10 ms·

Wouldn't most tech guys be able to support a family working for any of the local web developers, app developers or IT departments of non tech companies that you

by flexie 10y ago

Wouldn't most tech guys be able to support a family working for any of the local web developers, app developers or IT departments of non tech companies that you find all over Florida, New Zealand and most of the Western world? In urban areas of Florida and New Zealand you will find these jobs everywhere within a 5 mile radius. Maybe not always so interesting or well paying as some jobs in IT corporations, but good to have as a plan b. $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley.

theparanoid 10y ago
Working in a software company is qualitatively different than working in an IT department. One of them gets first dibs on dual monitor desktops. The other is cost center.
mywittyname 10y ago
> $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley. No, it's really not -- it's actually more like $77,000[1]. With the bulk of the difference being driven by housing prices. And $77,000 is actually above the average salary for a SE in Ft. Lauderdale (according to Glassdoor: $73,000). [1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
- besogno 10y ago
  The average income of a programmer is as relevant as the average income of a musician. It will not tell you anything about how much Lady Gaga makes, or the fact that the richest man in the world is a programmer. This kind of averages could possibly be relevant for bricklayers, but even in that case I doubt it.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Lady Gaga's wealth/success is about as relevant to a musician as Bill Gates's is to a software engineer. The averages are very relevant.
    - pilom 10y ago
      The GP's point is that Median Income would be valuable but "average" i.e. Mean Income, is much less valuable.
      - mywittyname 10y ago
        The according to the BLS, the median wage nationally is $100,080 and the average is $104,300. I'm not convinced a 4% difference takes away a whole lot of value, especially when salaries are close to a normal distribution. I'm willing to bet that as you limit you data set to a smaller region, salaries normalize even further.
        user5994461 10y ago
        Salaries are not a normal distributions. They are a multimodal distribution (usually 2 waves).
  - dasil003 10y ago
    The richest man in the world is better described as a founder than a programmer if you want to correlate his occupation to his income.
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
    Even the medium isn't truly informative in terms of purchasing power within a geographic region. It really boils down to your relative earning power vs your professional peers (including non engineers) in the direct geographic vicinity of you, in a supply constrained bidding war situation like desirable real estate. Let's say the average primary care physician's salary has been matching inflation for 20 years while that of the software engineer has outpaced it. Well even if a physician is doing just fine vs his physician peers, the rapid rise of sw eng salaries and the dramatically increased number of such people will have reduced his or her relative earning power and the standard of living he or she can afford, over said 20 years.
- Glyptodon 10y ago
  So I'm in essentially this situation and I concur that my salary does not completely adjust to an SV/Bay Area salary. But there are also 3 things that do not seem possible at once despite the extra money which keep me from pursuing opportunities in tech hubs: I'm ~5 minutes from biking/hiking/outdoors, ~10 minutes from work, and have a house with a shop/garage. So far as I can tell if I were to move to a tech hub I might be just shy of doubling my salary, but it wouldn't be possible to have the 3 things mentioned regardless unless I spent so much on housing that I'd have an effectively lower income, though I'd definitely make substantially more if I sacrificed them.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Yes. The thing to remember about these SV people is that they're mostly single people or working couples who are living in ridiculously tight spaces like these "microapartments". [0] They're forced out after having a kid or two. Almost anywhere else in the country, that $2200/mo will get you quite the spread; you can trade off between square footage, neighborhood, and commute time, but you're going to have very nice accommodations if you're willing to put that much money up. In SF, you're lucky if you can get a 1-bd for that, and LA is only slightly better. While the price of goods doesn't fluctuate as much, housing is a HUGE factor. If you want something functional for a family of 4 (or if you just like a lot of space), you are going to be paying at least $4000/mo in these tech hubs, or living 60 min+ away. Florida also has no income tax, v. California's rate between 7.5% and 13.3%. That is a big dent too. One other note. If you have the skills, look for remote work in companies that pay rates that are higher than you get paid in your local market. It's a great way to make the COL differential work even more in your favor. [0] http://sf.curbed.com/2016/3/30/11332920/rent-small-soma-micro-apartment http://sf.curbed.com/2016/3/30/11332920/rent-small-soma-micr...
