed for me and would be a good example. Let's say I get paid $50 per year. At the end of the year, depending on my/our performance, I will get paid between $0 and $200 as a bonus, which I wouldn't count as part of my base comp. Other forms of non-base include stocks/options/etc.
- sbochins 11y agoThe best way to afford housing in the bay area is to have already bought when the market was low. You can use that money to put in for a 3 bedroom house in or very close to SF. Unfortunately, it's too late to do this for anyone interested now.
- funkaster 11y agohonest question: what does "Silicon-Valley-style programming" mean? I've been living in SF for 5+ years and I'll prob stay for a few more. But I can't see myself living for too long mainly because of rent and house prices. Europe, to me, looks a lot better (I'm thinking Berlin). But re: "Silicon-Valley-style programming", I don't see any difference here than any other similar place.
- captain_trips 11y agoSo there are lots of programming jobs out there at places that are not like the valley. Thing Initech from Office Space - business casual dress code, gantt charts, dreary cubes, long death march schedules you have no control over, people are resources first, salaries are intentionally below market rate... I landed at one of these a few years ago and got out ASAP. They're out there, but not so much in the Bay Area because the talent war is so hot - any place like that wouldn't be able to hire or keep anyone.
- nommm-nommm 11y agoMost shops aren't like that. I don't do "SV style programming" but we have no dress code, no death March schedules, no charts, no meetings, etc. Same thing as my last job in another city. Though we also don't have ping pong, Foosball, stocked fridge, or many young people if that's what you are looking for. Oh, and not a lot of turnover either.
- alain94040 11y agoSilicon Valley style programming means working on consumer apps that have a chance of being used by thousands and millions of people. Especially in Europe, most programming goes to custom software for banking and various industries. There are very few Microsoft, Square or Google style companies in Europe, where software is the product. A lot of software is a cost center for something else. For some, it doesn't give them the same feeling of accomplishment.
- dreamdu5t 11y ago
- jordache 11y agoworking at one of the premier SV companies, google still doesn't provide sufficient income to purchase a home?
- eitally 11y agoSure it does on a sustaining basis, but you still have to save enough for the initial down payment.
- jcizzle 11y agoJust wanted to point out one thing, the comparison between Atlanta and SF is a bit more nuanced. Atlanta is about 3x larger (in square miles) and encompasses an incredibly economically diverse area. Within two miles, you can find a house for $20,000 and a house for $1,000,000+. This certainly brings down the 'average cost of living', but does not account for the cost of living in a safe and desirable area, which is not quite SF price levels, but is equally in demand and short of supply.
- darksim905 11y agoWhat does it take to be at that level (e.g. working at known, established tech giants and/or startups), knowing people or being knowledgeable + luck?
- optimusclimb 11y ago> (e.g. working at known, established tech giants and/or startups), knowing people or being knowledgeable + luck? Passing an interview gauntlet will usually suffice. Be really good at sophomore level data structures/algorithms class materials.
- matthewmcg 11y agoWelcome back (my office is in the 201 building too). As you'll soon find Atlanta has a lot to offer but you just have to look a bit harder or drive a bit further. You can't fix the lack of proximity to the ocean, but being able to get a direct flight to most airports in the Caribbean almost makes up for that.