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Again, this doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense without location data. I'm voting with my salary adjusted to San Francisco levels by using the following a

Again, this doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense without location data. I'm voting with my salary adjusted to San Francisco levels by using the following adjustment tool: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/ http://www.bestplaces.net/col/ I'd recommend that people do the same so we can remove a substantial source of noise from this poll and actually get a meaningful distribution.

almightygod 15y ago
I'm not sure that is accurate. To my surprise...my NYC salary of $176,000 adjusted to San Francisco should be $217,151 Is SF really more expensive then NYC?
- bartonfink 15y ago
  I'm not sure - never lived in either place. I'm not particularly tied to that calculator, it just came up first in a Google search. I do, however, think it's important to remove the location parameter from the salary function as best as we can. Otherwise the distribution of results is meaningless.
  - portman 15y ago
    In my personal experience, there's a growing trend of developers working remotely from wherever they want. As that trend becomes more mainstream, I would expect regional differences in developers' salaries to shrink. So I don't think the poll is meaningless without geography.
  - MrKurtHaeusler 15y ago
    No I don't think so. You will have a lot of people who live in average places and have average salaries entering in their information, and any information generated from data is going to be representative, and reveal something about average salaries in average places. Then you might get a whole bunch of people in expensive places entering in their large salaries, and any information generated from that data will reflect that. Then you will have a smaller number of people living out in the country, entering in their low salaries. Now there aren't too many of them so the affect they have on the statistics is proportional to their number. Basically, you will end up with a number like 70k as an average salary. And that means something. It means the average developer, wherever he may live, earns about 70k. Sure people in expensive places earn more than that on average, people in cheaper places earn less. But that is obvious, each person in each place entered their salary and they all counted towards the average. Now if everyone decided to try and correct away location, whatever that means, and scaled their salaries up to some arbitrarily expensive city, you might end up with a value like 120k, when in fact a vast majority of people are earning less than that. How is that representative? How is that useful or meaningful? Even people living in expensive cities are going to look at that value, and think they are earning below average when they aren't.
- mbesto 15y ago
  Depends on where you live in NYC. Average salary in Manhattan is $120k.
- dekayed 15y ago
  From the breakdown provided by the calculator, it looks like the big differentiator is housing costs (369 vs 250). My guess would be that they are using housing data for places like Queens/Brooklyn, where housing can be considerably cheaper than Manhattan, but are not considering places like South San Francisco, Colma, etc. when calculating the housing prices for San Francisco.
  - mattj 15y ago
    Queens / Brooklyn (other than Williamsburg) can be orders of magnitude cheaper than Manhattan. Colma / South SF / Oakland are probably 30% cheaper than SF. Still cheaper, but not overwhelmingly so.
- sgk284 15y ago
  Use WolframAlpha instead: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24176%2C000+in+manhattan+to+san+francisco http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24176%2C000+in+manhatt... More accurate and they give a lot more details to the data. *Note: I specifically stated 'Manhattan' in that query
- keithnoizu 15y ago
  Yes, although a large part of it depends on if you want to rent or buy. Rent is comparable in both cities from what I've seen, although nyc (unlin=ke san francisco) has semi reliable public transport and more rent friedly areas with reasonable commutes.
spottiness 15y ago
If we do that then we would be trusting that tool, which doesn't look right to me. (I don't think that SF is 138% more expensive than Miami, FL.) Let's put whatever we make, knowing that it's just an approximation. By the way, I'd rather live in an expensive city making proportionally more money, because my savings would also be proportionally larger, and when you're buying a plane ticket to Europe online or a pair of shoes at Zappos, they don't check your zip code to give you a price.
- badave 15y ago
  I live in San Francisco and it is probably 138% more expensive than Miami, FL. A cheapo 1br in the city runs around $1200 a month. Nice places cost $1500-2500 a month. I'm paying $2k a month myself but it's a really nice place w a Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and city view. How much are places in Miami?
  - killion 15y ago
    As someone that moved to the bay area from Miami 6 years ago 138% sounds about right to me. Comparing apples to apples you would need to compare Biscayne, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables in Miami to SF. Those neighborhoods are $1,000 to $2,000 a month.
    - djjose 15y ago
      As someone making the move from Miami to SF I can give some approximations that are hopefully time-accurate. Brickell/Downtown/South Beach/Grove 1BR prices are in the $1200-1600 range down here now for a now standard pad. You can of course go much higher, but not much cheaper (cheapest I've seen is $1100, a total steal these days). I myself have paid $1250 or so the last few years, however the building I just left in Brickell now has 1BRs starting at $1400. Demand has certainly moved the price needle up in the cooler parts of town here. For a similar looking place in SF I'm looking at the $1800-$2000 range in similarly cool parts of town. I could of course venture out to the Richmond and save/get more space but that's the same anywhere. In keeping apples to apples I'm comparing the Miami areas above to Nob Hill/Russian Hill/North Beach/Marina/Pac Heights/Inner Richmond areas. If I'm off in the SF comparisons someone please DO let me know. :)
smackfu 15y ago
