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SV is an anomaly. You have a super high concentration of VCs ploughing tens of millions in to hundreds (probably thousands) of companies. It's easy to compete f
by corford 12y ago
SV is an anomaly. You have a super high concentration of VCs ploughing tens of millions in to hundreds (probably thousands) of companies. It's easy to compete for talent when you have millions of someone else's money to spend on payroll.
In other areas there just isn't that kind of money floating about to compete with (nor is there as strong a need to compete in the first place as non-SV companies aren't fighting against a hundred other tech companies for access to the same talent). So, companies pay what they pay and a dev either sucks it up or moves to SV if he/she wants to earn more.
- pchristensen 12y agoI would assume that big companies that are post-investment (Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Autodesk, Cisco, Intel, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, etc etc etc) pay out several orders more dollars of salary than companies running on VC. Startups with VC money have to compete against THOSE companies to hire. Engineers here have a great alternatives and can optimize for money, stock, satisfaction, education, connections, etc, so you don't have to stay in a sucky job, low salary, or bad company. That is why salaries are so high. CA as a whole receives about $15B/yr in VC. Assuming every penny of that went to engineer compensation (not at all accurate - customer acquisitions is probably a bigger line item), that would be 75,000 jobs @ $200K company cost (probably low for the Bay Area). So VC directly pays for maybe 5-20K engineers in the Bay Area. Insatiable, rich tech companies are why salaries are high.
- corford 12y agoYep, really good points. Basically, the Bay Area is a land unto itself and assuming tech salaries in other parts of the country/world should be at comparable levels isn't really realistic.