    - mahyarm 10y ago
      If they want a family they don't live right beside work in the middle of a busy and dirty city. They move out to the suburban south bay (which has more tech jobs) or east bay, have 30m-1hr commutes and are dual income families. TBH the harder part of the bay area and kids is actually finding an affordable place to live that have good schools.
sampo 10y ago
> Wouldn't most tech guys be able to support a family working for any of the local web developers, app developers or IT departments of non tech companies that you find all over Florida, New Zealand and most of the Western world? Probably, but doing menial tasks behind where the modern edge progresses in technologies, your skills would become obsolete in 5-10 years. You'd either need to proceed to a general managerial path in your chosen no-name company, or devote time for self-study to stay in touch with the fashionable technologies.
- gcb0 10y ago
  you mean, like any fortune 500 company in the US?
- abalashov 10y ago
  What I have found is that this is often made up for by the arbitrage opportunities! Because traditional industries are so out of touch with the latest hipster trends, giving them just a little taste (calibrated to appear as bottom line-relevant as possible to the right stakeholders) can make you seem like the second coming of Jesus, get you massive raises and promotions, and make you essentially layoff proof. I remember I had a job in 2006 - where I was a low-grade operations nobody - and I prototyped something in client-side JS for an internal project. Overnight I became Master Sensei, and everyone in engineering (not my division) knew my name. They were mortified when I tendered my resignation. It doesn't always work. Megacorps don't intrinsically care about new technologies for their own sake, and it is true that defending the value of engineering to a bunch of greying MBAs in financial services or retail can be demoralising, at times infuriating or heartbreaking. Sometimes this type of activity can be consigned to skunkworks that never get a hearing or see the light of day, whether for political reasons (you're infringing on the J2EE guys' turf) or because management isn't tech-savvy enough to understand the value. But man, when it works, it works! I'm in telecom, and much of the industry - by the numbers, forget Twilio and WebRTC - operates according to soul-deadening customs that have changed little since the 80s and the advent of the micro-computer. Core routing tables and key provisioning databases are still distributed as giant spreadsheets and Access databases. Cable companies can be surprisingly low-tech, too. I've seen what happens when one becomes their connection to spiffy, modern innovation techniques like regular expressions and Python ETL jobs. The threshold for mind-blowing Bushido is startlingly low in enterprise. That can really make you an A-player in their eyes. Your main competition is going to be that these companies prefer to source such insights from giant professional services companies and consultancies, who can be similarly low-tech, but some of whom have realised there's enormous money to be made in opening large companies' eyes to 2003-era technology like Perl and Subversion. There's also the fact that big companies don't like the risk profile of depending on one guy or a small team to do advanced stuff. They'd rather spend millions of dollars to have it done mediocrely by Accenture or Deloitte, in the customarily obese enterprise fashion, skies darkened with "Linux resources" and the Sun eclipsed by UML diagrams and process maps. The other main danger is, as you allude, falling behind because the threshold for being ahead of the curve is so low. If you show them screen scraping or write an internal portal in a modern JS framework, they'll think you're from the future. Then you get into an actual tech company job and realise you've become an entrenched maintenance specialist in some decade-old stuff.
FungalRaincloud 10y ago
I mean, it's plausible that we could make enough to get by doing work that isn't fulfilling. Building websites for local churches, for example, can pay well enough to at least keep the lights on, and there's plenty of that sort of work. Trouble is, it can be career killing to be out of the game for a few months, especially if web dev is not what you want to be doing.
- ericd 10y ago
  Being out of work for a few months isn't career killing. There may be some correlation, but it's not causal - I know plenty of people who've chosen not to work for a few months that I'd hire in a heartbeat. They do generally work on interesting projects, though.
  - FungalRaincloud 10y ago
    It's not the time off, but rather, how you fill that time off that I am arguing is career stunting. If you have to work on uninteresting, non-career aiding work for a few months to make ends meet, you aren't likely to be working on interesting projects during that time. e: changed killing to stunting, because I do believe that it is recoverable.
