Cities with High Salary to Cost of Living Ratios for Software Developers
tgeonetta.comI suspect the cost of living data for Austin trails reality by some significant margin. The sources don't indicate the age of the data, but even if it's only a couple of years old, it's going to be wrong by enough to be a factor.
I have lived in Austin for a couple of years, and also lived here (and owned a house here) about 8 years ago. The cost of homes here has gone up tremendously since then. I was shopping for a house a few months ago, and was simply unable to buy one; those in my price range wouldn't accept my offer because it wasn't an all-cash offer (despite being $5000 or more over the asking price). Investors paying cash are buying aggressively here, driving up prices. Rental rates have risen at an even faster pace.
Certainly, it's cheaper here than in Silicon Valley. Five years ago, I was paying $2145 a month in rent for a house a couple of blocks from downtown Mountain View. Today I'm paying $1690 a month for a house quite far outside of downtown Austin and on the east side; renting in downtown is not an option, even at $2000+ a month. Apartments are somewhat cheaper, and buying a house is still notably cheaper than Silicon Valley, but the gap has been closing rapidly.
In short, Austin has grown incredibly fast in recent years, and the real estate market hasn't been able to absorb that growth in anything like a reasonable manner. So much so that I'd be shocked if the graphs in this article still reflect reality for Austin.
This is a common refrain, but one I consider misguided, having lived in Austin since the first .com collapse.
While Yes, housing costs have moved up, others have remained flat (so relatively compared to other cities, have moved down).
As silly as it sounds, my favorite metric is "Cost of Drinking". Find the fancy cocktail bars in any city's downtown. In Austin, nothing on the menu is above $12 at Midnight Cowboy or The Garage. Now compare that to the other cities on this list.
I am not sure you are fully connected into the situation anymore. Rents have increased around 40% over 5 years on average and that includes the outlying areas that aren't really even Austin anymore. Home prices are skyrocketing and out of control, e.g., Mueller development is in the $800,000 range for 3/3 on what looks to be about a 1/8 acre lot where you have a car sized back yard and you're paying around 2% property taxes per year. Then there's also the Fitch assessment that Austin home prices are the most overvalued IN THE COUNTRY http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/blog/real-estate/2014/12/a...
There is absolutely not way that the data is accurate, just alone the velocity of the Austin market guarantees that the data is inaccurate.
> In Austin, nothing on the menu is above $12 at Midnight Cowboy or The Garage. Now compare that to the other cities on this list.
I dunno if that's a great metric - or maybe it is and Austin's more expensive than you and I think. Cocktails at Gramercy Tavern are $14.
Eastside Showroom will be happy to serve you a $16 cocktail, and drink prices have climbed everywhere I frequent. It used to be easy to find $2-$3 decent beers in Austin... $4.50 is what Shiner costs these days.
By any metric I can think of, Austin costs more than it did even three years ago. All of my favorite restaurants are $2-$3 more for an entree than they were when I lived here in the past. And some have been priced out of downtown. Thai Passion (my favorite Thai restaurant anywhere which used the have a $5.75 lunch special) closed recently, and they aren't alone.
Again, it isn't California expensive but it's no longer Texas cheap either.
It's true that cocktails are extremely high quality in NY and generally the same price as they are elsewhere.
That said, you can't get a $2 Shiner Bock here.
Please tell me where to get a $2 Shiner.
HEB.
More seriously, it takes a happy hour. Doc's takes half off all Texas beers.
I have the same problem in Austin. Prices are going up faster than I can save, even accounting for the downpayment leverage. There's no way that I can compete with the all-cash offers that are $10k and $20k above asking price that are being made by investors and people from California and overseas. Knowing that it's a bubble, I think I'm going to have to wait until it pops, and just keep renting until then. Because commuting from Buda or Georgetown isn't attractive to me.
Yeah, and what developers here are going to have $500k cash to drop on a 3/2 in Crestview.
Oh Austin is so cute. I've lost apartments in Brooklyn getting outbid by $300K.
Austin's metro economy is currently insufficiently developed (that is, it hasn't found a way yet to geographically lock in any desirable, large-scale economic network effects) to support the kind of globally-unique signature metro economy associated with the metro areas like NYC, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, etc. Those signature economies can support the kinds of incomes it takes to regularly yield six-figure bidding gaps.
Tremendously is relative. Austin and SV real estate prices are not close at all. High property taxes keep home prices lower across almost all of Texas. Austin prices are limited in their 'irrational exuberance' upside since there's no way to finance a property tax bill and existing homeowners start to suffer. California is the opposite with low tax rates and proposition 13 covering existing homeowners - perfect conditions for price speculation.
The real estate prices aren't close, but what about salary? What about the real estate price relative to salary?
The salaries in neither area match up to current housing prices, nor do they keep up with the increasing prices year over year. What I have observed is that housing prices going up by 20% usually results in salaries only going up by 8%.
After 5 years, houses cost twice as much but salaries are only 40% higher. And to see those salary gains you have to switch companies and risk being labeled a "job hopper".
The game is rigged for developers in most of the tech hubs. There is a reason so many of us opt out of it by working remote in low cost areas.
So the question is, how much does that Mountain View place cost today? You don't need 1 million to buy a decent house in Austin. In SV/San Fran, good luck.
In a lot of places even 1 million isn't a decent house, once you try and accommodate kids.
If you consider sqft of home/land, amenities and distance to highly rated schools, Austin can be 10x less expensive, and it's easy to show examples of this.
Average $1.8M for 3b/3b in Mt View. $1.2 for 2b/1b. I paid $1600 for 2b/2b for a decent apartment (2625 California St) in Mountain View--in 2001. Now the same apartment goes for $3200.
You do if you're looking in south Austin (78704). Even tiny 1br bungalows go for $750k+.
Unlike SV though, if you go a few miles outside south Austin there are plenty of affordable homes in good neighborhoods. They may not be as hip or convenient, but at least they exist.
The life hack to actually come out ahead is to avoid these places and find a good opportunity in a cheaper place. I don't know a lot about Austin, but I'm familiar with NYC, and I think that example works too.
If you define the "cool" part of NYC as being in Manhattan, once you have a family it's irrelevant, because you can't live there... like 98% of everyone else, you end up in Jersey, the boroughs, or Long Island. Three hours north of NYC, a house costs 60-80% less, and you have the essentially the same access to NYC cool stuff without the hassle of NYC.
In my case, paying 7% of income for a mortgage on a nice big house that I will own in 15-20 years and banking savings is more appealing than some interest only loan on a $750k raised ranch in a big metro area. Barring building a successful business, a lottery-style liquidity event or selling your soul to some hedge fund, I don't see a reliable way to live in NYC, SFO, etc and coming out with any wealth.
The other life hack people do is to move to SF or NYC out of college, try to "make it", live like a grad student, bank a large savings cushion, and then retire to a cheaper place with a high quality of life when they want to have a family.
I have a few friends at Google who, after working there for close to 10 years, now are thinking about retiring to Portland, or Vermont, or North Carolina. The idea has certainly crossed my mind, that if I wanted to live in a rural area I could buy a house free & clear and be set for the rest of my life. I met an innkeeper in Alaska once that had worked in tech for 20 years, lived like a grad student, and when his kid was a teenager, bought a sailboat, sailed around the world, and came to settle in Seward, Alaska because they'd fallen in love with the town. I've heard it's pretty common in investment banking to have "your number", work for ~10 years until you hit it, and then retire to Fiji.
This is pretty much what I'm doing right now. When I moved to Seattle for a new development job I found roommates on Craigslist instead of paying about twice as much to rent a 1 BR. I'm now saving way more money than I otherwise would have, and I don't fall into the high spending trap because the people I spend most of my time with have more reasonable incomes that encourage frugality.
I don't have a target net worth or age for when I'll call it quits but the way I see it, I'm buying flexibility for the future without sacrificing any happiness today.
Three hours, seriously? That is no longer within the metro area of NY, not even close. If you're talking about suburban commuting, houses upstate in Westchester are still $1 million with a fat 3% property tax bill. The trains suck and have a history of safety issues and you have to spend 2 hours a day on one. No thanks.
Don't try to settle in the NY metro w/ a family unless you are in finance, your quality of life will suck. If you aren't living in the city there's no point to being here, I would much rather be somewhere like Utah, California, Wash state.
I live and work in Albany. I drive 5 minutes to work.
My family gets to hop on the Amtrak and enjoy the cultural advantages of NYC about once a month. We drive to places like the Bronx Zoo and Boston for various things.
When I was a kid in Queens, getting to Manhattan via transit easily took 2 hours. My son gets all of the benefits of not living in NYC, and many of the advantages.
