3 ms·

>You must be in the Bay Area. A 120K salary is above the median for SW developers for most of the country, and grants them a great lifestyle: Big house, two car

by antt 8y ago

>You must be in the Bay Area. A 120K salary is above the median for SW developers for most of the country, and grants them a great lifestyle: Big house, two cars, vacation travel, etc. Hardly "living on peanuts". I'm not in the US currently. I have worked with teams in New York in finance and the wages expected were multiples of 120k. Likewise in London and Honk Kong.

checkyoursudo 8y ago
So, some of the most expensive cities in the world. How about the likes of Minneapolis or Frankfurt or Jakarta?
BeetleB 8y ago
Most of the US is not California or the NE. When someone says "most", they mean the outliers are not included. When one says "most Americans can't point out Egypt on the map", it's rather pointless to give examples of PhD's who can.
- mmt 8y ago
  That made me wonder, though, in this particular context, are these really outliers? Even just counting population, the Bay Area's CSA is 8.8M, NYC is 23.9M, Boston is 8.2M and LA is 18.9M. That's already over 18% of the population, just in the major urban centers of California and the Northeast. It's not much of a stretch for the percentage of tech jobs to be in those areas, and less of a stretch to imagine that the vast majority would be in some kind of high-cost area. I wasn't able to come up with suitable web search terms to find any numbers, but perhaps someone else has.
  - antt 8y ago
    Throw in Seattle and there are no tech jobs outside those areas to a first approximation. I don't know where the people above are getting hired, but the only places I've ever seen outside those major cities are incidental programming jobs to babysit VBA code that runs some business that has nothing to do with computers.
    - BeetleB 8y ago
      Denver, Austin, Houston, North Carolina, Chicago, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Boise to name a few. Granted, some of these have recently become pricey, but still nowhere near Seattle levels. Look at all big companies (and not just the recent Internet ones of the last 20 years), and look at where they have sites. Jobs in most of these places.
      - mmt 8y ago
        > Look at all big companies (and not just the recent Internet ones of the last 20 years), and look at where they have sites. Jobs in most of these places. But how many of those jobs are technical/programming (in those places)? Even by population alone (Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta making up the bulk), that's under 10.7%, less than CA+NE (and only half of CA+NE+Seattle?). That persuades me that these lower-cost areas are the exception, not the rule.
        kthejoker2 8y ago
        Not sure why you'd compare Houston to all of California? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statist... Just looking at top 50, you've got a real geographic spread - about half of the people are in CA/NE, the rest are split pretty evenly between the four quadrants...
        mmt 8y ago
        > Not sure why you'd compare Houston to all of California? I believe everyone in this sub-thread has used "CA" to mean the SF Bay Area plus greater Los Angeles (and certainly I have). Similary, "NE" was just shorthand for the big cities therein, not the whole region. Ultimately, population is just a very loose proxy for number of tech jobs.
logosmonkey 8y ago
Yeah, outliers. The rest of the US where costs of living are radically lower 120k is a reasonable expectation. It's actually a bit lower for subsets of those skills here in Columbus,OH. Mostly with large corps like Chase, Cardinal Health etc. But you only have a 1400$ mortgage for a three bedroom home here so it's all relative.

by antt 8y ago

checkyoursudo 8y ago

So, some of the most expensive cities in the world. How about the likes of Minneapolis or Frankfurt or Jakarta?

BeetleB 8y ago

Most of the US is not California or the NE. When someone says "most", they mean the outliers are not included. When one says "most Americans can't point out Egypt on the map", it's rather pointless to give examples of PhD's who can.

mmt 8y ago
That made me wonder, though, in this particular context, are these really outliers? Even just counting population, the Bay Area's CSA is 8.8M, NYC is 23.9M, Boston is 8.2M and LA is 18.9M. That's already over 18% of the population, just in the major urban centers of California and the Northeast. It's not much of a stretch for the percentage of tech jobs to be in those areas, and less of a stretch to imagine that the vast majority would be in some kind of high-cost area. I wasn't able to come up with suitable web search terms to find any numbers, but perhaps someone else has.
- antt 8y ago
  Throw in Seattle and there are no tech jobs outside those areas to a first approximation. I don't know where the people above are getting hired, but the only places I've ever seen outside those major cities are incidental programming jobs to babysit VBA code that runs some business that has nothing to do with computers.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    Denver, Austin, Houston, North Carolina, Chicago, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Boise to name a few. Granted, some of these have recently become pricey, but still nowhere near Seattle levels. Look at all big companies (and not just the recent Internet ones of the last 20 years), and look at where they have sites. Jobs in most of these places.
    - mmt 8y ago
      > Look at all big companies (and not just the recent Internet ones of the last 20 years), and look at where they have sites. Jobs in most of these places. But how many of those jobs are technical/programming (in those places)? Even by population alone (Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta making up the bulk), that's under 10.7%, less than CA+NE (and only half of CA+NE+Seattle?). That persuades me that these lower-cost areas are the exception, not the rule.
      - kthejoker2 8y ago
        Not sure why you'd compare Houston to all of California? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statist... Just looking at top 50, you've got a real geographic spread - about half of the people are in CA/NE, the rest are split pretty evenly between the four quadrants...
        mmt 8y ago
        > Not sure why you'd compare Houston to all of California? I believe everyone in this sub-thread has used "CA" to mean the SF Bay Area plus greater Los Angeles (and certainly I have). Similary, "NE" was just shorthand for the big cities therein, not the whole region. Ultimately, population is just a very loose proxy for number of tech jobs.

logosmonkey 8y ago

Yeah, outliers. The rest of the US where costs of living are radically lower 120k is a reasonable expectation. It's actually a bit lower for subsets of those skills here in Columbus,OH. Mostly with large corps like Chase, Cardinal Health etc. But you only have a 1400$ mortgage for a three bedroom home here so it's all relative.