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I think it might be worth it to be there for a while if you're young and getting established. It still very much is a tech center and there's a great density of
by api 5y ago
I think it might be worth it to be there for a while if you're young and getting established. It still very much is a tech center and there's a great density of talent and jobs.
Live as light as you can and focus on learning and building your career. If you're not making at least $200k by age 30, leave. That's practically the poverty line if you want to start a family. A "fixer upper" starter house will be over a million dollars. I call the Bay Area the world's only six figure slum.
I wouldn't start a startup there unless it were lavishly funded, or unless it's made up exclusively of young people who are okay with sleeping on couches or living in tiny rooms.
The trend is toward place (in general, not just SF/SV) becoming less and less important over time. The old limitation that you have to be in the Bay Area to raise angel or VC money has been dead for years, and COVID massively accelerated the shift toward remote and distributed teams in knowledge-oriented industries. There is still benefit to going to a concentrated hub for a while to level up, but once you hit a certain level in your career you no longer need to stay.
- quickthrower2 5y agoSydney is a six figure slum but with fewer six figure jobs!
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoTrue. And it's not the only one. That's one of the things you have to figure wrt leaving/not coming to bay area -> where do you go instead? Once you start doing concrete comparisons.... the bay looks pretty good.
- siquick 5y ago200kUSD is 270kAUD and I doubt there are many dev jobs paying that in Sydney.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThat’s my intended point - high property prices but not the dev salaries to match. The decent 6-figures coming from the business roles but not dev. 270k developer? You can do it if you can write low latency C++ trading code, or get some super obscure but valuable tech contract gig.
- api 5y agoI still don't fully understand how some of today's real estate prices are possible. There are not that many buyers of the income or net worth required to afford these prices. How can a large scale market exist with so few customers who can reasonably afford the product?
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y agoSimple answer: The customers that can afford the product(s) are buying more than one.
- l33tbro 5y ago> How can a large scale market exist with so few customers who can reasonably afford the product? Cheap debt. Nobody has the net worth to afford all these places. So the value of the properties are relative to how much people can borrow. For the last few years, that has meant a borroing a lot since interest rates around 1.5%.