There are basically five jobs in all of Albany outside of state government. Yes, many of us would love to live in quaint smaller/medium towns within sight of a major global city but there tends not to be much career opportunity there
It's within range to work remotely and come in a couple days every couple weeks, while living in a lovely village in the mountains, and to take relatively easy weekend trips to the city, while paying Midwest-level real estate prices on lovely old houses.
Not everyone's choice of lifestyle, but it's certainly a nice one.
Yea, NYC has a HUGE advantage because of the train system going into and out of the city. You can easily commute south to Jersey or north to Connecticut. Each stop going away from NYC drops ~$20K on comparable houses (with a few exceptions like Greenwich). I've heard in the bay area the train system is terrible.
> Three hours north of NYC, a house costs 60-80% less, and you have the essentially the same access to NYC cool stuff without the hassle of NYC.
You really don't need to go that far. In fact, you shouldn't. You'll hit Lake George and the prices will start to go back up.
An hour or two out and you'll be closer and the houses are just as cheap. You can also go West into NJ and you'll experience the same price drop.
The problem is that you'll be 30 min away driving from a decent grocery store. In fact, you'll be 30 min away driving from pretty much everything.
This is true if you're speaking of downtown Austin. Most tech companies are in north Austin, which is decidedly less cool and more strip mall-ish. You can still get a huge house for $200k if you look in Round Rock or Cedar Park -- both of which are within a 15-20 minute commute of the Braker/Metric area where most of the low-cost office space that attracts startups is. It's not super sexy, but cheap housing still exists in Austin if you're willing to drive a little bit.
Which is becoming a much bigger problem because of the crushing traffic and limited public transportation.
Welcome to Texas, you must be new here.
>I was shopping for a house a few months ago, and was simply unable to buy one; those in my price range wouldn't accept my offer because it wasn't an all-cash offer
I don't understand this. If you're pre-qualified for a $500,000 dollar loan how is your offer worse than someone willing to pay $495,000 cash?
Deal velocity. An "all cash" offer at 1% less than asking is more attractive to the seller's agent (not necessarily the seller) than a loan-process-backed offer, because the agent wants to close quickly and move onto the next deal. The loan process adds days and weeks to the deal, while the "cash" offer can literally close tomorrow.
I'm scare quoting "cash" because what is really happening most of the time is the cash represents investor pools of already-fronted, already-loaned-out sums; it's only the minority of "all cash" offers that are actually an individual investor writing out unencumbered checks (and even then, that check is still somewhat encumbered by future flip profit expectations). Really what is happening is you are seeing competition between de facto loans already-made and turned into ready cash, and loan promises.
> not necessarily the seller
Usually the seller too.
A quick tip for those in the market. If you're trying to beat out cash offers, there's a sweet spot in every market where after a certain price point, the cash buyers drop off.
My understanding of the Austin market (please correct me if you know otherwise, I was just an interested observer of the market so as to educate myself before pulling the trigger, not an active participant) is there are two such sweet spots: well below the Austin median (like the $150K area), and way into the stratosphere (like the $1.5M+ area).
Below the median, the fixed costs and time commitments per transaction eat up too much of the flipping profit. In the stratosphere, and their deal velocity slows down too much (plus there are issues with money management, i.e., left holding the bag when the bottom cycle arrives).
Neither of these sweet spots to avoid hordes of cash buyers are likely to appeal to the median HN reader trying to find a residence in Austin. Too low and either the school district is below acceptable performance and/or the commute distance too far (though Austin metro area has it easy commute time-wise compared to places like LA, SF, NYC, ORD, MIA). Too high and unless you are cashing out of an even greater asset-inflated area, you can't afford it.
There is also the fact that "pre-qualified" != "pre-approved". It is quite possible these days for a loan to be rejected at the last minute.
This. Closing a real estate deal is like running the hurdles. Cash buyers are starting the race at the midpoint.
Lots less stuff that can go wrong, too. If you're getting a loan, the bank will want at least an appraisal, plus pre-approved doesn't necessarily mean the cash will show up. It can often take a month or more to close a loan.
With a cash offer, once a title search is performed (a few days assuming no liens), the owners and buyers can swap keys and a check. If the seller wants cash sooner than later, this can be very attractive; for example, he or she may well be bidding on another house and need to make a deposit or down payment.
Sometimes we're provincially biased, though. What you describe is not all that unusual nationwide.
And not to point out the obvious, but five years ago was rock bottom for this nation's economy (and housing market). I don't think that's a fair comparison, even if it is Mountain View v. Austin.
If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue. You could live exactly where you wanted to live.
Want a 700 sq ft studio in Manhattan for $3k/month? Great. Want a 2000 sq ft ranch home next to a river out in the country with your own garden? Done. Want to just save as much as you can, with a cheap apartment in a cheap town outside a cheap city? You got it. Maybe you even want that $600k suburban McMansion to raise your family in. That's not a problem either.
Most readers are probably going to prefer urban environments, but that's because the demographic of software developers is somewhat self-selecting. When it's nearly impossible to get a job as a developer not in an urban environment, people who don't like urban cities are going to self-select out of the profession. The high achievers among them will instead choose to become doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. -- careers that aren't so location restricted, despite ironically being far less amenable to remote work. I had some really smart and hard-working friends growing up, and all chose to go into careers of that nature simply because they didn't want to be forced to move to a big city.
> If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue.
If something like this seems obvious to you, and obviously a lot of smart people are acting in the opposite way, maybe you should re-consider your assumptions.
In reality, online communication tools currently are a poor proxy for in-person communication in many situations. Online tools do not pick up the array of non-verbal cues humans make when talking to one another, are not stereoscopic, do not allow freedom of motion, do not permit the collaborative use of 3d space, etc. They are a piss poor real time communication medium compared to an in-person conversation in a room with whiteboards. If you can never actually have a face to face conversation with someone on your team, there's an entire dimension to communication you are completely prevented from ever experiencing with that person.
I've worked remote for quite awhile now at a pretty broad range of companies. For the jobs that have had remote teams and local offices I do agree that I'm able to get a lot of communication done quickly when I visit the office.
However I find that the amount of "heads down" work I get done is greatly diminished when I'm in an office. And, much worse, there's a lot of noise in that added communication of being in the office. Remote teams, in my experience, have dramatically less "office politics".
Office space is great for communicating "big ideas" but these aren't anywhere near the bulk of communications being had. For most of the communications needs of software remote works fine (in my experience better).
I work on a quite a few "big idea" projects and I've found the best solution is to visit the office quarterly, get all the big idea brainstorming done, then scurry off to my remote office where I'm not distracted by office politics and can just get things done. A little face time goes a long way, and annual, or semi-annual all hands meetups can do wonders at filling in the gaps created on remote teams.
Whenever someone gives the response you just gave, I wish they would also consider how inefficient the current system of jamming hundreds of developers into small rooms is. Communication with distributed teams is certainly imperfect, but I think that there are bigger drawbacks to hiring an entire team in one place and forcing them all to move there and work in less than ideal conditions.
Amen. For 15 years I've been hoping that the dream of fully distributed teams would come to pass, but I don't think we're there yet for many use cases.
In particular, I think distributed teams work best when a) people already have strong relationships built via plenty of in-person interaction, b) they meet regularly in person, and c) the nature of the work is relatively predictable.
There's definitely some work like that, but early-stage startups benefit a great deal from in person communication, which is high bandwidth, low latency, and very high quality.
And yet the people working remotely have no problem communicating with said tools and being more productive than the ones communicating and working in person. Interesting ...
I would gladly accept all those issues over working in an open floorplan any day of the week.
I'd prefer private offices to remote distributed work. But I find it's actually easier to find remote jobs than software companies that make an effort to provide private offices.
Two things: not every place has access to excellent broadband and the legal and accounting issues for a distributed workforce can be significant, depending on where your home office is located. It could, for example, for you to pay taxes in that state and account for any sales the remote employee had a hand in. It's not too complex, but it requires a lot of attention to detail. It drives my HR and accounting department up the wall sometimes, too. We had to pay for the healthcare for an ex-wife of an employee in one state, because that state mandates it. (Yes, MA.) Lots of little things that are hard to run down, and can be surprising once you find out.
Very good points. It has really been baffling me why, especially in an industry like tech, where products for distributed networking and communications are developed, companies are so hell-bent on co-location.
I have my suspicions that it actually has to do with tax code and incentives to have corporate offices in expensive locations, but that's just an untested theory I have at the moment.
The most likely explanation is that it doesn't work. Bootstrapped companies are very strapped for cash. They often use a distributed team early on. if a distributed team worked, at least some startups would continue on the model - after all it's in the company culture and muscle memory. And we would hear about them. (especially when they succeed really big.)
