8 ms·

San Francisco is one of the worst-paying places in the US for software engineers

93 points by davidjnelson 9y ago

abalone 9y ago
Obviously, it’s a stunted metric. Cost of living handicaps don’t factor in the quality of life that bigger, more diverse cities have to offer. It’s more than just the cost of “rent, transportation, and groceries.” Some people value that and others don’t and that’s fine. But don’t pretend it’s an absolute, universal metric. I know plenty of people who moved out of SF only to lament what they’re missing and in several cases, move back.
moocowtruck 9y ago
true but san Francisco is also one of the best places that pay for "making software"
sidlls 9y ago
I am very close to the 110 Austin/198 SF profile. I'll take putting ~15% of my unadjusted SF income away in savings over the same rate for the (downward) adjustment I'd get in Austin. Not to mention all the extra opportunities and wider variety of projects to work on and the cultural variety. If I were living in Austin, reading this article would make me think, "If SF Companies can pay $134,000 why am I selling myself short for $110,000."
- chank 9y ago
  Nobody in Austin is thinking that. Living in Austin, I wouldn't even consider SF for $134,000.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    That isn't what I meant. I wouldn't consider SF for $134k, either. But someone getting $110k in Austin should be wondering why they aren't getting $134k in Austin instead. They're basically leaving $2k a month on the table because of some absurd adherence to regional pay scales.
    - cmurf 9y ago
      A regional variation isn't absurd. If someone offered me a job in SF, I'd insist on at least 20% more to try and counter the 50% higher cost of living.
      - sidlls 9y ago
        It is absurd. The value of an engineer's work doesn't magically adjust downward because of the circumstance of his or her location. Why aren't you insisting on that 20% bump now instead of leaving it on the table and reinforcing the existing inequity?
        objclxt 9y ago
        > The value of an engineer's work doesn't magically adjust downward because of the circumstance of his or her location Yes it does! It's only absurd if you assume every person is able, willing, and has no barriers to relocating. But there are plenty of engineers with families and/or established ties who don't want to move. One of the main reasons Facebook, Google, and Apple have engineering offices in Seattle is to attract engineers from Microsoft/Amazon that don't want to uproot their families and move to the bay.
        sidlls 9y ago
        Sure. And they're all selling themselves short.
        rayiner 9y ago
        The price of an engineer's labor isn't determined solely by the value of her work. It's a function of supply and demand. Demand is driven, in part, by value. But supply is driven, in part, by cost of living. In other words, if more people were willing to endure San Francisco's cost of living, supply would be higher and prices (salaries) would come down.
        itronitron 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jwatte 9y ago
They probably just multiplied cost of living straight up. Of course it doesn't work like that. If you live 20% below your "maximum means" then you can sock away a lot more money in the higher cost markets. Also, certain expenses, like cars, 401ks, and student loan payments are fixed cost and thus their relative percentage grows in cheaper/lower salary areas. So, anyone saying "adjusted for cost of living" needs to also cough up methodology details, or the comparison is impossible.
- balls187 9y ago
  Do people own cars in San Fran? You pretty much need to in Austin.
  - baddox 9y ago
    In my experience, mostly in the small pre-series-B tech startup scene in SF, very few people who live and work in SF own cars.
  - santaclaus 9y ago
    31% of San Franciscans are car free [1]. In 2015, at least, over 50% of trips in San Francisco were made without a personal car [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_... [2] https://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/02/03/new-data-shows-most-trips-in-sf-are-made-without-a-private-automobile/ https://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/02/03/new-data-shows-most-tr...
  - loeg 9y ago
    You don't need to in SF, but kind of do if you live in the broader bay area, which is much more sprawled.
Kinnard 9y ago
This contrasts with other research— "Does it Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?": https://triplebyte.com/blog/does-it-make-sense-for-programmers-to-move-to-the-bay-area https://triplebyte.com/blog/does-it-make-sense-for-programme...
- sidlls 9y ago
  Triplebyte's customers are disproportionately in the Bay and NYC. That doesn't alter facts, of course, but it is worth considering in the presentation (e.g. your link) and discussion of them.
- sjg007 9y ago
  The 15k benefit by triple byte (live in SF) conflicts with the 50k premium by Indeed if living in Austin.
pmoriarty 9y ago
And yet "we have a shortage of engineers".
- loeg 9y ago
  We only have a shortage of engineers willing to work for really cheap. It's just another way of complaining that tech employees are expensive.
syllogism 9y ago
This is plainly an advertorial...There's no way to trust the methods, data or conclusions, no matter how "truthy" it may or may not sound.
- cpncrunch 9y ago
  The link to their study isn't working any more (https://hired.com/state_of_salaries_2017 https://hired.com/state_of_salaries_2017).
  - yissachar 9y ago
    Looks like they somehow converted the hyphens to underscores: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017 https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017
chis 9y ago
It's weird to see articles like this not even mention the massive sampling bias. Most Seattle devs work for Amazon or Microsoft, whereas SF is a tech hub filled with startups and other low-paying opportunities.
- acchow 9y ago
  Not to mention the sampling bias of people who used the Hired platform.
  - bgirard 9y ago