Haha: "Housing is 581% more expensive in San Francisco." And I live in the Northeast! I mean, I guess they would need to pay me a lot more, because I literally could not spend 6x my current rent, because that would be all of my income.
- allenp 15y ago
  I think it means you would have 6 times less housing for what you're paying now (although that could also be non-sensical).
- sabat 15y ago
  Too many people confuse SF with the Bay Area. SF is just one city in a much larger populated region. You don't need to live in SF proper even to work there. And housing is cheaper outside of the City than in it (generally).
  - kstenerud 15y ago
    It's just a pain to bart/caltrain/drive every day.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    Tell you what, Mountain View / Palo Alto is getting ridiculous. My 650sqft one-bedroom which cost $1700 2 years ago, is going up to $2600 when I move out. Granted you can still find cheaper in Mountain View, and you can get wayy cheap in the East Bay, but honestly the city is not looking so expensive to me these days.
    - mahyarm 15y ago
      The $150/month bridge toll tax difference is how you should calculate the rent.
rmason 15y ago
Just did a comparison between East Lansing and San Francisco on that site. Salary went up 2.25 times. SF cost of living is 1.5 times and rent is 6.6 times as expensive. Holy cow!
BenSchaechter 15y ago
If you ever need to run a poll with location data -- please feel free to use my site: http://gopollgo.com http://gopollgo.com -- we give awesome reports and location data all free of charge.
kbd 15y ago
Sheesh, I live in Austin, TX and according to that, my salary adjusted for San Francisco nearly doubles.
MrKurtHaeusler 15y ago
Why? How are honest values more "noisy" than faked ones? I mean if it turns out that more programmers work in places that have San Francisco salaries, then those values will dominate anyway. If people in other smaller cities with lower salaries artificially inflate theres for the survey, they survey will present a skewed result. If they enter the correct values, then whatever information can be extracted from it will also be more accurate. I recommend people don't enter "adjusted" information in.
neild 15y ago
That calculator is making a very common and yet very fundamental error: It assumes that cost of living adjustments should apply linearly across a salary range. It costs more to live in San Francisco that it does to live in Detroit. However, that additional cost is largely static: You'll pay a lot more for housing, you'll probably pay noticeably more for food, and you may pay somewhat more for clothing and other items. You won't pay more for a car (if you have one), you won't pay more for the items you buy from Amazon, and you won't pay more for your Netflix subscription. If you earn $30,000/year, the difference in cost of living between San Francisco and Detroit will be dramatic. You may not be able to afford a place to live in San Francisco at all on that salary. If you earn $300,000/year, the difference will be almost negligible, since your living expenses will be a trivial portion of your income. (The one kicker will be housing--you'll probably need to settle for a smaller living space.) It doesn't make any sense to apply a cost of living adjustment as a strict multiplier, which that calculator does. It claims that someone making $30,000 in Detroit will need an $80,000 salary in San Francisco to be equivalent, while someone making $300,000 will need $800,000. That's clearly ludicrous. It does not cost an additional $500,000 annually to live in San Francisco. Determining equivalent cost of living is a complex question, and will always be imprecise. There are things that simply can't be converted--on my current salary, I could afford to buy a house with a hundred acres of surrounding woodland near my home town. There is no amount of money in the world that will buy that in San Francisco. Equally, there are many things available in San Francisco and its environs that can't be had for love or money in my home town.
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  > Determining equivalent cost of living is a complex question, While that's true, the calculator presented isn't as bad as you make it out to be. It splits up the calculations across several different indexes. Food, Housing, Utilities, Transportation, Health, and Misc. It's increase is based merely on the average. This is probably fair, considering if you want to maintain the same life style you have in one location, this gives you an estimate as to what you'll need. And I imagine if you live in Detroit and spend a substantial portion of that on housing, you'll need that much of a pay raise to maintain that same level of housing. You even suggest this: "The one kicker will be housing--you'll probably need to settle for a smaller living space." That's the point. The monetary comparison assumes you maintain the same level of housing. Obviously it's not precise. However, if you accept that housing will be different, you can remove it from the equation. In this case, the overall percentage is used, but housing is the reason for that. Remove housing, and it helps get a good idea of overall living costs.
mburnett 15y ago
Wow. It says Palo Alto, CA is 71% MORE expensive than NYC. That result alone left me feeling that this data is not what I am looking for. I have lived in both places and disagree. I am curious about what "NYC" means to this site.
- gnosis 15y ago
  Location, location, location. It would probably make a lot more sense to compare Palo Alto to a rich neighborhood in NYC, or even to Manhattan proper, rather than to NYC as a whole. Compared to NYC, Palo Alto is tiny, way less populated, and way less densely populated -- and there are still plenty of dirt cheap places to live in NYC (though you might not want to live in those places, for various reasons). Living in Palo Alto would be more like living on the Upper East Side or in the Wall St district.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
iamjoshua 15y ago
I think that in addition to location, degree of expertise or years of experience are important factors which often correlate with location. For instance, if you live in the midwest and make your living tweaking wordpress themes, you may consider yourself a "programmer". However, that wouldn't fly in a major city. So I would speculate that salaries are higher in SF, for example, but the quality of the "programmer" is significantly higher than in other locations. Just my 2 cents...