We do, sometimes hear from them:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134592
So the question is: does this distributed model work for others? Others don't often report in. (And does it work for succeeding really big?)I currently work at bootstrapped, distributed and profitable startup. This year we did appx $15mm in rev. http://www.inc.com/profile/buysellads (member of the Inc. 500)Maybe it's the term I'm looking, but look through this: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=distributed%20bootstrapped&sor...
As you scroll down try to piece together the story you're seeing. Click through to the companies. As I read it, hiring seems to be one of their biggest challenges. They're just not growing as much as they would like.
18 people in an office can build a $1 billion company with 10 million+ users in 18 months. (instagram.)
What's the closest a distributed team has come to that?
> What's the closest a distributed team has come to that?
Tough comparison since so few companies embrace remote work, but see Automattic.
> does it work for succeeding really big
For really big companies there's always only so many people in any given city that you can hire. What's interesting is that most office based teams are effectively distributed in the collaborative work that they do with offices in other cities, yet they don't embrace individual distributed workers.
But my experience is that very many startups embrace remote work when they are small. (as in, thousands of them do.) They have to - they don't have a choice.
It doesn't seem to scale that well. (As in, they try but fail to scale it.) This is just my experience or impression.
> What's the closest a distributed team has come to that?
Stack Exchange.
> where products for distributed networking and communications are developed, companies are so hell-bent on co-location.
IME, not everyone has equal experience using those tools. It's WAY easier to do a cubicle fly-by than to train your non-technical workforce how Skype works (if that sounds crazy, trust me - it's not).
I work mostly remotely, but I care deeply about communication. I've invested in a great headset so calls aren't plagued by WFH artifacts. I have a cough button. I have a dedicated office in my house. I get up, showered, and dressed every day so I'm online and ready for an ad-hoc video call at all business hours. My internet is fast and stable, and I have two backups in the very rare case it goes down (iPhone tether, Verizon hotspot).
In sum, I don't want my convenience (wfh) to inconvenience anyone else, so I do everything I can to make that the case. It's worked out really well so far. But I can tell you, most developers don't go through the hassle.
I can understand it to an extent - tech is a pretty creative field and creative stuff definitely benefits from co-location. But most of what the average tech worker does day to day is execution, and there's no reason one can't execute from a chair in Anywhereville just as good as a chair in Palo Alto.
The irony about tech being so adverse to remote work is pretty thick, at least that's what my friends in other sectors who work remote with no problem tell me. Even companies who build tools to enable remote work often don't embrace it themselves.
>If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue.
I would say I'm pretty against distributed teams at the moment. Would you mind elaborating on the value of them?
Assuming this is a serious question, you can hire whoever you want without worrying about their location. The world is your talent pool.
Or to put it another way, almost every recruiter e-mail I respond to states that I am not interested in relocating (usually to the bay area). Requiring all of your employees to sit in the same building is not just old fashioned, it misses out on talent that chooses to live elsewhere.
The other big one is that the company can save a lot of money on office space. If necessary, a small HQ can still be located in San Francisco or Silicon Valley for physical proximity to investors, but you don't need to worry about getting a big, fancy and expensive space to house all your workers. For a funded startup, this means the burn rate is a lot lower. For a bootstrapped company, it just means the company has a lot more money to spend elsewhere or save; they could even roll the savings into higher salaries to attract better talent (which fits with your point as well).
You're never going to have to worry about whether you need an open floorplan or not, because by default everybody gets a custom-designed private office.
> You could live exactly where you wanted to live.
Until that awesome employer has layoffs and your options get really limited out in Nowhere, UT.
Recent CB Insights (crunchbase) analysis found that Utah is the best (least competitive vs amount raised) place to raise a funding round. And the powder ain't so bad. :) (not too bad taxes, either, if you prefer cold over Texas's heat & zero taxes..)
I agree with you. There are so few companies that support remote work that this is the biggest issues with working remotely.
I remember once meeting an old high school friend in NYC. He was hanging out at one of those non-descript but unfathomably loud bars. Some of his coworkers stopped by. The conversation switched to the car one of them had bought. A Lexus SC430 convertible. He was complaining about how he never got to get out of The City and drive it enough. They were all super-sharp CS graduates working for one of the most successful hedge funds in the world.
My point with this story is that if you are making way above the median salary in NYC ($200k+ range at the time, this was 10 years ago) - the world is just different. You are making enough money to enjoy one of the top cities in the world. With the $125k-$140k salaries some software developers report making, they are barely getting to "enjoy" living in NYC. Finance has distorted the baseline of what it means to be successful in NYC. I mean, my school friends' coworkers were 2-3 yrs out of Harvard and talking about the travails of $80k car ownership like it was an Accord.
Software salaries outside of Fintech and top-tier companies like Google and Facebook and a handful of others in globally attractive cities are the equivalent of middle class in the burbs. You're doing OK but you're not going to be relatively 'really doing well'. In a city like NYC, there are more than enough free events to overwhelm anyone. However, in San Jose, what do you do? Hang out on the Palo Alto main drag?
Check out the size of the dogs being walked near Central Park. Where do these people live?!
> Check out the size of the dogs being walked near Central Park. Where do these people live?!
True, it's NYC is an expensive place to try and mix in all of the creature comforts of suburban life. The big dog, the fancy car, lots of square footage of living space. And to young kids, just out of college, who've never known anything other than suburban living before moving to NYC, these may seem like "baseline necessities" that you have to sacrifice in order to live here.
Once you accept that the baselines of city living are different from the baselines of suburban life, things get a lot simpler (and cheaper).
If there are developers unable to "enjoy" living in NYC at a $125-$140k base salary, then that's on them. Plenty of single people love life here on salaries of $45-60k, and are even able to save money.
> Finance has distorted the baseline of what it means to be successful in NYC.
This is obviously only if you try to keep up with them and the other Joneses. There are too many people here. Nobody notices if you don't have a dog, or a car, or a big apartment.
I own a place in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn, don't want for much, and provide for my family all on a way less than Google/Finance salary. I think that's a perfectly fine definition of success.
>> "Plenty of single people love life here on salaries of $45-60k, and are even able to save money."
Here's some anecdata: I lived like a king on my $30,000 grad student stipend for years in Manhattan. And maxed out my IRA every year at the same time. The trick is just to get an apartment somewhere uncool, then you're rich.
Where in Manhattan did you live?
I'm going to guess Washington Heights.
Yup, Hamilton Heights in fact. Price per square foot as a function of latitude is a pretty flat curve for a long distance north of 125th, so there's no reason to go into the extra deep boonies to save money. I was on 139th on the West side.
Total total non-sequitor.
Really long and good article about Lin-Manuel Miranda who had a hit Broadway musical about Washington Heights.
I took his point to be the opposite--that in expensive cities in general, the typical 'burbian metrics of success (big house, big dog, big car) are unattainable, but at least in NYC there is a lot of other things you can enjoy, much more so than in SJ.
San Jose is not hurting for nearby recreation oppurtunities, though you often need a car to access them. On the other hand, try a city with hot/humid southern weather like Atlanta or even Dallas or Huston...there is a reason they have high obesity rates.
I wonder if Uber 2025 will ever be cheap enough to make not having a car in the burbs almost a mandatory requirement.
Last time I was in the area my aunt took me to the Los Gatos creek trail.
Like someone else commented, cities are not fungible. Maybe Richard Florida is right.
Given all the other costs in California, having a car is pretty cheap; you could easily support one on minimum wage.
That said, if you can bike or take transit to work, the cost of owning, maintaining, and insuring a $5000 used car to go hiking and surfing isn't very significant.
>With the $125k-$140k salaries some software developers report making, they are barely getting to "enjoy" living in NYC.
This is laughable, have you ever lived in NYC?
It sounds like they were trying to enjoy suburbia in NYC. Why in the world would you buy a luxury car here? As the anecdote points out, you're never going to drive the damn thing anywhere fun.
While the anecdote is interesting, for a couple of years I was happy living in New York while earning around $45K. If I'd played the finance game (I also have degree from a top-ranking CS program) I could have earned five times that. But I also know myself enough to know that route would have left me much less happy.
Meanwhile, living in the 'burbs' is the cultural equivalent of living in Siberia as far as I'm concerned. I spent < $20k last year and had a great time in New York.
Weirdly Atlanta is not on the list, but this is why I'm probably never moving to SF. Yes, all the cool jobs are there, but for what price?