    And the fact they're only including base salary instead of looking at total compensation. Bonus and (public) equity would probably skew the numbers and thus change the conclusions drawn here. This kind of distortion makes the Toronto market seems a lot better compared to SF because it's not common to receive a large equity grant in Toronto.
  - wnevets 9y ago
    So dont use hired for sf jobs
chubot 9y ago
Another way to look at it: the absolute amount of money you save matters, especially if you're young. It's better to make a lot and save a lot. And I don't think it's too hard to save money with a $160K salary, unless you have kids. That is, the salary to expenses ratio isn't the only thing to look at. For example, if you save 10% of your money in SF and make $150K, that's $15K a year in savings. If you save 14% of your money in Austin and make $100K, that's $14K a year in savings. Even though you went through 90% of your salary in SF and only 86% in Austin, living in SF is better, because you saved more money in absolute terms. You can move elsewhere and take advantage of that savings. If you only care about money, the ideal strategy is probably to move to SF in your 20's, make a high salary, and then move out of SF. A lot of people these days don't have kids until their 30's. (Anecdotally that seems to be what a lot of people have done in the past decade -- move out of the Bay Area when they want to have kids.) This also doesn't account for the fact that SF has more "outliers" and more choices. You might be pleasantly surprised by the kind of job you can get or the kind of money you can make in SF. In most cities (certainly not all), you probably won't be surprised. The job market is what it is. (I'm assuming something about their methodology here, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  > ...move out of the Bay Area when they want to have kids... This is fascinating to me, because if demographers' prognostications are to be believed, then future growth economies (on the multiple-decades-scale) are heavily represented by new middle-class families, in Asia and Africa, and to a lesser extent the Middle East and South America. So not only is the Bay Area ecosystem doubling down on its geographic centrism into a non-growth geography, it is tripling down on a bet that a non-family-oriented HQ culture (where the majority of unicorn companies consider the majority of their staff "who matter" to be located) will innovate sufficiently to penetrate and hold family-oriented heavy-growth markets of the future.
  - asveikau 9y ago
cletus 9y ago
So I guess it's interesting to look at salary in terms of the local cost of living but that's actually pretty meaningless. The reason is you don't have to live "average". This is the strategy many employ. Do their time, save a lot of money and leave. I come from Australia. I live in Manhattan. The amount of money I can save here is now than I can earn in Australia. It's just ridiculous how much better it is. Also I think just is the real winner for this strategy. For one you don't need a car here. That saves you on buying a car, gas, maintenance, insurance, tickets, damage, parking and so on. Plus you can actually live in decent places for much less than anywhere in the Bay Area, like Jackson heights. I mean Austin isn't bad either but you need a car there.
- Domenic_S 9y ago
  I promise you're spending as much on MTA passes as someone in Austin does on a modest car.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - crazygringo 9y ago
    $121 for a monthly unlimited MTA pass. How on earth do you spend only $121/month on a modest car, including gas, insurance and depreciation? I'm pretty sure that's not possible.
    - s0rce 9y ago
      Maybe possible if you live in a low cost of living place, have good insurance record and a old crappy car, own your car and rarely drive but it would be close.
      - vorotato 9y ago
        or the car is paid off and you're just paying depreciation and gas
    - 9y ago
justhackedme 9y ago
Obviously...
bonniemuffin 9y ago
This article doesn't seem to mention non-salary compensation like stock options and RSUs, which can form a pretty large fraction of total compensation, and might vary wildly between locales.
throwthisawayt 9y ago
No where in the article do they mention how they factor in cost of living into the comparison. As other commenters have pointed out, most studies naively make a linear adjustment; i.e. if cost of living is 2x you need 2x the salary. This makes no sense. Say your cost of living is 30k and your salary is 100k in one city. In a 2nd City your cost of living is 60k and 180k. A rational economic decision would be to live in City 2 since it maximizes your savings. The linear adjustment based on cost of living only make sense if a person is saving 0% of their salary. The other issue is I don’t buy the 110k vs 130k difference in Austin. They are not considering total comp in which case the delta is way bigger. Finally, Hired is mostly used by startups and low to medium paying employers. There is a huger salary difference at large tech firms between SF and other cities. What this study is really saying is “if you want to work at medium size companies, don’t earn anything beyond a salary, and spend all of your salary San Francisco is not worth it”.
- timr 9y ago
  "Say your cost of living is 30k and your salary is 100k in one city. In a 2nd City your cost of living is 60k and 180k. A rational economic decision would be to live in City 2 since it maximizes your savings." This doesn't actually happen, except in the heads of naïve young dudes who want to justify living in SF right now. Total REAL compensation for a non-senior engineer in SF is somewhere around $130k right now, with some Magic Stock Bux (probably worthless! maybe not!) thrown in for fun...but those don't buy burritos. Total comp of $110k sounds reasonable for Austin, as well. You can shift the ranges up or down based on seniority, but the spread is about the same, and the range caps out at around $200k in both markets for all but the most exceptional people. In other words, the salary premium they're talking about here sounds right to me, and a premium of $20k a year is more than consumed by the 3x difference in rent, alone. You can perhaps justify going to SF on other grounds (career growth, networking, etc.), but it's not purely economically rational for most people.
