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I moved from the midwest to San Francisco. In my experience: -> the culture here is more optimistic and open-minded; people are more willing to take risks an
by arebop 11y ago
I moved from the midwest to San Francisco. In my experience:
-> the culture here is more optimistic and open-minded; people are more willing to take risks and try hard things
-> the weather is more moderate
-> the scenery is more interesting and varied
-> there are vastly more (good) job opportunities for software engineers.
-> Bay Area/NYC software engineers get paid more than engineers elsewhere *on average*. But they are also much more skilled on average. If you're skilled enough to be hired in the bay area, then you probably will be paid less than what you could demand where your skill is rare.
-> cost of living is totally unreasonable in the bay area, and the stats understate this because many people here have massive effective subsidies from rent control and fixed property taxes.
- michaelchisari 11y agoBay Area does pay more than elsewhere. However, given the extraordinary rents, it doesn't pay that much more. If money is a concern, I'd say somewhere like NYC or LA is a better option.
- arenaninja 11y agoSalaries in LA area are low. I used to get recruiter spam for positions paying 38k-50k and asking for two years of experience. This wasn't even very long ago, about late 2013 in the Santa Monica area
- shampine 11y agoI don't think that is a truthy assessment as I just got a recruiter email in my inbox at $140k for full stack node.js. I think you can easily find both ends of the spectrum. Average seems to be about around $80-115k for most devs in LA.
- lallysingh 11y agoOr work in NYC and live in NJ/Long Island. If you can get productive on the commute, you can live in a nice house for very little money, in a good school district. It's not as trendy as Brooklyn/SF, but I have a basement, a back yard, and a shed (with power and water). I might put a rack back there, and not worry about noise...
- sbalea 11y agoI am sorry but I find it hard to be productive in a crowded and noisy NJ Transit train.
- juliangregorian 11y agoI live in NYC and have been considering moving to California. My impression is that both NYC rents and salaries are pretty much in line with SF, while LA is behind in both.
- kmonsen 11y agoHaving worked in tech in NYC and now in Mountain View you are technically correct, but it is not the whole picture. In NYC I lived in Brooklyn and took the subway to work and was pretty happy with that. In silicon valley this is usually not an option. There are company shuttles, but it is not the same as just jumping on the next city bound train. You will need a car, and you will want to live in expensive areas to avoid horrible commutes. This is also true for SF, the transportation system even there is nothing like NYC, even including NJ. On a personal level, I find SF/Bay area much more boring than NYC. The food options are nowhere near as good either. I'm happy with that as I'm getting older with a nice house and family. But if I was 25 I would stay in NYC, there are more than enough tech jobs there and you can live for cheaper if you want.
- StuffMaster 11y agoKnow any places to work in NY? I've been thinking of moving to Brooklyn myself.
- kmonsen 11y agoI worked for Google and enjoyed that. There are a number of startups in Brooklyn that look promising and of course there are lot of financial software development opportunities in Manhattan. I really liked Brooklyn, there is a lot going on there.
- ryanSrich 11y agoGiven the rent it actually pays less. A lot of people don't realize this. $3k for a studio apartment is insane.
- arebop 11y agoSorry, I was not clear: I think if you have the option to work in Silicon Valley, you can make more elsewhere. The housing crisis and (to a much lesser extent) generally high wages amplify this imbalance. Lots of people say that Silicon Valley pays particularly well, and I think this is true only statistically. Silicon Valley pays world-class engineers more than Chicago pays mediocre engineers. I believe a world-class engineer is likely to make more in Chicago than in Silicon Valley, provided that the engineer can find a suitable job at all in Chicago. So if want to maximize expected income, I think you should live in NYC working in finance, or if you don't like that option, anywhere in the U.S. except the Bay Area. I don't know anything about the rest of the world so I wouldn't give any advice about that. If you want to maximize the likelihood that you can find an interesting job in software, you should move to the Bay Area.
- gamechangr 11y agoMaybe...I'm not sure if you can find "world-class engineers" that are somehow interested in working with less than world-class coworkers (so if they were paid crazy amounts of money perhaps).