GA tech is releasing very high quality engineers and the startup scene here is great (Mailchimp and many others), and you live in a frikin mansion 10 minutes commute to work (if you live in Alpharetta). Tons of technical meetups and both thriving startup scene and established enterprise presence.
West coast based companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon et al keep trying to offer me jobs in SF like it's obvious that this is where I would want to move, I really don't understand why they don't open offices in Alpharetta. Dead cheap office space, great talent pool, and if you ask me - awesome weather. and they will have to pay me 50% less than what they would in SF, and I won't have to switch my 3,500 square feet house (which is 10-20 minute drive to a myriad of tech companies) with a 2 bedroom and an hour commute to work
and you live in a frikin mansion 10 minutes commute to work (if you live in Alpharetta)
Yeah, but then you have to live in Alpharetta. Would be nice to see more jobs ITP. I currently work for a large enterprise company, at an office in Roswell (our office was moved here from Alpharetta a few months before I started) and I see lots of people (including me) commuting up. I'm coming up 400 the whole way so it's not too horrible. But I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who have to use the east side of 285 (we have lots of people who live in or near Decatur) work from home a lot. Still, it beats living in San Francisco... I actually moved here from SF when my wife and I realized there was no way we could afford to settle down there.
Alpharetta is great (if you are 35+ with kids)
Not so great if you are a young couple before having kids and want to have some city action, I agree... I think that most ITP jobs are more tending toward younger startups, Rails, Python etc. Alpharetta is much more enterprise / Java / .NET, funny how your tech stack needs to change dramatically based on where you choose to live...
I actually think the cooler jobs are midtown ;)
I'm also surprised Atlanta isn't on the list. I live here for now, but my main gripe is that there isn't much to do in or near the city. We don't have any worthwhile natural features like mountains, lakes, or beaches, and the cultural scene (museums, etc) is a joke.
We can change that! :) If more companies will move from SF / NY to Atlanta / Alpharetta - there will be more things todo. I agree that seeing the Aquarium, Fernbank, High museum once is pretty much enough for a lifetime, but what about top golf? the new avalon? things are getting more and more interesting... ;)
I feel like you're trying hard to reframe the situation so as not to admit the obvious fact here -- that your tastes are, by big city standards, somewhat dull.
It's fine if you like living in a place with one museum, an aquarium and a golf club. But don't frame it like there's some mystery about why people choose to pay multiple times your costs to live in big cities: that's where the culture is. Your Atlanta suburb is not an alternative to SF, it's a place where you can live because you simply don't care for the things that draw many others to SF. There's no need to compare the two.
Ah yes, Atlanta boosterism. I remember that about Atlanta.
I wouldn't move back to Atlanta unless I had a job ITP....I worked in Alpharetta for 2 years right out of school and hated the location...all of the action is near midtown/ponce/buckhead
Yep, not the best place for right out of school job, but it's heaven on earth if you are with a family and want to settle down. When I go out today, (not as often as before) we less go to a buckhead rave party, and more to each other's huge basements playing pool / watch movies in our 3D home cinemas drinking from our home made bar because of all the money saved from living in Alpharetta ;) (sorry, was mixing a bit of fantasy with reality, but I have 2 kids and I go out every week or so, it's just that things change with time, especially after getting married and having kids, at least for me...)
I love GA too... but Texas has zero income tax (it's in the state Constitution).
Yes because of insane property tax
High property taxes are a myth. Slightly higher, yes. However, you can choose your tax rate by choosing a subdivision right next door. Subdivs w/ larger, more expensive homes tend to have lower tax rates. 3% at $100k home is common, 2.5% at $500k home. Depends on community amenities. About half of the collected tax go directly to your local school district, and small slices to various community services, fire, police, water, etc. The state is mostly funded through sales tax (which is around 7 to 8%).
Taxes are generally from 2% to 3% of property tax appraisal (which is usually lower than the real, "market" value; when I bought my house, it was appraised for 40% less than what I paid for it). For a $500k house (large home, probably 4,000 to 5,000 sq ft, pool), maybe $1k/mo. For a $200k home (which could still be 3k sq ft), maybe $500/mo.
Any way you cut it, even $12k/year in property tax is certainly less to possibly a LOT less than 13% income tax in CA, and you can buy smaller or larger, buy elsewhere or relocate, or negotiate it away by protesting with comps data. Also, it's a tax only when you spend the money, not when you make it (encouraging investment).
Rentals have no direct property tax, of course. Compare the actual prices. Before you say "oh, that's where it is!" compare the rental prices for a home in San Jose (or SF) to the same home in an Austin suburb.
Rentals have no property tax, of course.
Someone's paying that tax, even though it's not the tenant. That's going to get passed through to the tenant in the form of higher rents.
That was kinda my point. :) Compare the rents. Yes, of course the homeowner has to cover costs, but apples to apples the rents in Austin are 50% or even less vs San Jose.
Where I am, I can reasonably bike commute to work, and I might just have to change clothes and towel down. Down there, I'd have to take a full on shower once I got to the office.
Decisions based on average (a/k/a "mean") salaries, however, are only relying on a small part of the picture. Personally I'd like to see standard deviations accounted for in here. I have the feeling that it is easier to make 1.5x to 2x these "averages" in some cities than in others, especially for people with experience.
Agreed.
The other data I'd like to see is distribution of non-salaried incomes -- bonuses and equity. I have the feeling that SF and SV are the only places where you have a realistic shot of working for a company for 4-6 years and coming away a millionaire.
In other places, it'd be base salary, maybe a bonus, and that's it. For life. And if you ever have ambitions to start your own startup, would you want to be in Atlanta?
This is something a lot of us have instinctively felt for a long time, hence all job action in places like Austin, Denver, Raleigh, etc. And I've worked in SF, Denver and Raleigh, NC enough to know the differences. If I can make 6 figures in both SF and Raleigh, the cost of living and quality of life are insanely better in Raleigh. I own a condo, a car and have tons of discretionary income. For the same type of work in the bay area, I'd have to contend with ridiculous rents, ridiculous taxes, longish commutes and increased expenses on food/misc items. These increases are not commensurate with the increase in salary that usually goes along with moving to the bay area. My actual income when adjusted for these factors is better than friends who make ~200k in SF.
"If I can make 6 figures in both SF and Raleigh, the cost of living and quality of life are insanely better in Raleigh."
The keyword is "if". Employers in places that say they're lower cost of living are more reluctant to pay the high developer salaries that one gets elsewhere.
Raleigh though is a still better deal (salary/COL) than say Portland or random place in Midwest.
I've lived in several of these cities briefly (Seattle, Austin), and a long-term (Raleigh, NYC).
If you can put up with the car culture - which you have to if you want to live outside of NYC or Chicago - Raleigh is a great city. Very low cost of living, a burgeoning downtown night-life and cultural scene, and very warm, likable people. Austin has a much better downtown, but I'd be concerned about traffic moving there, which is not a problem (yet) for Raleigh.
I love how "put up with car culture" is a thing for our generation. Previous generation it would be "put up with not being able to drive". I'm fighting a losing battle against life in the suburbs but my one hope is that by the time I give in, I can commute in a self-driving car.
It's not really about cars themselves, it's about: 1) sitting in traffic 2 hours a day to get to work and back, 2) not being able to walk from place to place when out (usually
As someone who went from 100% car culture to 100% no car culture, the best is having some walkability, a train to take you to work and back, and a car for weekend errands and road trips. When we all have kids we're going to want cars, too. Both extremes suck.
That's only a thing for people who live in NYC, Chicago, and maybe the Bay. The rest of us still need cars. I live pretty far away but my commute to Pittsburgh is ~2 hours each way.
And Boston, Philly, and most of the rest of the world :)
and DC.
I am also semi car-free in Seattle and can attest to a very satisfying quality of life. I moved here last year.
If anyone is toying with moving here and has questions: chris.laidlaw@socrata.com.
(We're hiring!)
There are plenty of parts of Pittsburgh where a car is a 'want', not a 'need.' Especially in the era of improving bike infrastructure and internet taxis.
I'm semi-carfree in Seattle. Most actual cities can support a carfree lifestyle, but I guess that's a bit of a tautology.
"outside of NYC or Chicago"
I've been carless in Boston (technically cambridge and somerville) for 15 years now and it's not at all been an issue.
I'm not some wackadoo outlier either, I know tons of people like myself.
I live in Somerville and work in Cambridge, no car, commute on the bus and otherwise get around exclusively w/ public transit. Parent is not alone.
Having to own a car is a deal-breaker.
Raleigh's location also opens up a lot of roadtrip options, too: It is just several hours from the nation's capital, the outer bank islands, the Appalachian Mountains, and "big city" events at Charlotte and/or Atlanta. When going to the mountains or beaches, there are the options of exploring something more commercialized (Boone, Wrightsville Beach) or more rural (Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Maggie Valley, etc).