  - shados 9y ago
    Yeah, it is a gold rush. It's pretty easy (relatively speaking) to make well over 200k at a public company with some experience if you include stocks. And some people are lured by options of startups (it's a gamble!). It's harder to get that elsewhere. Not everyone (or most) get there, but a lot do, and even more try.
scurvy 9y ago
LA (at least in the places you'd want to live) is no longer cheaper than SF. This data set is flawed.
- Judgmentality 9y ago
  Do you have any data to back up that claim?
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  No, Nice places in SF are still a bit more expensive than nice places in LA (and Santa Monica of course). They both have been getting more expensive, but the difference is still there.
  - scurvy 9y ago
    You need a car in LA, not SF so there's the cost of car ownership. Venice and Santa Monica have skyrocketed the past 3 years due to Snap. $9500/mo for a 2BR at 4th and Rose? Happening location, but that's much higher than SF. https://twitter.com/chiropractic/status/926191351430971392 https://twitter.com/chiropractic/status/926191351430971392 Housing costs are probably equal now or within a percent or two.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Most of Santa Monica isn’t that bad, and even Venice can be reasonable away from the water. There are plenty of places in SF that exceed high end places in LA for rent, and they are similar or greater in area to boot. Let’s at least compare apples to apples. It isn’t just SNAP, google is big in Venice as well. Many tech startups are in the west of LA. I just don’t a year in Westwood. It was pricey, but not SF pricey. And ya, you need a car, which is also true for much of the Bay Area. (Well, we didn’t need a car until we had a kid, Uber + bus worked well enough before child car seats became an issue)
      - scurvy 9y ago
        I'd hardly call 4th and Rose "high-end" though. That was kind of my point. Even the periphery, fringe places are coming up to SF levels.
xor1 9y ago
I'm very jealous of my friends with SF jobs who work remote and live with their parents. I know three who do this, they're all late 20s/early 30s. I totally would do it if I had the opportunity, I still get along great with my folks. I also know 1 person with a remote SF job in the midwest who lives like a king.
s17n 9y ago
Tl;dr: they took an ad for Hired.com and made it into an article. There's no methodology or data reported.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
L5 Google engineers are getting $800k RSU packages over 4 years. Netflix pays their senior engineers > $400k/yr straight cash. I have a friend with 8 years experience getting $200k/yr base at Facebook and 125k/yr in RSUs. Sure, exactly 50% of the engineers in SF make below average salaries, but the top 50% are doing phenomenally well.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  Netflix, Google, and Facebook would be in the top 10% if not 1% of all software developer jobs in terms of compensation.
  - pfarnsworth 9y ago
    They are also one of the largest employers in the Bay Area, with tens of thousands of engineers in total. So they represent quite a large number of engineers and large percentage of Bay Area employment. Plus LinkedIn, Apple, Amazon, etc all strive to have equitable pay as well. It's not just 1% of the engineers that make this.
dimva 9y ago
As an engineer living in SF, I agree that it doesn't really make sense for the average software developer to live here. But, if you are top 10-20% (not necessarily a superstar), it's definitely the place to be. Whether you want to work at startup or a big company, the pay vastly exceeds the extra cost of living. At a startup, you actually have the chance to make lots of money in an acquisition or IPO. In other places, you really don't. I used to live in NYC. There's tumblr, mongodb, and zocdoc, all in the $1 billion range, which only makes the founders and a few early employees rich. Foursquare was really hot for awhile, but ended up disappointing. Rapgenius imploded. Betaworks companies either stagnated or outright failed. I know tons of great people who got jobs at the hottest companies in NYC at the time and ended up with nothing. In SF/bay area, there's uber, facebook, google, palantir, airbnb, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, lyft, stripe, square, etc, etc, etc. All of these recently started companies are worth billions, and have created or will create lots of millionaires. More importantly, I don't remember any big disappointments in bay area companies, besides maybe dropbox. Almost every hot company from 5 years ago is now worth a lot more money. It's fairly easy to select which startup to work for if you want to optimize for equity payout. Today, I would probably pick flexport. At a big company, you get to work on the most interesting projects. The top executives for all the biggest tech companies are here, so all the best projects are going to be here as well. And the pay is very good - I don't know any senior engineers making less than $300,000 a year, including people who are just a few years out of grad school. In both cases, you get to work on the most interesting technology. For example, there are no self-driving car companies in other areas (besides Pittsburgh). The most successful blockchain businesses (coinbase, ripple) are here. The companies that have to deal with the biggest scale are here (google, facebook). Personally, I more than doubled my already-high pay in NYC by moving to SF. Not moving here earlier was a big career mistake - I would have worked on far more interesting projects with much more competent coworkers and I would have been able to retire by now. Everyone I know who moved from NYC to SF before me is now a multi-millionaire, because they got a job at stripe, palantir, pinterest, or some small companies that managed to get acquired for a large amount of money.