    - ericd 10y ago
      I don't think it's that dire, but I guess interviewing afterwards could be trickier. If you were still a good programmer after three months, I think you'd be just fine. I just took six months off to travel the world, I'm not worried.
- eropple 10y ago
  I regularly take three months off to Not Do Work and have yet to have a single problem picking up new work. Some envy, but no problems.
ryandrake 10y ago
Others have also replied but yea: with all due respect to IT helpdesk support staff and Wordpress maintainers and the guy who does the web site for the local nail salon, there's no way any of that compares to a career in software. Living in a low cost of living area is nice but it's not worth that.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Those aren't the only jobs in low-cost areas. Almost every mid-size or larger company has an internal software group making real software, and every metropolitan area has at least several of these. Lots of that is on older "enterprise" stacks v. cool open-source or experimental stacks, but it's still a plenty legitimate career path, and you'd be surprised how modern a company that looks like a dinosaur at first glance can be when you look a little deeper. Example: Walmart runs lots of stuff on Node.js. If you want to slave away in a startup, then yeah, you're probably going to want to be in SF, SEA, or NYC. If you want a long-term job at a stable employer where most people don't take themselves too seriously, overtime is rarely or never expected, and you work with a bunch of smart, established people (even if they're a bit change averse), there is plenty of opportunity outside of the tech hubs. And on salary, the average may be an OK guideline but it is by no means the top of the market. Lots of good people will hire in at 1.5-2x the area's average.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    > Those aren't the only jobs in low-cost areas. Almost every mid-size or larger company has an internal software group making real software, and every metropolitan area has at least several of these. Having one company in an area does not help. My original comment dealt with the risk of when that one company doesn't work out for whatever reason. If that's the only tech employer in the area, you're screwed. Even if there are a few in the area, getting a tech job is not like getting a job at the local Starbucks. One could easily apply to all 20 companies in the area and not get anywhere. Ask me how I know. At least in the Bay Area, you could apply to 20 companies a week and not run out of potential opportunities.
    - 10y ago
sidlls 10y ago
> $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley. Not really. The quality of life on just about any axis, from parks and recreation to culture to education in Ft. Lauderdale is just inferior. Also, $50k doesn't go as far as you think there. There are a number of day-to-day and intangible costs (e.g. commute) that are actually less expensive in the valley.
- will_brown 10y ago
  "Quality of life" is inferior on any axis? Fort Lauderdale is the Yatch Capital of the World, the intercostal are a billionaire playground. Name any activity on the water from recreation, fishing, diving, to bio research...SV isn't on the map. On the other extreme - absolutely free - I would take Fort Lauderdale Beach and the weather over anything SV has to offer. After all there was a move to totally relocate Hollywood movie industry from CA to South Florida. And parks? What measure does SV outperform? Everglades National Park is probably 4-5x larger than SV and it's in Fort Lauderdale's backyard. Though South Florida doesn't get the tech press, we also have billion dollar startups. As far as schools, I went to a public high school (top 50 in the US) not even the best rated public school in my area, but my 4 brothers and I all have graduate degrees, fellow alumni include astronauts, countless professional athletes and even a tech founder by the name Jeff Bezos. I won't touch culture, because it is much to loaded but there is no shortage of meuseums dedicated to arts and sciences. Come to Wynwood during Art Basel and you might leave thinking we have the most progressive city in the world artistically. Finally, I don't want to minimize the diversity of the SV demographics but it again doesn't compete with the diversity and actual cultural influence these various background have in South Florida.
  - self-diversity 10y ago
    If you aren't aware, there is abundant outdoor activity including water recreation in the bay area. You seem to think we have to stay in the valley
    - will_brown 10y ago
      No doubt, but OP is saying nothing in Fort Lauderdale (our "Salt Life") is on axis with SV, With a fair reading I didn't claim the same. Florida keys and Caribbean are Home to the 3rd and 4th largest reefs in the world, so at minimum we can agree it's on the same axis as SV's quality of water activity.