Atlanta is only 50 road miles closer to Raleigh than New York City.
Maybe it's just how I read this sentence, but I think "Raleigh is 50 road miles closer to Atlanta than it is to NYC" cleared things up for me.
Regardless, that's a really interesting fun fact I learned today.
That doesn't mean 50 minutes closer, though. To get to NYC you have to drive up I95 through such fun spots as the whole DC metro.
I'm surprised to see this as well. Alternatively: by road, Raleigh is equidistant from Philadelphia and Atlanta.
Piling on, I live in Denver and maybe drive once a week tops. Even then, it's usually to get up to the mountains for skiing/hiking. (A huge consideration if you're considering where to live.)
I wouldn't tout Denver's public transit system as an upside of living here. It's just marginally better than the awful road system, so it gets the benefit of looking better by comparison.
Really? I live like half a mile from a light rail station and I'm right next to a bus stop and I'm super happy with our public transportation. In addition my walk score is through the roof. Also our roads are fantastic even if 25 can be a bit of a bear. I think it's all about perspective. I'm from Chicago originally where it was an hour + commute.
even if 25 can be a bit of a bear
When your only means of travel is bad, your whole system is bad.
I'm glad that you've found a solution that works for you. I've had the misfortune to be subjected to public transport as a daily necessity, so I'm not as enthusiastic as you are about it.
Also, I work just off of 70, and my wife works in DTC. So there really aren't any good compromises for living that give us both decent commute time.
I understand that the whole vibe in the metro is built for the more hipster-ish living style. I just don't really fit into that, so what fundamentally matters to me is not great, and that colors my perceptions I guess.
>It's just marginally better than the awful road system
I go to CO for vacation semi-regularly, what am I missing as a tourist? Because I actually praise the roads in CO and their road crews frequently.
From what I've seen, they are several magnitudes better compared to most other places that I've been to or lived in... and I'm from a military brat family and a road tripper.
Anywhere you go as a tourist, you're not getting the rush-hour experience. While this is significant, the worst thing about the Denver road system is the unwillingness to plan.
There are essentially only two (!) real roadways: I-70 and I-25. If you're willing to pay the few hundred $/mo, you can also drive on 470 to bypass the traffic. Once you get away from these two (three), it's a mire of unconnected and unplanned roads.
On top of this - especially highlighted by the snow this past weekend - there is no regular maintenance of the roads other than 25 and 70.
At the end of January I was in a car accident and am waiting for repairs, so I've gotten a glimpse of the public transportation system also. What used to take me ~20 mins to drive now takes over an hour, and unless your complete list of destinations is along the I-25 corridor, that's pretty typical.
Now, maybe I just have a sour taste for CO. I am definitely looking to GTFO - that's why I was looking in this thread in the first place - but this has been my experience with the city/state for the last ~5 years. Take it how you will.
Denver is a midsized metro area of 2.5M, how many Interstates do you expect? And how far are you driving that only an Interstate highway counts as a 'real roadway'?
Except cities aren't really fungible. If you like big cities, then NYC may be the best place to live regardless of salary. If you like the outdoors, then maybe another city. If you are raising a family, then maybe you want to be in a quieter area with good schools. If you want to be in a tech hub, then you should be in Silicon Valley. And if you have a spouse, that is all adjusted by their needs and the industry they work in.
On a software developer's salary, you'll get by regardless of what city you live in, so you should be choosing the city which suits your personality and your stage of life.
Cities aren't fungible, but on the other hand, it can pay benefits to live in a city where there is a plethora of opportunities just in case you need to find a new job.
Which, in this line of work, happens to be just about everywhere.
On a software developer's salary there are a whole lot of cities in which you'll have to live like a student if you have a family.
Anecdote: The "average" salary reported for New York is very close to the entry-level starting salary for college graduates at most large (names you've heard of) tech employers in NYC. Companies routinely check what each other are doing and adjust entry-level pay packages yearly to compensate for competition, inflation, demand, etc. which makes data from each successive previous year not as relevant for someone interested in making a decision now. I do not think it is hard to imagine that more senior employees that are currently not interested in another job do not have any incentive to report pay to these sites, particularly if their pay is higher than what the site is reporting. (i.e. selection bias)
Related -- I believe the distinction between "engineer" vs "developer" being discussed here lately is less relevant than people think. Many people choose their own title when reporting information on sites used as sources in the article and companies may choose to post job listings using a completely different title. Even if the data could be traced back to an actual official title at each company, a large well-paying (or low-paying) company in a particular city could skew the entire number based upon whether they randomly refer to their employees as developers, programmers, or engineers internally. Similarly, a social trend to prefer "engineer" could skew all the anonymous reporting on these sites but actually had no bearing whatsoever in how salaries are determined. Given the noise in the data, I don't see how distinctions can be drawn from the outside.
Agreed, the salaries on these sites are generally way lower than I expect. It makes me wonder if my current job is paying above market (and thus moving to another employer would be a significant pay cut) or if the data is really really wrong.
I think averaged adjustments for cost of living are senseless as this is quite individual.
Let's take me as an example: I manage to live modestly but well on around 1000 CHF (1050 USD) in Zurich while making around 6400 CHF (6700 USD) in net-salary. I am a junior software engineer hacking on Python in a SMB.
(Full disclosure: My company is hiring; feel free to reach out to me at iwang{at}fastmail.net. Also, my experiences working in Switzerland can be found here: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" http://goo.gl/EIX4UX)
I remember saving lots of money in Switzerland because it was too expensive to actually buy anything. When that frappechino costs 8CHF, you think hard about getting it (now it's probably even worse!).
> I think averaged adjustments for cost of living are senseless as this is quite individual.
Well it's a base to work from. If it costs, on average X for Y things, and you know you are happy with about half of Y, then it'll still be cheaper to live in Cyanide Springs, Oklahoma, than in central London.
Very true. Different individuals have their own spending amount. I tried to use a reasonable average when adjusting the salaries but if you are far away from average, then your own calculations will be different.
But do you think you are the exception or the norm? I've looked into Zurich real-estate last year and 1000CHF wouldn't even come close to the prices I saw for a small 2br.
The idea of the average adjustments is to get a general idea of the cost of living.
I am an exception as I rent a room for 500 CHF (the norm is 750-1000 CHF). Also, I pay 200 CHF for the cheapest insurance. Then, I budget about 300 CHF to buy food.
If you insist on renting a nice 2bd aparment, you can do so for 2500 CHF in Zurich-city. If you move just slightly out of town, prices drop. I live on the southern end of town and my company is in the north. It takes me only 35 min to go through the whole city (Zurich is rather small).
In my opinion, cost-of-living averages give a misleading idea because people mentally give "cost of living" equal weight as to net-salary.
Although my life in Zurich costs more than my life in Munich, the ridiculous-high salaries and excellent working-conditions (I pay only 16% as taxes) make me feel that I win the lottery each and every month on pay-day. However, in case of sickness I would probably take a day off work and go to Germany (45 min trip) to go to the doctor there as doctors in Zurich also earn double as much.
It's easy to say COL is innacurate if you're a single person willing to live a frugal lifestyle. These are typically based on average family size, so in the US, that's a family with 2.3 children. I'm not sure what the average family size is in Switzerland.
My point being- I used to be able to save a tremendous amount of money; something like 65% of my after tax income, when I was single. Now that I'm married with two kids, I'm only able to save a much smaller 35%. I still live frugally, however, when you have young kids going to school, it's no longer possible to live like a monk. School is expensive, and kids are expensive to raise.
Cost of living is a very valid metric. At a minimum, it reflects the local property tax rates, which are basically the cost of schools and other government services.
Even so, the way a family with 2.3 children lives can differ significantly between cities. A successful middle-class family with 2 children isn't abnormal if they live in a 2-bedroom apartment in NYC, but they are well outside the norm in most other cities.
> Also, I pay 200 CHF for the cheapest insurance.
What insurance do you buy? And do you live at home?
The point of COL is for comparison. As long as the factors are equally applied, then the value of COL averages still make comparisons valid.
Last time I was researching, good enough flat (with 2+ bedrooms) in Zurich costs 4K+ CHF per month.
In Zuerich maybe, I rented 3.5 room apartment in Adliswil for 1.970 CHF last week. Close to nature, and for me close to office since my company in in Binz.
Moved away from crowded Berlin, no regrets.
Same here, move from Berlin to Zürich. From time to time I miss some things, but now I can fly there and spend a weekend more intensely than while living there ;)
BTW, I think I saw that appartment in Adliswil. Switzerland is so small ;)
Hey, you live sort of next door.