93 points by davidjnelson 9y ago

Obviously, it’s a stunted metric. Cost of living handicaps don’t factor in the quality of life that bigger, more diverse cities have to offer. It’s more than just the cost of “rent, transportation, and groceries.” Some people value that and others don’t and that’s fine. But don’t pretend it’s an absolute, universal metric. I know plenty of people who moved out of SF only to lament what they’re missing and in several cases, move back.

moocowtruck 9y ago

true but san Francisco is also one of the best places that pay for "making software"

sidlls 9y ago

I am very close to the 110 Austin/198 SF profile. I'll take putting ~15% of my unadjusted SF income away in savings over the same rate for the (downward) adjustment I'd get in Austin. Not to mention all the extra opportunities and wider variety of projects to work on and the cultural variety. If I were living in Austin, reading this article would make me think, "If SF Companies can pay $134,000 why am I selling myself short for $110,000."

chank 9y ago
Nobody in Austin is thinking that. Living in Austin, I wouldn't even consider SF for $134,000.
- sidlls 9y ago
  That isn't what I meant. I wouldn't consider SF for $134k, either. But someone getting $110k in Austin should be wondering why they aren't getting $134k in Austin instead. They're basically leaving $2k a month on the table because of some absurd adherence to regional pay scales.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    A regional variation isn't absurd. If someone offered me a job in SF, I'd insist on at least 20% more to try and counter the 50% higher cost of living.
    - sidlls 9y ago
      It is absurd. The value of an engineer's work doesn't magically adjust downward because of the circumstance of his or her location. Why aren't you insisting on that 20% bump now instead of leaving it on the table and reinforcing the existing inequity?
      - objclxt 9y ago
        > The value of an engineer's work doesn't magically adjust downward because of the circumstance of his or her location Yes it does! It's only absurd if you assume every person is able, willing, and has no barriers to relocating. But there are plenty of engineers with families and/or established ties who don't want to move. One of the main reasons Facebook, Google, and Apple have engineering offices in Seattle is to attract engineers from Microsoft/Amazon that don't want to uproot their families and move to the bay.
        sidlls 9y ago
        Sure. And they're all selling themselves short.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        The price of an engineer's labor isn't determined solely by the value of her work. It's a function of supply and demand. Demand is driven, in part, by value. But supply is driven, in part, by cost of living. In other words, if more people were willing to endure San Francisco's cost of living, supply would be higher and prices (salaries) would come down.
        itronitron 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jwatte 9y ago

