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I left the Bay Area, not Silicon Valley, 6 years ago and since then I've been able to realize a 40% salary increase (this has more to do with experience and sen
by jackcosgrove 11y ago
I left the Bay Area, not Silicon Valley, 6 years ago and since then I've been able to realize a 40% salary increase (this has more to do with experience and seniority than locale - just making the point that good salaries are possible outside SV) and I've purchased a house and a rental property. The latter would have been unthinkable in the Bay Area. Plus the gender ratio is much better for men almost anywhere else.
I don't even think SF and SV are good places to start out anymore. You can learn skills anywhere with the internet, and you miss out on early investments due to the opportunity cost of rent. If you want to live in the Bay Area, it's better to hunker down someplace cheaper for a decade or more, save up a down payment, and then lateral into a midlevel or senior role at a tech company, whose salaries are high enough to service a mortgage but not high enough to save a down payment and pay rent at the same time.
- muzz 11y agoIf you had bought a house in the Bay Area at that time, it would be worth almost double now. Houses that were $500k are now $900k-1M
- jonknee 11y agoTo be fair if you had bought a house almost anywhere at that time it would be worth almost double now. OP did even better and bought two!
- jackcosgrove 11y ago$500k in 2010, at the depths of the housing crisis, would have gotten me a little over 1000 sq ft near an oil refinery in the East Bay. It's academic though, since that means a $50-100k down payment, which I could not have saved. Everyone gets hung up on the real estate appreciation in the Bay Area, but forgets that down payments are very hard to save up. Edit: I wasn't considering condos. Go fee simple or go home.
- maaku 11y agoUh, $470k got me 1100sqft right near Caltrain in Willow Glen, a desirable suburb of San Jose. Last year. The situation is crazy, don't get me wrong, but I think you're a little overselling it.
- eitally 11y agoAnd $1.35m got me 1800sqft in Willow Glen last month. Afaik, avg sales price in Willow Glen over the past year is just over $1m.
- maaku 11y agoCondo vs single family home :) I'm over by Tamien station off Minnesota Ave if that provides some context. (I call it the ghetto side of Willow Glen, as if there were such a thing. It's still a lovely neighborhood.)
- eitally 11y agoGood for you! Maybe we'll run into each other sometime. :)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 11y agoI have a 1200 sqft house with a nice yard in a cool neighborhood midway betwen Berkeley and downtown Oakland that we got for under $350k (including some largish repairs & upgrades) around that time. Admittedly we timed it well and property values around here have practically doubled since we bought it, but I think that was partly due to a lack of investment in new construction for a few years following the recession.
- goshx 11y agoI am confused by the part you say that you left the Bay Area, not Silicon Valley, and then you said that good salaries are possible outside SV. Did you mean outside Bay Area?
- jackcosgrove 11y agoYes, out in flyover country.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoYou mean "long term affordability" country.
- thearn4 11y ago> I've purchased a house and a rental property. The latter would have been unthinkable in the Bay Area. I purchased a house with my wife here in northern OH, and while we don't have a rental, we do have around 4 acres of land to use and for our son to play on, in an area with an excellent public school district. I know this would be very hard to come by near most tech-centered hubs in the country, and would be very difficult for me to give up now. The more I think about it, the less certain I am that even doubling my salary would convince me to do it.
- vasilipupkin 11y agoBut, it's cold and rainy 7-8 months out of the year. A family of 3 doesn't need 4 acres. You have to admit that most people are willing to pay up for good weather
- rubbingalcohol 11y agoThe weather isn't even that good in Silicon Valley. I'd take rain and snow vs. dry and concrete.
- vasilipupkin 11y agowell, I would say most people would consider weather in SV better than in Ohio. Of course, I agree, preferences differ
- VLM 11y agoYou can live a life of wealth and luxury, or you can enjoy the weather. Note that given the cost difference between living in SV vs Ohio (although I don't live in Ohio) I could spend 12.8 years with my wife at an all inclusive tropical resort. We'd probably get a discount if we lived there full time, so maybe 15-20 years. Not exactly your average retirement home. Or cash on the barrel no discounts or financial aid at all I could pay list price to send SEVEN kids thru Harvard for four years with a reasonable allowance for expenses and still have money left over. I don't have seven kids, but I guess I could pay cash on the barrel to send a couple thru med school or law school instead, maybe finance a startup or small business for one of them. Or I could cash buy six rental properties vaguely similar to the house I live in, and retire as a landlord (although from watching my great uncle do this, being a landlord is no retirement!). The rent off six houses, minus realistic expenses, would be a little less than I get paid now, but its interesting to think about.
- nfriedly 11y agoI similarly got a ~25% income increase with a new job, about a year after leaving the bay area and moving back to Ohio. I also have a ridiculously lower cost of living - my 15-year mortgage for a nice house on an acre of land is about 1/2 of what rent was in San Mateo, and about 1/4 of what I know friends were paying for apartments in SF.
- quickquicker 11y agoI'm (probably) months away from doing something similar, although I'll be moving back from NYC.
- aidenn0 11y agoPlease tell me what tech jobs are available with good salaries in Ohio. Most of my friends are in Indiana/Ohio/Kentucky, my parents are in Northern Virginia (very drivable from Ohio) and I would love to be closer to all of these. However, I've not seen anything at even half my current salary (though I do like my job so I haven't been the most motivated job-seeker).
- nfriedly 11y agoWell, I work remote for IBM, but we do have a few offices in this area if remote isn't your thing. Here's my link to the IBM job site if you're interested: http://u.rfer.us/IBEiwV2J5c http://u.rfer.us/IBEiwV2J5c Before that, I freelanced which ended up turning into a full-time gig with a startup in SF that liked my work.
- sridca 11y ago> Plus the gender ratio is much better for men almost anywhere else. Could you elaborate?
- surge 11y agoMy guess, it's not as hard to find women in the office in tech companies in key roles outside of SF at least not as bad as it's made out to be in CA and the tech centric news sources that tend to focus solely on Silicon Valley as representative of tech as a whole. Some of us work in regular old Fortune 500 companies that aren't based in SF, and generally, but not always, they seem to do a better job on the gender mix and attracting female talent granted its not 50/50. Maybe companies in other areas provide better work life balance and stability than start up culture tech companies, I don't know. This is also purely anecdotal and based on my experience. Might just mean in general, if the person's single maybe the odds are better of meeting someone, no idea.
- freyr 11y agoI believe SF has a much better straight male to female ratio than the rest of SV. A lot of single women want to live in the city.
- mwfunk 11y agoSilicon Valley has one of the highest male/female ratios in the world, if not the highest. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/the-best-and-worst-cities-for-women-looking-to-marry/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/the-best-and... At least by that metric, that means it's the toughest place for single heterosexual men to find women to date. I'm curious if women find the imbalance awesome or awkward when it comes to dating (probably a little bit of both?).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ap22213 11y agoCome to DC which has one of the best ratios (for guys, at least), and the women are pretty much all highly-educated, if you're into lawyers, policy wonks, biologists, or NGOers. Plus, salaries at pure software companies and startups are pretty good. I have had four people in the last week quote me 200k salaries.