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> “If you want to own a house, have paid-for cars, put your kid through school, put away savings, and otherwise be completely comfortable then you can do just f
by dxbydt 8y ago
> “If you want to own a house, have paid-for cars, put your kid through school, put away savings, and otherwise be completely comfortable then you can do just fine.”
lol wut ? if you work in a typical SF startup, you can do precisely none of these things. Like, literally zero.
- aetherson 8y agoWell, it depends on the definition of "startup." If you work exclusively at seed-stage or A-round companies with like less than 15 employees, your salary will be a lot lower than if you work at lots of B and C-stage companies. I've worked at companies that at least called themselves startups for my entire career, and I own a house in San Bruno, my wife and I each have paid-for cars, we can put our kids through school, and we put away savings.
- matthewowen 8y agoSF startup cash comp for engineers is comfortably in the 150k-200k range, and often higher. This is series A, series B stage companies. If you have a few years of experience and are making less than this then I'm please to be able to inform you that you are underpaid. If you have one of those incomes at the higher end, you can do these things in the bay area. If you have more than one then that stuff is not hard at all. Berkeley has pleasant single family homes in a great school district around the $1MM mark. You can absolutely do that on $200k/year. IMO you should for sure be able to reach the mark where this is comfortable financially by the time you're around 30.
- geggam 8y agoYou mean people have quit coming in full cash 10-15% over ask for houses in the bay area ? 2 years ago people with standard financing didnt have a chance in hell of buying a house in the Bay
- matthewowen 8y agoI know a bunch of people who have bought in this price range with standard financing, and I based the numbers on sale prices.
- donaldknuth123 8y agoYou seem to be massively misunderstanding the Bay Area real estate market. Homes are routinely bought in full cash 20% over asking. No average engineers are making those kinds of offers.
- ummonk 8y agoThey'll be a lot more expensive by the time some of us turn 30.
- deanmoriarty 8y agoUnless you mean both spouses should earn around 200k and thus bringing in a FAANG-equivalent income of 400k, I really don't know how you could afford what you are saying on a single 150k-200k salary (and perhaps another 50k for your spouse's salary, since not everybody works in tech). After paying for CA taxes, fed taxes, kids' schools, rent, car expenses, 401k contributions, I really don't know how you would come up with the savings necessary for the huge down payment required for a house there. Just last week, a friend of mine got outbid on a ~1.5M house in the East Bay Area because another buyer came in and offered a down payment of $700k (!!), whereas my friend just had a more traditional 20%. Good luck getting to those savings on a 150k startup salary and mostly worthless options. In my experience, and I certainly respect yours, people just need to stop working for startups and go to big corporations, period. And I speak as someone who had a low 7 figure liquidation event from a startup, and I'm still so against startups, because that liquidation event still didn't match the compensation I could have gotten as FAANG all along.
- throwaway5752 8y agoIt's a big world, and a lot of interesting startups are not in SF. A lot of interesting startups in SF hire remote, too.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoThat's a California problem, not inherent to startups themselves.