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It's actually hard to beat San Diego in a few respects: 1) The weather is just perfect all year long. 2) The cost of living, while high, isn't insane compared
by hkarthik 13y ago
It's actually hard to beat San Diego in a few respects:
1) The weather is just perfect all year long.
2) The cost of living, while high, isn't insane compared to places like the Bay Area or NYC.
3) The public schools are actually quite good in many of the areas without being far flung from the city.
The big downside, however, is that there just aren't many local jobs for techies. The few that exist pay very little compared to the ones in the Bay Area or even a little further north in LA despite the cost of living being on the high side.
My wife and I have talked about moving there for a while (we both work from home) but the big challenge is that we'd have to find other income streams (in addition to our day jobs) to fund a good lifestyle in San Diego. In the face of a pretty tepid local job market and challenges with remote work pay being lower, that seems to be a requirement to make it out there.
- mrfusion 13y agoHow much extra income would you need?
- hkarthik 13y agoIt really depends. We have 2 children so good schooling is a must and the better neighborhoods in SD cost a pretty penny. I currently live in Dallas, TX and for me the numbers work out this way: * Housing is 2-3x more expensive for comparable neighborhoods. * Jobs pay about 10-15% less on average. So if you have a $100K income and own a $300K home in Texas, you can expect to get a $85K income and own a $900K home (worst case scenario). Downsizing can make the numbers more favorable, but it only gets you so far. All that being said, I would probably need an secondary income stream that provides an additional 25% or more of my primary income stream to justify moving out there.
- mrfusion 13y agoI wonder if you could argue that you'd need a smaller house since you could spend more time outdoors? Food for thought ...
- nicholas73 13y agoI'm no expert in the SD job market, but my feeling is that there are many tech jobs but not the kind HN people are thinking of. There are large bio and defense industries there, along with some hardware companies like Qualcomm. It's definitely not a software haven though. I actually worked in SD in defense at graduation - I wouldn't say the pay was worse than the Bay, unless you were a rockstar Ruby ninja.
- ertemplin 13y agoI interned at Qualcomm once, and they are a pretty great place to work if you are a software engineer with experience in mobile, embedded systems, or even .NET. Plus their mobile computing division is growing incredibly quickly. Over the course of my 3 month internship, my team almost doubled in size. There is also a great web/javascript community that is growing in the area called sandiego.js (http://sandiegojs.org/ http://sandiegojs.org/). I attended most of their talks this summer and there were always people looking to hire people to do work for them.