by flexie 10y ago

theparanoid 10y ago

Working in a software company is qualitatively different than working in an IT department. One of them gets first dibs on dual monitor desktops. The other is cost center.

mywittyname 10y ago

> $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley. No, it's really not -- it's actually more like $77,000[1]. With the bulk of the difference being driven by housing prices. And $77,000 is actually above the average salary for a SE in Ft. Lauderdale (according to Glassdoor: $73,000). [1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...

besogno 10y ago
The average income of a programmer is as relevant as the average income of a musician. It will not tell you anything about how much Lady Gaga makes, or the fact that the richest man in the world is a programmer. This kind of averages could possibly be relevant for bricklayers, but even in that case I doubt it.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Lady Gaga's wealth/success is about as relevant to a musician as Bill Gates's is to a software engineer. The averages are very relevant.
  - pilom 10y ago
    The GP's point is that Median Income would be valuable but "average" i.e. Mean Income, is much less valuable.
    - mywittyname 10y ago
      The according to the BLS, the median wage nationally is $100,080 and the average is $104,300. I'm not convinced a 4% difference takes away a whole lot of value, especially when salaries are close to a normal distribution. I'm willing to bet that as you limit you data set to a smaller region, salaries normalize even further.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        Salaries are not a normal distributions. They are a multimodal distribution (usually 2 waves).
- dasil003 10y ago
  The richest man in the world is better described as a founder than a programmer if you want to correlate his occupation to his income.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Even the medium isn't truly informative in terms of purchasing power within a geographic region. It really boils down to your relative earning power vs your professional peers (including non engineers) in the direct geographic vicinity of you, in a supply constrained bidding war situation like desirable real estate. Let's say the average primary care physician's salary has been matching inflation for 20 years while that of the software engineer has outpaced it. Well even if a physician is doing just fine vs his physician peers, the rapid rise of sw eng salaries and the dramatically increased number of such people will have reduced his or her relative earning power and the standard of living he or she can afford, over said 20 years.
Glyptodon 10y ago
So I'm in essentially this situation and I concur that my salary does not completely adjust to an SV/Bay Area salary. But there are also 3 things that do not seem possible at once despite the extra money which keep me from pursuing opportunities in tech hubs: I'm ~5 minutes from biking/hiking/outdoors, ~10 minutes from work, and have a house with a shop/garage. So far as I can tell if I were to move to a tech hub I might be just shy of doubling my salary, but it wouldn't be possible to have the 3 things mentioned regardless unless I spent so much on housing that I'd have an effectively lower income, though I'd definitely make substantially more if I sacrificed them.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yes. The thing to remember about these SV people is that they're mostly single people or working couples who are living in ridiculously tight spaces like these "microapartments". [0] They're forced out after having a kid or two. Almost anywhere else in the country, that $2200/mo will get you quite the spread; you can trade off between square footage, neighborhood, and commute time, but you're going to have very nice accommodations if you're willing to put that much money up. In SF, you're lucky if you can get a 1-bd for that, and LA is only slightly better. While the price of goods doesn't fluctuate as much, housing is a HUGE factor. If you want something functional for a family of 4 (or if you just like a lot of space), you are going to be paying at least $4000/mo in these tech hubs, or living 60 min+ away. Florida also has no income tax, v. California's rate between 7.5% and 13.3%. That is a big dent too. One other note. If you have the skills, look for remote work in companies that pay rates that are higher than you get paid in your local market. It's a great way to make the COL differential work even more in your favor. [0] http://sf.curbed.com/2016/3/30/11332920/rent-small-soma-micro-apartment http://sf.curbed.com/2016/3/30/11332920/rent-small-soma-micr...
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    If they want a family they don't live right beside work in the middle of a busy and dirty city. They move out to the suburban south bay (which has more tech jobs) or east bay, have 30m-1hr commutes and are dual income families. TBH the harder part of the bay area and kids is actually finding an affordable place to live that have good schools.

