5 ms·
In Silicon Valley, most likely you are not going to afford a house anyway.. .
by tanilama 8y ago
In Silicon Valley, most likely you are not going to afford a house anyway.. .
- Tiktaalik 8y agoWell you can't afford a house in Vancouver either so why not go to the USA and earn more. The spot with the best balance seems to be Seattle. High salaries and housing relatively affordable when compared to Vancouver or SF.
- s2g 8y agoNo. it's the worst. don't come here.
- mynameisvlad 8y agoSeattle's housing market is going up really quickly, though. Last time I moved, I definitely noticed higher rents and more expensive purchase prices compared to a few years ago. It's not yet at the level of Vancouver, and far from SF/NY levels, but its trajectory isn't great.
- jonny_eh 8y agoSounds like a good time to buy a house in Seattle then, if you can afford it.
- trhway 8y agoSunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple) median is close to 2M - that is only 5x of $400K which a lot of FANG and other engineers pull yearly (and that is the main reason for current SV home prices as, during such low mortgage rates, the market is naturally self-adjusting to 5-6x of prevalent salaries. In 2008 those houses were $700-800K+ - the 5-6x of those $120K-150K salaries back then).
- jseliger 8y agoIf only there were some way to put more houses on a given plot of land, perhaps by stacking one on top of another, we could somehow break this dynamic. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco_zoning_needs_more_density_and_tall_buildings.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...
- trhway 8y agoi'm yet to see a high-rise development resulting in cheaper housing, at least in US. No that i'm against it - i like it, when it is done right, for different reasons though. The housing prices are rising across the globe - one has to put somewhere all this money sloshing around. So, even to just stabilize the prices, one has to build faster than the money are printed - like Alice in Wonderland where you have to run fast just to stay at the same place. Basically all that NIMBY vs. YIMBY fights is just 2 poor hobos fighting for a penny and completely distracted with that fight while a nice rich gentleman sells them both to slavery and makes away with the money and all the rest of their possessions.
- pm90 8y ago> i'm yet to see a high-rise development resulting in cheaper housing, at least in US. No that i'm against it - i like it, when it is done right, for different reasons though. It definitely won't be one or 2 developments; there has to be a systematic increase in the housing stock. Which is why the latest California plan (which was shot down in committee) to increase the density around mass transit by default was so amazing. SF is NYC in the making. I know SF folks don't want to change the character of the city but something has to give; its attracting way too many people and we still need affordable housing for middle class folks.
- timr 8y agoRight. Only by building up will San Francisco finally achieve New York City's cheap rents.
- m0llusk 8y ago
- s2g 8y agoYeah, the argument is a bit ridiculous. You shouldn't go to the bay area because you will never be able to afford a 2 million dollar house on 300k a year. Stay in Vancouver and just buy a 1 million dollar house on 90k instead.
- titanomachy 8y agoWhere in Vancouver did you find this magical house that only cost 1 million dollars? Are you sure you weren't in Burnaby, or Coquitlam?
- sidlls 8y agoThe vast majority of engineers in the valley do not get FANG levels of compensation. Non-engineers earn even less. FANG employs a small fraction of all engineers, also. Using their salary as a baseline to analyze affordability introduces a strong bias towards one extreme of the tail. If one wishes to analyze affordability in general starting that bias makes the analysis not fit for purpose.
- taysic 8y agoIs 400k really for a lot of engineers? How many years of experience?
- jonny_eh 8y agoSeems way too high to me (I even used to work at Netflix as an engineer years ago).
- trhway 8y agoall the Netflix engineer salaries i know about are larger than $400K. And it may give you nightmares when/if you hear what Netflix offers when it gets into an offer bidding war with a compensation-comparable company :) To GP questions - there is a lot of info available around about FANG compensation. Wrt. other companies - several guys around have recently landed new jobs - between 250K by a junior guy with 12 years experience and 0.5M by the guy with 20+. Only one went to FANG, a junior with about 10years and he got close to 300K.
- bproven 8y agoI like how juniors are 10-12+ years lol This may be true, but again these are outliers - most people here are not cranking down 400K. Netflix hires the best of the best so these people are the top 10% of engineers probably... Not the avg joe
- bproven 8y agoIts not true. Most engineers are in the 150-200K range at the most. It is true that some companies like Netflix do pay much more, but Netflix goes for the best of the best. This is the not the majority of engineers. So realistically if you are talking 80% of engineers, then no, they are not making 400K (so they can easily buy a 2million dollar house in SV) they are making about a 1/3 of that.
- stale2002 8y agoEhhh, IF you are at Google/Facebook/Uber, AND you are an L5 senior engineer (6+ years of experience probably), then you might be making close to this. It is certainly DOABLE, and within reach to get a job at google and stay there for 3 years. But thats the population we are talking about here.
- eanzenberg 8y agoWhat percentage of FANG employees pull 400k yearly? The ones i know who work there make half that.
- ironjunkie 8y agoI agree. The thing with salaries is that you have a minority that is extremely well paid at FANG companies, and love to brag about it, given a false feeling that everybody is in that range. A good reminder that nobody brags about being paid 100k in tech,
- DrScump 8y agoSunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple) The Sunnyvale housing market may be "ground zero" for Apple due to supply, but Apple's "Spaceship" HQ is in Cupertino. Homestead is the border, except for a small chunk just west of Wolfe.
- hello_moto 8y agoFANG engineers pull $400k WITH RSUs. Base+Bonus won't be that high. And ... guess what... Bank uses Base (no bonus, no RSUs) to calculate your mortgage.
- trhway 8y ago>And ... guess what... Bank uses Base (no bonus, no RSUs) to calculate your mortgage. you have obviously never taken a mortgage in US. What bank typically uses is 2 last W-2s. In case if you don't know what W-2 is - it includes base + bonus + FMV of the vested RSUs as of the vest date.
- astrange 8y agoIf you made $400k a year I think you can convince a private banker to do something with them.
- dagmx 8y agoAs a Canadian in Vancouver who owns a home, the sad state of Vancouver is even the suburbs are ridiculously expensive. If I want to sell my downtown townhouse and buy a detached home or upgrade in any way I'm looking at a 1.5 hour commute easily and still not getting much. And once you're outside downtown , entertainment etc rapidly drops off. Alternatively in the bay area, where I may soon be moving, the suburbs have a strong drop off in cost from the hotspots while still maintaining a reasonable commute and quality of life. The issue is, Vancouver's infrastructure drops off so dramatically as you get further from downtown.