Anyone interested in a HN meetup in Zurich? Mail me plz (e-mail-address in my profile).
HN meetup sounds great, count me in ;)
I’m curious how Europe’s tech hubs (specifically London, Paris, and Berlin) compare to U.S. cities.
I suspect Berlin would compare quite favorably, despite the relatively high German tax rate. I moved there 18 months ago and currently pay €500 ($565) for a one-bedroom apartment in a nice part of town (Prenzlauer Berg). In San Francisco, I paid 5X that for a studio apartment in Hayes Valley.
I would say Berlin would look good, cost of living there is decent mainly due to the reasonable rental costs and good transport, and the demand and job mobility that has improved a lot there. Dublin also wouldn't rate too badly. London would probably look more like New York.
I think the problem with Berlin is that salaries are low, while prices are growing pretty quickly.
From my experience, this is what makes Berlin less attractive than people think (at the financial level):
- low engineer / developer salaries compared to other German cities. - rent prices are growing a LOT faster than salaries, my last appartment outside of the city center (the "Ring") cost almost 900€ a month, plus electricity. - public transportation is not that good (especially in winter) and quite expensive relative to the avg. salary (about 80€ if you live in the AB zones, 100€ for ABC). - high taxes, though this is a common problem in Germany. - food is cheap, but not cheaper than in other German cities with better avg. salaries. - if you own a car, prepare for extremely high insurance and taxes
Obviously, Berlin has its own perks, besides the known ones like night-life and openness of the people, it has a really huge demand for engineers and a vibrant startup scene.
I wouldn't be surprised if London came out bottom.
Anecdotally, salaries are lower and rent higher as compared with both NY and San Francisco. Taxes are obviously higher as well.
Glassdoor suggests "software developers" or "software engineers" in London earn around $60k, which would put it far below the salaries listed here.
In the absence of the COL index for the UK we can use the "London living wage" - supposedly a baseline for a minimum acceptable standard of living[1] which translates to £18k (a little under $30k). The tax paid on the amount earned in excess of this living wage is around £7k (<$11k) That would leave around $19k of savings or "discretionary spending", actually slightly better than NYC and Portland despite the low salary, but based on what is almost certainly a much less generous view of essential costs of living.
[1]Since it assumes dependents it's quite a generous minimum standard; indeed excluding tax payments from the equation I've never spent more than it whilst living in London on substantially higher income. But it's also almost certainly less generous than the COL assumptions for the US cities.
£18k/year in London, I suppose you didn't live alone, that's the only way to make ends meet on that budget.
I did live in London on my own, on a budget tighter than that. Admittedly, a few years ago
Rental prices have skyrocketed in the past few years:
https://s2.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/626WvTKmFK2FRBFpBg9rNg--/...
This is for buyers but the rental market price rates have gone up in pretty much the same way.
Interesting, average rent in London is around £1000/month, plus £44 council tax (e.g. Wandsworth), plus monthly travelcard £120, gas and electricity £45, broadband/phone £16, mobile phone £15. Leaves about £60/week for food, clothes, etc. If you do manage to find a studio flat for £700/month then that brings it up to £130/week, so you could actually go to a pub sometimes.
I'd pay 65 quid for a mothly bus pass (I didn't have to use subway on a typical day), and the rent was £65 a week plus electricity (3rd zone just outside of the 2nd, Streatham Hill) - for a bedsit, kind of a shithole, but I've seen worse. It was around 2010.
London is phenomenally expensive. Rent, tax, national insurance and transport consume most people's disposable income - even in well-paid professional jobs.
Would be nice to see more SE cities in here like Atlanta, Miami/Ft Lauderdale, Tampa/Orlando, Jacksonville, Charlotte, NOLA, etc..
edit the software market is pretty hot up in DC/North Virginia too
Salary/COL is typically high in the bigger SE metros from what I've observed growing up in the region.
That's true, however DC & Northern VA specifically are actually pretty expensive to live in. In fact, I would argue that they're not great places for a lot of devs, because the cost of living is high but you also don't get much in return for that COL - it's high because people in the region have basically guaranteed jobs between all the gov't and contracting jobs. Plus, all that gov't and contracting stuff is what the software jobs are. So sure, you can be gainfully employed writing AbstractFactoryFactories in some gigantic consulting firm.
But overall, you're really paying for the job security of people in very different fields than you, and you will spend your off-hours surrounded by lawyers and gov't employees. I don't recommend it, but YMMV of course.
Agreed on the COL in NOVA - I moved there recently from FL and regret it every time I pay rent, and can't even wrap my head around house prices. That's why I'm curious to see data from the Southeast and FL in particular.
Also in NOVA you're paying for some of the best public middle/high schools in the country, which I don't care about yet but if I had kids would be something to factor.
Memphis here.
The cost of living here is basically impossible to beat.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend the city of Memphis, but I wouldn't dissuade anyone from living here either.
The 'burbs here are indistinguishable from the 'burbs anywhere else. Within the city there are certain neighborhoods that are very bike/walker friendly. We have Shelby Farms, which is an urban park 5 times larger than Central Park.
Memphis also has a lot of crime. In the poorest neighborhoods that manifests as gang-related violent crime. In the rest of the city we deal with a higher than average rate of property theft. Get a big dog (or a small dog with a big bark) and lock your doors and you'll be fine.
Overall I love the city and I want to be here as it begins to recover from decades of mismanagement and overt racism.
Suggested title change: "American Cities with ...". Not everyone lives in Murica.
Is that itemizing the CA taxes or just taking the standard deduction? The rule of thumb in CA is if you make more than $100,000, your state taxes are larger than the standard deduction.
OP here. Good point, it is definitely using standard deduction.
well, based on the ADP site, that's about a $3k difference in annual state tax vs. standard deduction for CA, so I don't think that changes things too much, but good to know for someone like me who's already here in san jose.
When the final analysis results in 5-10k difference, I'm just going to live where I want
This is happening more and more. WTF web devs?
Me: Where are the charts themselves?
Me: Oh, I'm using noscript.
Me: Displaying PNGs now requires javascript.
Sorry, the trivial amount of people using noscript is simply unimportant to me.
How about the fact that the page stalls and freezes and is completely unusable on an iPhone 5?
For a sentence that begins with sorry, that's quite an abrasive followup. It's rather offputting.
This attitude is, quite frankly, pathetic. People have no respect for their craft.
On the contrary! We just conceive it differently than you :)
Craft is not a personal conceit. You're thinking about art. And even then, most arts have a craft. Knowing your craft usually makes you a better artist, but is not strictly necessary.
And what about falling back to a verbal description of the chart for those of us on ELinks?
Respecting your craft means using the right tools and techniques for the job. Not caring about one group of users is no excuse for needing Javascript to display a chart. You don't use Javascript to display a chart because you don't need Javascript to display a chart. Render the chart server-side and use an image to display it. It's a static chart, it's not like the information is changing with every page load. To do otherwise is just lazy and disrespectful.
I didn't actually look at the site that's being complained about but SVG charts are actually the way to go in terms of accessibility, and they can certainly be rendered client side (but maybe shouldn't be, as you say, if the data is static). Charts made this way definitely beat out an image with a description
svg accessibility stuff (not my blog, just one I found after a quick search): http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2013/12/using-aria-enhance...
Has anyone done something similar for Europe or other parts of the world?
Yeah, I'd love to see the said for London, Paris and say Brussels and Madrid. I'm pretty sure we'd have surprises (or maybe not ...)
This doesn't have developer salaries, but might be of interest. Edit: Forgot the link: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/
But precisely, that's the interesting part. For instance COL in Madrid and Barcelona are similar yet salaries in Barcelona are lower. It's kind of the point of the article, crossing COL data and salaries after taxes. COL alone in itself gives a hint but it's not enough.
I still feel like Chicago developers miss out on being exposed to the culture of SV or Seattle. I've worked and lived in Chicago all of my professional career, and one of the intangible non-money aspects to this field to consider is how you grow as an engineer. If you love writing software, this isn't a very good place to work compared to SV/Seattle. There just isn't a very large or strong culture of software development here like there is in those cities. Also the tech scene here feels super small and tight knit. If you work for a startup here its hard to interview or talk to people outside your company without somebody knowing somebody from XYZ company who can get the inside digs on you. That's been fine for me in my career, because I think I'm a decent performer, but it makes things awkward when you want to move on.
Agree. Chicago is a great city experience for affordable price, but nothing compares to SV, even Seattle does not really match.