sampo 10y ago

> Wouldn't most tech guys be able to support a family working for any of the local web developers, app developers or IT departments of non tech companies that you find all over Florida, New Zealand and most of the Western world? Probably, but doing menial tasks behind where the modern edge progresses in technologies, your skills would become obsolete in 5-10 years. You'd either need to proceed to a general managerial path in your chosen no-name company, or devote time for self-study to stay in touch with the fashionable technologies.

gcb0 10y ago
you mean, like any fortune 500 company in the US?
abalashov 10y ago
What I have found is that this is often made up for by the arbitrage opportunities! Because traditional industries are so out of touch with the latest hipster trends, giving them just a little taste (calibrated to appear as bottom line-relevant as possible to the right stakeholders) can make you seem like the second coming of Jesus, get you massive raises and promotions, and make you essentially layoff proof. I remember I had a job in 2006 - where I was a low-grade operations nobody - and I prototyped something in client-side JS for an internal project. Overnight I became Master Sensei, and everyone in engineering (not my division) knew my name. They were mortified when I tendered my resignation. It doesn't always work. Megacorps don't intrinsically care about new technologies for their own sake, and it is true that defending the value of engineering to a bunch of greying MBAs in financial services or retail can be demoralising, at times infuriating or heartbreaking. Sometimes this type of activity can be consigned to skunkworks that never get a hearing or see the light of day, whether for political reasons (you're infringing on the J2EE guys' turf) or because management isn't tech-savvy enough to understand the value. But man, when it works, it works! I'm in telecom, and much of the industry - by the numbers, forget Twilio and WebRTC - operates according to soul-deadening customs that have changed little since the 80s and the advent of the micro-computer. Core routing tables and key provisioning databases are still distributed as giant spreadsheets and Access databases. Cable companies can be surprisingly low-tech, too. I've seen what happens when one becomes their connection to spiffy, modern innovation techniques like regular expressions and Python ETL jobs. The threshold for mind-blowing Bushido is startlingly low in enterprise. That can really make you an A-player in their eyes. Your main competition is going to be that these companies prefer to source such insights from giant professional services companies and consultancies, who can be similarly low-tech, but some of whom have realised there's enormous money to be made in opening large companies' eyes to 2003-era technology like Perl and Subversion. There's also the fact that big companies don't like the risk profile of depending on one guy or a small team to do advanced stuff. They'd rather spend millions of dollars to have it done mediocrely by Accenture or Deloitte, in the customarily obese enterprise fashion, skies darkened with "Linux resources" and the Sun eclipsed by UML diagrams and process maps. The other main danger is, as you allude, falling behind because the threshold for being ahead of the curve is so low. If you show them screen scraping or write an internal portal in a modern JS framework, they'll think you're from the future. Then you get into an actual tech company job and realise you've become an entrenched maintenance specialist in some decade-old stuff.

FungalRaincloud 10y ago

I mean, it's plausible that we could make enough to get by doing work that isn't fulfilling. Building websites for local churches, for example, can pay well enough to at least keep the lights on, and there's plenty of that sort of work. Trouble is, it can be career killing to be out of the game for a few months, especially if web dev is not what you want to be doing.

ericd 10y ago
Being out of work for a few months isn't career killing. There may be some correlation, but it's not causal - I know plenty of people who've chosen not to work for a few months that I'd hire in a heartbeat. They do generally work on interesting projects, though.
- FungalRaincloud 10y ago
  It's not the time off, but rather, how you fill that time off that I am arguing is career stunting. If you have to work on uninteresting, non-career aiding work for a few months to make ends meet, you aren't likely to be working on interesting projects during that time. e: changed killing to stunting, because I do believe that it is recoverable.
  - ericd 10y ago
    I don't think it's that dire, but I guess interviewing afterwards could be trickier. If you were still a good programmer after three months, I think you'd be just fine. I just took six months off to travel the world, I'm not worried.
eropple 10y ago
I regularly take three months off to Not Do Work and have yet to have a single problem picking up new work. Some envy, but no problems.

