4 ms·
Pay is partly based on cost of living, and cost of living helps to set the market rates. You'd have to pay me 10 times more than I get now, with a huge hiring
by burfog 7y ago
Pay is partly based on cost of living, and cost of living helps to set the market rates.
You'd have to pay me 10 times more than I get now, with a huge hiring bonus, to make me move to San Francisco. I'm not alone in this thinking. This is why the market rate is high.
Part of that is sort of circular, due to the bidding war for housing. Part is that some people just hate the political insanity. Part is that people have family connections elsewhere and they have hobbies that are incompatible with San Francisco.
- shuckles 7y agoLet’s say you’re the median American SWE getting paid $80k a year. You’re saying you wouldn’t move to SFBA for less than $800k/yr in total compensation? I find that hard to imagine.
- burfog 7y agoI can see what it costs. Getting $800k/yr means a house of about $1,600,000 should be affordable, but that gets you trash. Getting a "house" that PHYSICALLY TOUCHES the neighbor's house will go for more than that in a semi-tolerable San Francisco neighborhood. That is substandard living conditions.
- govg 7y agoHow do you afford housing wherever you make $80k? Unless literally everything comparable costs 10x in SF, there's no logical way you can say 10x is the mark at which SF wages are pegged at.
- shuckles 7y agoIn accounting, this is an idea known as operating leverage.
- shuckles 7y ago$1.6m will get you 2,200 square feet of sweet, sweet detached single family living in Pacifica, Berkeley, or Marin. Double an $80k annual income will get you a 640 square foot home with $250/square foot land and construction costs, so not a particularly high end or spacious place.
- treis 7y agoBriefly looking at redfin shows that my 500kish house would be 3.5 millionish in Mountain View. Similar in SF but it's a lot harder to find a directly comparable house. That's a 14k monthly difference in the mortgage. Equivalent to 240k annually after taking taxes into account. Using that number means I'm roughly at par with a FAANG salary given my level. But it's not like the FAANG engineer is setting fire to that 240k. Depending on where you are in your amortization schedule 20-80ish % of your payment goes to principle. And my 500k house is probably going to be worth 800k in 10 years while the bay area house would be 4.5-5 million. When you take that into account I'm probably at 70% of an equivalent FAANG position. The more important thing to look at here is risk. FAANG salaries and bay area real estate prices are out of whack with the fundamentals. If you get in and out without the bubble bursting you're sitting pretty. If it bursts or even has a 10% correction the FAANG engineer is way behind.
- shuckles 7y agoOne can rent a perfectly decent home in Cupertino with 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms for under $4,500 [1]. Price to rent ratios are very high for most SFH properties, so renting is often the right move. This will allow families to send their kids to public schools ranked among the best private schools in the nation for free, without any charter or magnet lotteries. I don't think rent for any comparable home in, say, Austin is more than $2,000/mo cheaper, or $40,000 before tax. That's a much narrower gap to justify than most of the hyperbole in this thread and especially narrow if both partners are working: job opportunities in the Bay Area are strong for almost all kinds of professions. [1] https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/cupertino-3-bedroom-3-bath-house-in/7049705970.html https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/cupertino-3-bedroom-3...
- xxpor 7y agoGod forbid you live in a townhouse. How do people survive in such poverty??