One thing I have noticed during a recent job search - I used the cost of living calculator from bankrate.com[1], relocation from city A to city B from wolframalpha [2] and the salary information available on websites like glassdoor, indeed and salary.com to get an estimate of a par salary at different locations for a particular position. In these websites, I noticed that indeed.com has extremely optimistic estimates of the salaries for most positions when compared to glassdoor or salary.com, so much so that I stopped using data from indeed.com e.g. here are the salaries for a software engineer in Chicago, IL
- glassdoor.com ( avg $74,426 ) [3]
- salary.com ( median $62,257 ) [4]
- indeed.com ( avg $114,000 ) [5]
Even when verified by converting the par salaries from 2 different locations using bankrate or wolframalpha the indeed estimates were quite high. Since, the author used data from glassdoor and indeed, I wonder how accurate the analysis is considering the underlying data from indeed isn't necessarily accurate.
[1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+seattle...
[3] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/chicago-software-engineer-...
[4] http://www1.salary.com/IL/Chicago/Software-Developer-I-salar...
[5] http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Software-Engineer-l-Chicago,-...
There's probably a huge difference in salary ranges for someone with minimal experience and someone with lots of experience, and this isn't even counting if you're really good or just mediocre.
Personally, with 10 years of experience, if I was to move to Chicago right now, I would expect to make more than $114k due to the highish cost of living. There's no way in hell I'd move anywhere to make $74k, let alone $62k per year.
Nice. A slightly more useful analysis would be for a fixed, user defined, salary. Showing results for Glassdoor is pretty cool. But I don't care what other people make. I care about what I make and what I think I can make in particular cities. All the figures are pretty low for a senior engineer which limits it's use.
Also, the chart that takes taxes into account is really cool. Super useful. People who move from Seattle to California know that cost of living is a big difference, but they don't properly account for state income tax! They often try to, but get the math wrong.
Nice! Would like to see similar rating for Europe. From my experience, Prague could be the leader.
Is it possible for non-Europeans to get work visas in Prague? Last I checked, they have out 3 visas a year or something.
In 2011 it was pretty easy for a Czech company to get business visas for its workers.
Isn't Brno the actual tech hub in Czech Republic ?
They should've added Washington DC and Boston to this list.
I was surprised that Boston wasn't included.
Boston wages appear too low: for 75% increase in COL than Chicago you have almost no increase in salary - too many universities drive wages down.
We are too often overlooked, sadly
I would have liked to see Detroit on the list, or more accurately the suburbs around it.
Very nice work! I'd love to see it expanded and "opened up" in the form of a Google Spreadsheet or something else where people can plug more cities into it.
Sadly there's no data for Utah. Salt Lake City has an amazing ratio between software developer salaries and cost of living. 6 figure salaries are the norm for non-junior developers. According to trulia, housing is about half the price (450k vs 950k).
It's hardly a technical wasteland either, historically or economically. Utah was the 3rd or 4th node on what became the internet. Alan Kay began research on what he would later call "object oriented programming" at the University of Utah.
In the startup world Utah is number 7 when it comes to venture funding http://siliconslopes.com/blog/2015/01/19/utah-ranks-7th-nati.... Personally, I've spent time working for a google venture funded Utah based startup.
I've had multiple offers to relocate to areas like Sydney, Las Vegas, Seattle and they've never been able to beat Utah's salary to cost of living ratio.
Also, having the world's best snowboarding and mountain biking is a perk for some of us.
Of course the one thing that beats working for a Utah company and living in Utah is working remotely for Bay Area company and living in Utah. Win/Win.
For those that wish to own a home, make sure to consider property taxes.
Texas has no income tax but very high property taxes at ~3% per year of home value. So a 350k house will add ~$900/month on top of a mortgage.
SV has a much lower rate but you'll probably pay more than Texas in absolute terms because 350k houses do not exist there.
Colorado is a nice balance. Home prices in between SV and Texas, but one of the lowest property tax rates in the country.
Homeowner's insurance is also to be considered as a non-negligible fraction of the monthly cost of a house. When I bought a house in 2008 in upstate NY, I was moderately surprised to see that with taxes and insurance my monthly payment more than doubled from the amount I was to pay from mortgage alone (granted this was at a time with a historically low interest rate).
Homeowner's insurance, or mortgage insurance? The former is cheap, the latter, not so much.
Can someone explain the numbers,
I see averages of $100K/year for developers and then keep hearing of freelancers raking $150-$200/hour ($300K/year).
How can this be ?
As a freelancer, "hour worked" and "billable hour" are two very different things. If you're billing $x/hour, then you're earning much less when you count in all the hours that are work that's required for sustainable freelancing but aren't billable - finding clients, negotiating with them, making proposals for prospects that in the end don't become clients, handling your business/taxes/legal/advertising/etc.
Taxes/etc are a different issue on top of that, but a freelancer should expect to work many hours at a high rate, and many hours at the rate of $0/hour.
Companies pay benefits on top of salary. According to my company the cost for me is $208 per hour for "total compensation". I don't know how they come to that number but it seems unlikely. I generally bill out at about $100 more per hour. I make somewhere between 1/8 - 1/10 of that in actual hourly rate. The thing that really gets me is that I work salary but if I work over 40 hours in week they still considered that as a $208/hour loss even though they pay me nothing. Then I'm "over budget".
Freelancers have to charge higher rates because of lack of benefits and because they can charge $200 per hour and still be cheaper than me. Freelancers have cost that aren't directly passed on in an employee relationship. You're also assuming all freelancers have 40 hours of work each week, which is probably unlikely. Now you have me dreaming of working 20 hours a week and making what I make now. Hell, I'd like to get to 6 figures in my 50+ hour per week corporate job.
Both of those rates are real (I have, in fact, had exactly that salary and charged exactly that rate at different points in my career), but freelancers don't make $300k per year in any but the rarest cases. Part of their pay derives from the volatility of their work. Freelancers don't work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week - they work on whatever schedule they can according to the volume of projects they pull in. Generally, the total number of hours adds up to much less than that for a salaried worker, so the overall pay would be comparable.
Naturally, the range for freelancers varies much more widely, with the most active freelancers making serious money, and the least just scraping by.
It's hard to make $200/hour for 8 hours a day. You will have overhead eating much of that away. Like time not spent working directly for a client, or lease for renting your office. So one can't compare those hourly prices to what an employee make per hour.
freelancer financials at $200/hr are closer to 200/hr * 30hr/wk * 52wk * 2/3 weeks billed = $208k/yr minus overhead, and an individual with rare enough experience and skill to close a gig at $200 is not the same type of person working average salaried jobs
Is this for the city proper, or does it take an average of the suburbs, too?
I live in a suburb of Portland, (Hillsboro) and I live a perfectly decent life making about $44,000 a year before taxes. I'm also young and don't have kids, but I would happily commute half an hour into Portland if I had a job in the city. It's not that bad of a drive as long as it isn't during rush hour.
FYI, something about this page is bringing my iPhone 5S to a crawl. Safari routinely stops responding for 10s at a time. Is it the graphs?
Cost of Living is just one factor to consider, and everybody has different priorities.
I discount the CoL "bonus" because of the generally poorer environment with respect to culture, public institutions like libraries and parks, and educational opportunities. I grew up and lived in the south for most of my life. With precious few exceptions I found it to be mainly a canvas upon which the bigoted (race, gender, sex orientation) and extreme anti-government types painted most of the landscape. You could give me 100% of my current salary/year tax-free in a high-yield/low-risk investment account and I wouldn't move back to one of those places. I may have considered it before I had kids, but not now.
Metro Atlanta might not be representative, but things aren't too bad for me here. I can get just about any book on the PINES system, and I find most books I want in the local branch's ebook loan program. There are several decent parks (Fort Yargo is the closest). Downtown Athens is a 30-40 minute drive if I need a higher dose of culture.
Things used to be a lot worse, just ten years ago. Winder was a crumbling, traffic-choked hole. It's less crumbly now, and the traffic situation is improving. And the editor of the local paper didn't get run out of town when he endorsed marriage equality, so there's that.
Would love to see Boston, Boulder, and Los Angeles added to the list for comparison
How about Chiang Mai or other city with large digital nomad community?
You won't be pulling in any local income in those cities (all work would be remote, you would be dodging thai taxes on income taxed in a western country), so it wouldn't be a very realistic comparison.
Not really: http://www.rd.go.th/publish/6045.0.html
Also there are many people who are permanent and pay Thai taxes.
Yes, but if your income is usa sourced but you are working in Chiangmai, both the thai and U.S. governments have first dibs on taxes, there is no tax treaty that can help you.
The distinction between "software developer" and "software engineer" seems like a spurious one. Almost invariably I've seen the two terms used as synonyms.