ryandrake 10y ago

Others have also replied but yea: with all due respect to IT helpdesk support staff and Wordpress maintainers and the guy who does the web site for the local nail salon, there's no way any of that compares to a career in software. Living in a low cost of living area is nice but it's not worth that.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Those aren't the only jobs in low-cost areas. Almost every mid-size or larger company has an internal software group making real software, and every metropolitan area has at least several of these. Lots of that is on older "enterprise" stacks v. cool open-source or experimental stacks, but it's still a plenty legitimate career path, and you'd be surprised how modern a company that looks like a dinosaur at first glance can be when you look a little deeper. Example: Walmart runs lots of stuff on Node.js. If you want to slave away in a startup, then yeah, you're probably going to want to be in SF, SEA, or NYC. If you want a long-term job at a stable employer where most people don't take themselves too seriously, overtime is rarely or never expected, and you work with a bunch of smart, established people (even if they're a bit change averse), there is plenty of opportunity outside of the tech hubs. And on salary, the average may be an OK guideline but it is by no means the top of the market. Lots of good people will hire in at 1.5-2x the area's average.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  > Those aren't the only jobs in low-cost areas. Almost every mid-size or larger company has an internal software group making real software, and every metropolitan area has at least several of these. Having one company in an area does not help. My original comment dealt with the risk of when that one company doesn't work out for whatever reason. If that's the only tech employer in the area, you're screwed. Even if there are a few in the area, getting a tech job is not like getting a job at the local Starbucks. One could easily apply to all 20 companies in the area and not get anywhere. Ask me how I know. At least in the Bay Area, you could apply to 20 companies a week and not run out of potential opportunities.
  - 10y ago

sidlls 10y ago

> $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley. Not really. The quality of life on just about any axis, from parks and recreation to culture to education in Ft. Lauderdale is just inferior. Also, $50k doesn't go as far as you think there. There are a number of day-to-day and intangible costs (e.g. commute) that are actually less expensive in the valley.

will_brown 10y ago
"Quality of life" is inferior on any axis? Fort Lauderdale is the Yatch Capital of the World, the intercostal are a billionaire playground. Name any activity on the water from recreation, fishing, diving, to bio research...SV isn't on the map. On the other extreme - absolutely free - I would take Fort Lauderdale Beach and the weather over anything SV has to offer. After all there was a move to totally relocate Hollywood movie industry from CA to South Florida. And parks? What measure does SV outperform? Everglades National Park is probably 4-5x larger than SV and it's in Fort Lauderdale's backyard. Though South Florida doesn't get the tech press, we also have billion dollar startups. As far as schools, I went to a public high school (top 50 in the US) not even the best rated public school in my area, but my 4 brothers and I all have graduate degrees, fellow alumni include astronauts, countless professional athletes and even a tech founder by the name Jeff Bezos. I won't touch culture, because it is much to loaded but there is no shortage of meuseums dedicated to arts and sciences. Come to Wynwood during Art Basel and you might leave thinking we have the most progressive city in the world artistically. Finally, I don't want to minimize the diversity of the SV demographics but it again doesn't compete with the diversity and actual cultural influence these various background have in South Florida.
- self-diversity 10y ago
  If you aren't aware, there is abundant outdoor activity including water recreation in the bay area. You seem to think we have to stay in the valley
  - will_brown 10y ago
    No doubt, but OP is saying nothing in Fort Lauderdale (our "Salt Life") is on axis with SV, With a fair reading I didn't claim the same. Florida keys and Caribbean are Home to the 3rd and 4th largest reefs in the world, so at minimum we can agree it's on the same axis as SV's quality of water activity.