They probably just multiplied cost of living straight up. Of course it doesn't work like that. If you live 20% below your "maximum means" then you can sock away a lot more money in the higher cost markets. Also, certain expenses, like cars, 401ks, and student loan payments are fixed cost and thus their relative percentage grows in cheaper/lower salary areas. So, anyone saying "adjusted for cost of living" needs to also cough up methodology details, or the comparison is impossible.

balls187 9y ago
Do people own cars in San Fran? You pretty much need to in Austin.
- baddox 9y ago
  In my experience, mostly in the small pre-series-B tech startup scene in SF, very few people who live and work in SF own cars.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  31% of San Franciscans are car free [1]. In 2015, at least, over 50% of trips in San Francisco were made without a personal car [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_... [2] https://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/02/03/new-data-shows-most-trips-in-sf-are-made-without-a-private-automobile/ https://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/02/03/new-data-shows-most-tr...
- loeg 9y ago
  You don't need to in SF, but kind of do if you live in the broader bay area, which is much more sprawled.

Kinnard 9y ago

This contrasts with other research— "Does it Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?": https://triplebyte.com/blog/does-it-make-sense-for-programmers-to-move-to-the-bay-area https://triplebyte.com/blog/does-it-make-sense-for-programme...

sidlls 9y ago
Triplebyte's customers are disproportionately in the Bay and NYC. That doesn't alter facts, of course, but it is worth considering in the presentation (e.g. your link) and discussion of them.
sjg007 9y ago
The 15k benefit by triple byte (live in SF) conflicts with the 50k premium by Indeed if living in Austin.

pmoriarty 9y ago

And yet "we have a shortage of engineers".

loeg 9y ago
We only have a shortage of engineers willing to work for really cheap. It's just another way of complaining that tech employees are expensive.

syllogism 9y ago

This is plainly an advertorial...There's no way to trust the methods, data or conclusions, no matter how "truthy" it may or may not sound.

cpncrunch 9y ago
The link to their study isn't working any more (https://hired.com/state_of_salaries_2017 https://hired.com/state_of_salaries_2017).
- yissachar 9y ago
  Looks like they somehow converted the hyphens to underscores: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017 https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017

chis 9y ago

It's weird to see articles like this not even mention the massive sampling bias. Most Seattle devs work for Amazon or Microsoft, whereas SF is a tech hub filled with startups and other low-paying opportunities.

acchow 9y ago
Not to mention the sampling bias of people who used the Hired platform.
- bgirard 9y ago
  And the fact they're only including base salary instead of looking at total compensation. Bonus and (public) equity would probably skew the numbers and thus change the conclusions drawn here. This kind of distortion makes the Toronto market seems a lot better compared to SF because it's not common to receive a large equity grant in Toronto.
- wnevets 9y ago
  So dont use hired for sf jobs

chubot 9y ago

Another way to look at it: the absolute amount of money you save matters, especially if you're young. It's better to make a lot and save a lot. And I don't think it's too hard to save money with a $160K salary, unless you have kids. That is, the salary to expenses ratio isn't the only thing to look at. For example, if you save 10% of your money in SF and make $150K, that's $15K a year in savings. If you save 14% of your money in Austin and make $100K, that's $14K a year in savings. Even though you went through 90% of your salary in SF and only 86% in Austin, living in SF is better, because you saved more money in absolute terms. You can move elsewhere and take advantage of that savings. If you only care about money, the ideal strategy is probably to move to SF in your 20's, make a high salary, and then move out of SF. A lot of people these days don't have kids until their 30's. (Anecdotally that seems to be what a lot of people have done in the past decade -- move out of the Bay Area when they want to have kids.) This also doesn't account for the fact that SF has more "outliers" and more choices. You might be pleasantly surprised by the kind of job you can get or the kind of money you can make in SF. In most cities (certainly not all), you probably won't be surprised. The job market is what it is. (I'm assuming something about their methodology here, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yourapostasy 9y ago
> ...move out of the Bay Area when they want to have kids... This is fascinating to me, because if demographers' prognostications are to be believed, then future growth economies (on the multiple-decades-scale) are heavily represented by new middle-class families, in Asia and Africa, and to a lesser extent the Middle East and South America. So not only is the Bay Area ecosystem doubling down on its geographic centrism into a non-growth geography, it is tripling down on a bet that a non-family-oriented HQ culture (where the majority of unicorn companies consider the majority of their staff "who matter" to be located) will innovate sufficiently to penetrate and hold family-oriented heavy-growth markets of the future.
- asveikau 9y ago