almightygod 15y ago

I'm not sure that is accurate. To my surprise...my NYC salary of $176,000 adjusted to San Francisco should be $217,151 Is SF really more expensive then NYC?

bartonfink 15y ago
I'm not sure - never lived in either place. I'm not particularly tied to that calculator, it just came up first in a Google search. I do, however, think it's important to remove the location parameter from the salary function as best as we can. Otherwise the distribution of results is meaningless.
- portman 15y ago
  In my personal experience, there's a growing trend of developers working remotely from wherever they want. As that trend becomes more mainstream, I would expect regional differences in developers' salaries to shrink. So I don't think the poll is meaningless without geography.
- MrKurtHaeusler 15y ago
  No I don't think so. You will have a lot of people who live in average places and have average salaries entering in their information, and any information generated from data is going to be representative, and reveal something about average salaries in average places. Then you might get a whole bunch of people in expensive places entering in their large salaries, and any information generated from that data will reflect that. Then you will have a smaller number of people living out in the country, entering in their low salaries. Now there aren't too many of them so the affect they have on the statistics is proportional to their number. Basically, you will end up with a number like 70k as an average salary. And that means something. It means the average developer, wherever he may live, earns about 70k. Sure people in expensive places earn more than that on average, people in cheaper places earn less. But that is obvious, each person in each place entered their salary and they all counted towards the average. Now if everyone decided to try and correct away location, whatever that means, and scaled their salaries up to some arbitrarily expensive city, you might end up with a value like 120k, when in fact a vast majority of people are earning less than that. How is that representative? How is that useful or meaningful? Even people living in expensive cities are going to look at that value, and think they are earning below average when they aren't.
mbesto 15y ago
Depends on where you live in NYC. Average salary in Manhattan is $120k.
dekayed 15y ago
From the breakdown provided by the calculator, it looks like the big differentiator is housing costs (369 vs 250). My guess would be that they are using housing data for places like Queens/Brooklyn, where housing can be considerably cheaper than Manhattan, but are not considering places like South San Francisco, Colma, etc. when calculating the housing prices for San Francisco.
- mattj 15y ago
  Queens / Brooklyn (other than Williamsburg) can be orders of magnitude cheaper than Manhattan. Colma / South SF / Oakland are probably 30% cheaper than SF. Still cheaper, but not overwhelmingly so.
sgk284 15y ago
Use WolframAlpha instead: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24176%2C000+in+manhattan+to+san+francisco http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24176%2C000+in+manhatt... More accurate and they give a lot more details to the data. *Note: I specifically stated 'Manhattan' in that query
keithnoizu 15y ago
Yes, although a large part of it depends on if you want to rent or buy. Rent is comparable in both cities from what I've seen, although nyc (unlin=ke san francisco) has semi reliable public transport and more rent friedly areas with reasonable commutes.

