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The article is poorly argued. Paragraph 2 -- if you pick a winning startup (uber, etc) then the bay area is great! Well, yes. The problem is picking that win

by x0x0 10y ago

The article is poorly argued. Paragraph 2 -- if you pick a winning startup (uber, etc) then the bay area is great! Well, yes. The problem is picking that winning startup, and really, if you're good at that, stop wasting your life as an engineer and go invest money for a living. We shouldn't expect eng to be able to pick better than vcs, and their hit rate isn't great. It also uses pre-tax salaries, not after tax salaries, where Seattle has a large advantage; even at $120k, you get $5k more in cash in Washington state. Which may not sound like much, but you should view it not as 5/120 but as 5/80 (roughly your take-home pay). The discussion of housing (where exactly is that sub $800k housing in sfbay) ignores commute times and costs. Sure, if you want to live in outer sunset or east bay and deal with horrid commutes, there's cheap housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, housing will likely be much more expensive. The author also pays no attention to the effects of having to reset your social network / family to exploit moving to sfbay, banking the higher salary, then moving away. That's a large price to pay if your plan is to get to your mid 30s then move elsewhere. And hard to achieve buy-in from significant others who may similarly not be stoked about losing all his/her friends. And finally, it finishes with a discussion of the two most generous employers, google and fb. Who, yes, are generous but also not representative.

derefr 10y ago
I don't know if the article was really talking about "winning" startups. Growth+revenue aren't really representative of whether a company is "winning"—they're just representative of a company that's properly doing the thing investors want it to do, growing at the expense of all else. If you're an investor, you need a company to succeed in a long-term sense: to pay out at the other end of the bet that started it. That's hard to predict: it's like looking at the fitness of animals in an ecosystem and trying to predict which one will end up with the most great-great-grandchildren. But if you're an employee, you just need a company to be growing, and to be throwing money around in the process of doing that. You aren't looking for a fit animal, you're looking for a fat animal. Animals might get fat before they get fit, as before puberty in mammals—and investors try to encourage startups to "bulk up" to kickstart their metaphorical puberty. But unhealthy animals also get fat, and to a predator, they're just as edible. If your goal is to "eat a lot of salary", you just need a company who's known to be throwing their fat around, not a company who will dominate their niche and sire a thousand children.
- x0x0 10y ago
  That is a good point. I do think though that even growing startups prefer to pay in equity though, at least until you get to the pseudo-IPO ultra late stages. As recently as a couple years ago, AirBnB gave me a fairly cash poor offer, but wanted me enough that when I turned it down both my future manager and a VP eng tried to get me to reconsider.

by x0x0 10y ago

derefr 10y ago

I don't know if the article was really talking about "winning" startups. Growth+revenue aren't really representative of whether a company is "winning"—they're just representative of a company that's properly doing the thing investors want it to do, growing at the expense of all else. If you're an investor, you need a company to succeed in a long-term sense: to pay out at the other end of the bet that started it. That's hard to predict: it's like looking at the fitness of animals in an ecosystem and trying to predict which one will end up with the most great-great-grandchildren. But if you're an employee, you just need a company to be growing, and to be throwing money around in the process of doing that. You aren't looking for a fit animal, you're looking for a fat animal. Animals might get fat before they get fit, as before puberty in mammals—and investors try to encourage startups to "bulk up" to kickstart their metaphorical puberty. But unhealthy animals also get fat, and to a predator, they're just as edible. If your goal is to "eat a lot of salary", you just need a company who's known to be throwing their fat around, not a company who will dominate their niche and sire a thousand children.

x0x0 10y ago
That is a good point. I do think though that even growing startups prefer to pay in equity though, at least until you get to the pseudo-IPO ultra late stages. As recently as a couple years ago, AirBnB gave me a fairly cash poor offer, but wanted me enough that when I turned it down both my future manager and a VP eng tried to get me to reconsider.