cletus 9y ago

So I guess it's interesting to look at salary in terms of the local cost of living but that's actually pretty meaningless. The reason is you don't have to live "average". This is the strategy many employ. Do their time, save a lot of money and leave. I come from Australia. I live in Manhattan. The amount of money I can save here is now than I can earn in Australia. It's just ridiculous how much better it is. Also I think just is the real winner for this strategy. For one you don't need a car here. That saves you on buying a car, gas, maintenance, insurance, tickets, damage, parking and so on. Plus you can actually live in decent places for much less than anywhere in the Bay Area, like Jackson heights. I mean Austin isn't bad either but you need a car there.

Domenic_S 9y ago
I promise you're spending as much on MTA passes as someone in Austin does on a modest car.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- crazygringo 9y ago
  $121 for a monthly unlimited MTA pass. How on earth do you spend only $121/month on a modest car, including gas, insurance and depreciation? I'm pretty sure that's not possible.
  - s0rce 9y ago
    Maybe possible if you live in a low cost of living place, have good insurance record and a old crappy car, own your car and rarely drive but it would be close.
    - vorotato 9y ago
      or the car is paid off and you're just paying depreciation and gas
  - 9y ago

justhackedme 9y ago

Obviously...

bonniemuffin 9y ago

This article doesn't seem to mention non-salary compensation like stock options and RSUs, which can form a pretty large fraction of total compensation, and might vary wildly between locales.

throwthisawayt 9y ago

No where in the article do they mention how they factor in cost of living into the comparison. As other commenters have pointed out, most studies naively make a linear adjustment; i.e. if cost of living is 2x you need 2x the salary. This makes no sense. Say your cost of living is 30k and your salary is 100k in one city. In a 2nd City your cost of living is 60k and 180k. A rational economic decision would be to live in City 2 since it maximizes your savings. The linear adjustment based on cost of living only make sense if a person is saving 0% of their salary. The other issue is I don’t buy the 110k vs 130k difference in Austin. They are not considering total comp in which case the delta is way bigger. Finally, Hired is mostly used by startups and low to medium paying employers. There is a huger salary difference at large tech firms between SF and other cities. What this study is really saying is “if you want to work at medium size companies, don’t earn anything beyond a salary, and spend all of your salary San Francisco is not worth it”.

timr 9y ago
"Say your cost of living is 30k and your salary is 100k in one city. In a 2nd City your cost of living is 60k and 180k. A rational economic decision would be to live in City 2 since it maximizes your savings." This doesn't actually happen, except in the heads of naïve young dudes who want to justify living in SF right now. Total REAL compensation for a non-senior engineer in SF is somewhere around $130k right now, with some Magic Stock Bux (probably worthless! maybe not!) thrown in for fun...but those don't buy burritos. Total comp of $110k sounds reasonable for Austin, as well. You can shift the ranges up or down based on seniority, but the spread is about the same, and the range caps out at around $200k in both markets for all but the most exceptional people. In other words, the salary premium they're talking about here sounds right to me, and a premium of $20k a year is more than consumed by the 3x difference in rent, alone. You can perhaps justify going to SF on other grounds (career growth, networking, etc.), but it's not purely economically rational for most people.
- shados 9y ago
  Yeah, it is a gold rush. It's pretty easy (relatively speaking) to make well over 200k at a public company with some experience if you include stocks. And some people are lured by options of startups (it's a gamble!). It's harder to get that elsewhere. Not everyone (or most) get there, but a lot do, and even more try.

scurvy 9y ago

LA (at least in the places you'd want to live) is no longer cheaper than SF. This data set is flawed.