The whole piece feels like a reference to [0]
Main comments on that one were the difference between software developer and engineer's salary, but also requests for the real cost of living. This addresses the latter.
Selfishly, I'm glad to see that Nashville isn't on this list! Though I'd be interested to see how it compares.
There seem to be a lot of cities that offer good talent with a great cost of living - sort of cities poised for a breakout. I wonder what kind of critical mass you have to have in other areas - i.e. concentration of tech talent, infrastructure, educational resources, etc... to really be a great tech community?
There's definitely a network effect. And abundance of tech jobs draw in and abundance of tech workers, which draws in companies (jobs) looking for workers, which draws in workers looking for jobs...
That's why you see municipalities failing at becoming "the next Silicon Valley" so often. It's not impossible for new tech hubs to form, but it's not as easy as you'd think by looking at CoL.
I was pretty surprised it wasn't there as well, though the COL has gone up significantly compared to what it was, it's still relatively cheap compared to some of the major hubs. Though judging by the plates around here, people have already figured out the cost difference.
Haha me too! I think that it's rapidly converging on Austin though. Getting more expensive every year, more condos going up, etc.
It is nice a cost of living discussion that looks at total discretionary earnings rather than useless metrics like percentage of income spent on rent+food.
I'm curious if the salaries include stocks and other compensation - my stocks are a large portion of my compensation package, and I work for a major company, not a startup. It makes me wonder if this might skew more in favor of west coast, where (I think?) those compensation schemes are more common - as where I'm at, those numbers all seem really low compared to what most people I know make.
There is a lot of selection bias in the type of people that post on those sites. The salaries are almost always deflated. Software engineers making $200k+ aren't posting on indeed.com.
The salaries are probably pretty accurate for people that need to look at job boards to figure out whether they'd be best moving to a new company or city though. If you're in the relatively small subset of software engineers eligible for roles paying north of $200k, the opportunities to radically improve your disposable income and lifestyle are searching for you.
> The salaries are almost always deflated.
Really? Last I looked self-reported numbers tend to be _inflated_ compared to govt collected figures (from tax returns and payroll reports). My intuitive understanding of this is that people being underpaid tend to not want to brag about it, even anonymously.
I agree. The salaries seem inflated compared to talks with co-workers. If I look within my own company and even within my own company+city+job title Glassdoor is way to high. Honestly the most accurate numbers we get are probably from the H1B visas because they are required to be reported by the employer but I don't know how that correlates to pay of national citizens.
I guess the best way to know if you are underpaid is applying for other positions and see what kind of offers you get.
I don't know what the truth is either, but sites like Glassdoor are specifically designed so you can find out if you're being underpaid, and let others know they're being underpaid. So intuitively it could go the opposite as well. People who think they're getting underpaid report, and people who are clearly not ($200k+ crowd) may not. It would be really interesting to know, though.
Stocks are extremely hard to value until you IPO, though.
Based on the sources I used, they would probably not includes those extras (unless they self-reported them at glassdoor.com I guess).
How accurate is glassdoor? If I look at my city, for my position, inside my own company it seems highly inaccurate. Either that or I'm paid half of what everyone else makes, which seems unlikely. According to this site indeed seems probably even more inflated.
Then I can't figure out what the incentive to inflate your salary would be when reporting it to glassdoor unless companies are doing it themselves.
It's unlikely that it is inaccurate by that much. The company would not want to show higher salaries either (resentment).
You are probably underpaid.
If your company doesn't have a lot of people in your position, or if you think you might be identified by your salary, then Glassdoor will fudge things a bit.
I am a bit surprised to see the salaries for Denver. For anyone leaving/working in Denver area is that on par with what you see?
For some reason i was expecting Denver to be a bit higher on that list in terms of salaries.
Most of the cost is from rent or housing. If you lower that cost by living more minimally, San Jose may still be the best place overall in terms of discretionary spending.
You could say the same about Austin. If you lower you costs in housing, in Texas you'd pay less in property taxes, so you save twice (more discretionary plus a lower tax bill) In San Jose, it doesn't matter how cheaply you live, your income is still taxed at the same rate and things still cost the same. And the cheapest San Jose place would still be far more expensive than the cheapest Austin place.
Would love to see Philadelphia included in such a calculation.
what's the difference between engineer & developer ?
One's called an engineer, and the other is called a developer.
The difference is supposed to be that an engineer works more in the design of software than the developer, who works more on the implementation. In reality, the difference is rarely that concrete and generally the two are interchangeable for many people in the middle of the overall bell curve.
What would "Extra Discretionary" look like for SF?
Yes, I missed the SF entry too.. Though, it will very likely be on par with NYC.
I look at these numbers as curve-fitting. If you want to rationalize why you stay in Austin or North Carolina or someplace, this is great data to do it with.
In Seattle, taking a 45 minute train ride can be the difference in 300K or more for buying a house. I wonder if other cities are similar?
So...
1.5 hrs/day * 5 days/week * 50 weeks/year * $80/hr = $30,000/year. Obviously those numbers are fudged in a bunch of places, but maybe it's not so crazy to spend $300k extra to avoid the commute?
In the bay area you're pretty much screwed no matter how far out you go. But it's not just about cost of living, it's also about finding a place you can afford where you wouldn't mind sending your kids to school some day. That cuts the options down quite a bit.
A shame Detroit was not included. Salaries are similar to Chicago and CoL is much lower, although probably not as low as Raleigh.
I would think people would pay to get out of Detroit.
I lived in Detroit until the mid 80's, now Chicago, but just went back for the first time with a touristic mindset. I met software developers from New York, Boston, and San Francisco who had moved TO Detroit and liked it. Detroit overall is as horrible as the media says, but the central core, which includes a big university, medical center, and downtown, is livable, bikable, and.... just cool.
..And we have fiber[0]
0:http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/2015/02/22/dan-gil...
Well, then you should come visit :)
an international version of this would be good
I wish I could just plug cities into this thing and it spits out the same data. Would be an incredibly useful tool
Looking at SF would be very interesting since being in the bay area I have the choice of both SJ and SF
No mention of Pittsburgh! We have a fairly low cost-of-living and decent salaries for tech.
I'm from there originally, and I agree, but the weather really is a problem. It's terrible. I live in Portland now, an area renowned for its gray rainy days and lack of sunlight. And yet, it has been 50º-60º and sunny for nearly a month now. Whenever I check Pittsburgh it's hovering around 0º. It's really a shame because I love Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh's weather isn't that bad, having gone through 4 winters there in college. This year has been an outlier, with the Western US generally experiencing record heat and drought while the Eastern US has experienced record cold: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/02/19/freezing_c... http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-east-west-weat...
Don't get used to it. This winter has been historically dry and warm in PDX. Snowpack in the Cascades is ~11% of normal this year.
I was kind of looking for that too. Cost of living in this area is pretty low and the tech scene is growing. The only downside is you have to live in Pittsburgh and I actually like sunshine so I've been thinking of moving.
Our city isn't that bad! Though it does rain a good deal, and is cloudy a lot.
That said there are a lot of amenities (museums, shows, groups, &c) and things-to-do, so we're not as isolated and dull as a lot of people I've met feel we are.
I live in Ohio but work in Squirrel Hill. The city has transformed over the years and is a really nice place. The only downside is the weather. This time of year it's easier to complain about weather but we literally get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the country. We basically have 2 seasons: 4 months of summer, 8 months of winter/grey. Other than that the area is ok. Where I live it's pretty depressing old industry towns with nothing left, but like I said I don't live in Pittsburgh.
Things like schools, healthcare, crimerates and public transport should be added.
The original poster was addressing costs versus salary.
Be interesting to compare this to some Indian cities.
Very in depth, nice work OP!
Thanks, I hope it helped.
Texas personal income tax is zero. That's a huge advantage. But then you have to live in Texas.
States have to collect taxes somehow, and though Texas doesn't have a personal income tax, you pay through the nose in property taxes.
And parts of Texas are very nice.
I would guess that New York is getting underrated, because in finance, once you get a serious, adult job, you're usually called something other than software engineer. "Vice President" is the typical title for someone of my age (31) even if you're a full-time programmer with no reports. Only at Managing Director (30-35 if you're lucky or good, 40-45 more typically) are you culturally expected to start having reports. I've heard of full-time engineers getting "Portfolio Manager", even if the job has little to do with managing a portfolio.
So, I'd guess that there are a lot of high-paying full-time software jobs in New York (and Chicago) where the title is something like "Vice President, Technology" or "Quant Trader".
Nobody is getting VP titles and is still doing much programming. There would be maybe one VP per dept.