spottiness 15y ago

If we do that then we would be trusting that tool, which doesn't look right to me. (I don't think that SF is 138% more expensive than Miami, FL.) Let's put whatever we make, knowing that it's just an approximation. By the way, I'd rather live in an expensive city making proportionally more money, because my savings would also be proportionally larger, and when you're buying a plane ticket to Europe online or a pair of shoes at Zappos, they don't check your zip code to give you a price.

badave 15y ago
I live in San Francisco and it is probably 138% more expensive than Miami, FL. A cheapo 1br in the city runs around $1200 a month. Nice places cost $1500-2500 a month. I'm paying $2k a month myself but it's a really nice place w a Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and city view. How much are places in Miami?
- killion 15y ago
  As someone that moved to the bay area from Miami 6 years ago 138% sounds about right to me. Comparing apples to apples you would need to compare Biscayne, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables in Miami to SF. Those neighborhoods are $1,000 to $2,000 a month.
  - djjose 15y ago
    As someone making the move from Miami to SF I can give some approximations that are hopefully time-accurate. Brickell/Downtown/South Beach/Grove 1BR prices are in the $1200-1600 range down here now for a now standard pad. You can of course go much higher, but not much cheaper (cheapest I've seen is $1100, a total steal these days). I myself have paid $1250 or so the last few years, however the building I just left in Brickell now has 1BRs starting at $1400. Demand has certainly moved the price needle up in the cooler parts of town here. For a similar looking place in SF I'm looking at the $1800-$2000 range in similarly cool parts of town. I could of course venture out to the Richmond and save/get more space but that's the same anywhere. In keeping apples to apples I'm comparing the Miami areas above to Nob Hill/Russian Hill/North Beach/Marina/Pac Heights/Inner Richmond areas. If I'm off in the SF comparisons someone please DO let me know. :)

smackfu 15y ago

Haha: "Housing is 581% more expensive in San Francisco." And I live in the Northeast! I mean, I guess they would need to pay me a lot more, because I literally could not spend 6x my current rent, because that would be all of my income.

allenp 15y ago
I think it means you would have 6 times less housing for what you're paying now (although that could also be non-sensical).
sabat 15y ago
Too many people confuse SF with the Bay Area. SF is just one city in a much larger populated region. You don't need to live in SF proper even to work there. And housing is cheaper outside of the City than in it (generally).
- kstenerud 15y ago
  It's just a pain to bart/caltrain/drive every day.
- dasil003 15y ago
  Tell you what, Mountain View / Palo Alto is getting ridiculous. My 650sqft one-bedroom which cost $1700 2 years ago, is going up to $2600 when I move out. Granted you can still find cheaper in Mountain View, and you can get wayy cheap in the East Bay, but honestly the city is not looking so expensive to me these days.
  - mahyarm 15y ago
    The $150/month bridge toll tax difference is how you should calculate the rent.

rmason 15y ago

Just did a comparison between East Lansing and San Francisco on that site. Salary went up 2.25 times. SF cost of living is 1.5 times and rent is 6.6 times as expensive. Holy cow!