Judgmentality 9y ago
Do you have any data to back up that claim?
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
No, Nice places in SF are still a bit more expensive than nice places in LA (and Santa Monica of course). They both have been getting more expensive, but the difference is still there.
- scurvy 9y ago
  You need a car in LA, not SF so there's the cost of car ownership. Venice and Santa Monica have skyrocketed the past 3 years due to Snap. $9500/mo for a 2BR at 4th and Rose? Happening location, but that's much higher than SF. https://twitter.com/chiropractic/status/926191351430971392 https://twitter.com/chiropractic/status/926191351430971392 Housing costs are probably equal now or within a percent or two.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Most of Santa Monica isn’t that bad, and even Venice can be reasonable away from the water. There are plenty of places in SF that exceed high end places in LA for rent, and they are similar or greater in area to boot. Let’s at least compare apples to apples. It isn’t just SNAP, google is big in Venice as well. Many tech startups are in the west of LA. I just don’t a year in Westwood. It was pricey, but not SF pricey. And ya, you need a car, which is also true for much of the Bay Area. (Well, we didn’t need a car until we had a kid, Uber + bus worked well enough before child car seats became an issue)
    - scurvy 9y ago
      I'd hardly call 4th and Rose "high-end" though. That was kind of my point. Even the periphery, fringe places are coming up to SF levels.

xor1 9y ago

I'm very jealous of my friends with SF jobs who work remote and live with their parents. I know three who do this, they're all late 20s/early 30s. I totally would do it if I had the opportunity, I still get along great with my folks. I also know 1 person with a remote SF job in the midwest who lives like a king.

s17n 9y ago

Tl;dr: they took an ad for Hired.com and made it into an article. There's no methodology or data reported.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

L5 Google engineers are getting $800k RSU packages over 4 years. Netflix pays their senior engineers > $400k/yr straight cash. I have a friend with 8 years experience getting $200k/yr base at Facebook and 125k/yr in RSUs. Sure, exactly 50% of the engineers in SF make below average salaries, but the top 50% are doing phenomenally well.

chrisco255 9y ago
Netflix, Google, and Facebook would be in the top 10% if not 1% of all software developer jobs in terms of compensation.
- pfarnsworth 9y ago
  They are also one of the largest employers in the Bay Area, with tens of thousands of engineers in total. So they represent quite a large number of engineers and large percentage of Bay Area employment. Plus LinkedIn, Apple, Amazon, etc all strive to have equitable pay as well. It's not just 1% of the engineers that make this.

dimva 9y ago

As an engineer living in SF, I agree that it doesn't really make sense for the average software developer to live here. But, if you are top 10-20% (not necessarily a superstar), it's definitely the place to be. Whether you want to work at startup or a big company, the pay vastly exceeds the extra cost of living. At a startup, you actually have the chance to make lots of money in an acquisition or IPO. In other places, you really don't. I used to live in NYC. There's tumblr, mongodb, and zocdoc, all in the $1 billion range, which only makes the founders and a few early employees rich. Foursquare was really hot for awhile, but ended up disappointing. Rapgenius imploded. Betaworks companies either stagnated or outright failed. I know tons of great people who got jobs at the hottest companies in NYC at the time and ended up with nothing. In SF/bay area, there's uber, facebook, google, palantir, airbnb, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, lyft, stripe, square, etc, etc, etc. All of these recently started companies are worth billions, and have created or will create lots of millionaires. More importantly, I don't remember any big disappointments in bay area companies, besides maybe dropbox. Almost every hot company from 5 years ago is now worth a lot more money. It's fairly easy to select which startup to work for if you want to optimize for equity payout. Today, I would probably pick flexport. At a big company, you get to work on the most interesting projects. The top executives for all the biggest tech companies are here, so all the best projects are going to be here as well. And the pay is very good - I don't know any senior engineers making less than $300,000 a year, including people who are just a few years out of grad school. In both cases, you get to work on the most interesting technology. For example, there are no self-driving car companies in other areas (besides Pittsburgh). The most successful blockchain businesses (coinbase, ripple) are here. The companies that have to deal with the biggest scale are here (google, facebook). Personally, I more than doubled my already-high pay in NYC by moving to SF. Not moving here earlier was a big career mistake - I would have worked on far more interesting projects with much more competent coworkers and I would have been able to retire by now. Everyone I know who moved from NYC to SF before me is now a multi-millionaire, because they got a job at stripe, palantir, pinterest, or some small companies that managed to get acquired for a large amount of money.