BenSchaechter 15y ago

If you ever need to run a poll with location data -- please feel free to use my site: http://gopollgo.com http://gopollgo.com -- we give awesome reports and location data all free of charge.

kbd 15y ago

Sheesh, I live in Austin, TX and according to that, my salary adjusted for San Francisco nearly doubles.

MrKurtHaeusler 15y ago

Why? How are honest values more "noisy" than faked ones? I mean if it turns out that more programmers work in places that have San Francisco salaries, then those values will dominate anyway. If people in other smaller cities with lower salaries artificially inflate theres for the survey, they survey will present a skewed result. If they enter the correct values, then whatever information can be extracted from it will also be more accurate. I recommend people don't enter "adjusted" information in.

neild 15y ago

That calculator is making a very common and yet very fundamental error: It assumes that cost of living adjustments should apply linearly across a salary range. It costs more to live in San Francisco that it does to live in Detroit. However, that additional cost is largely static: You'll pay a lot more for housing, you'll probably pay noticeably more for food, and you may pay somewhat more for clothing and other items. You won't pay more for a car (if you have one), you won't pay more for the items you buy from Amazon, and you won't pay more for your Netflix subscription. If you earn $30,000/year, the difference in cost of living between San Francisco and Detroit will be dramatic. You may not be able to afford a place to live in San Francisco at all on that salary. If you earn $300,000/year, the difference will be almost negligible, since your living expenses will be a trivial portion of your income. (The one kicker will be housing--you'll probably need to settle for a smaller living space.) It doesn't make any sense to apply a cost of living adjustment as a strict multiplier, which that calculator does. It claims that someone making $30,000 in Detroit will need an $80,000 salary in San Francisco to be equivalent, while someone making $300,000 will need $800,000. That's clearly ludicrous. It does not cost an additional $500,000 annually to live in San Francisco. Determining equivalent cost of living is a complex question, and will always be imprecise. There are things that simply can't be converted--on my current salary, I could afford to buy a house with a hundred acres of surrounding woodland near my home town. There is no amount of money in the world that will buy that in San Francisco. Equally, there are many things available in San Francisco and its environs that can't be had for love or money in my home town.

jasonlotito 15y ago
> Determining equivalent cost of living is a complex question, While that's true, the calculator presented isn't as bad as you make it out to be. It splits up the calculations across several different indexes. Food, Housing, Utilities, Transportation, Health, and Misc. It's increase is based merely on the average. This is probably fair, considering if you want to maintain the same life style you have in one location, this gives you an estimate as to what you'll need. And I imagine if you live in Detroit and spend a substantial portion of that on housing, you'll need that much of a pay raise to maintain that same level of housing. You even suggest this: "The one kicker will be housing--you'll probably need to settle for a smaller living space." That's the point. The monetary comparison assumes you maintain the same level of housing. Obviously it's not precise. However, if you accept that housing will be different, you can remove it from the equation. In this case, the overall percentage is used, but housing is the reason for that. Remove housing, and it helps get a good idea of overall living costs.

mburnett 15y ago

Wow. It says Palo Alto, CA is 71% MORE expensive than NYC. That result alone left me feeling that this data is not what I am looking for. I have lived in both places and disagree. I am curious about what "NYC" means to this site.

gnosis 15y ago
Location, location, location. It would probably make a lot more sense to compare Palo Alto to a rich neighborhood in NYC, or even to Manhattan proper, rather than to NYC as a whole. Compared to NYC, Palo Alto is tiny, way less populated, and way less densely populated -- and there are still plenty of dirt cheap places to live in NYC (though you might not want to live in those places, for various reasons). Living in Palo Alto would be more like living on the Upper East Side or in the Wall St district.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

iamjoshua 15y ago

I think that in addition to location, degree of expertise or years of experience are important factors which often correlate with location. For instance, if you live in the midwest and make your living tweaking wordpress themes, you may consider yourself a "programmer". However, that wouldn't fly in a major city. So I would speculate that salaries are higher in SF, for example, but the quality of the "programmer" is significantly higher than in other locations. Just my 2 cents...