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Where the Highest Paying Tech Jobs Are
prostoalex writes "Where would you look for a high-paying tech job? If your answer is Silicon Valley or Research Triangle, Forbes magazine suggests some other destinations. When you take the cost of living and consider the net pay adjusted for that cost, places like Montgomery, Ala., Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Fort Smith, Ark. suddenly seem quite attractive."
I dislike the high cost of living, traffic, unaffordability of houses etc. in places such as Silicon Valley. But there are lot more companies where one can work for with decent salary. One's chances of finding another job with close to maximum salary in one's field are lot higher there without having to move.
These are not just idle concerns. I have been asking many such questions to myself recently as I am not in high-tech area such as Silicon Valley. There are no easy answers to such questions. These become even more difficult once one has family, house etc. and has established roots in one place.
Osho
The biggest factor for me is to consider the possibility that if your job goes south (project ends, company folds, you don't like your boss), then you are stuck in the middle of nowhere. If you are relocating, you need to understand that at some point you will need to move again.
If you are used to an environment where you can lose your job today and have a new one by the end of the week, then you will be shocked when you spend 6 months unemployed.
Now don't get me wrong, I grew up in Idaho, but you need to realize that it is a complete backwater. =)
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
You forgot to mention the fact that Huntsville is heavily religious, conservative and their entire engineering industry is government funded defense.
Good Morning Vietnam!
;)
Well that's the time here as I post this. Anyway, it's very interesting living in Ho Chi Min (rated the #12th best major city in the world to live in and the best in Asia)*. I've got to say that, in a country that has a per capita GDP less than a tenth that of the United States a dollar goes a long way.
The key is how to make it. If you can make it by working for a major foreign corporation here (read: oil company) and get a Western salary, you will live like a king. Unfortunately local opportunities to make that kind of money are otherwise almost nil. Even if you can speak Vietnamese you will find that even a very high salary here (doing a job like coding) in not much relative to the U.S. Also you may find yourself thought of being overqualified; I do very high end media and some people here told me they were afraid to contact me after seeing my CV because they thought I'd charge a fortune.
While you can make a good living here teaching English I doubt that would appeal to the skilled professionals that make up Slashdot's readers. No, the best job is one in which you can work "at the end of a wire", that is live here but work for some U.S. company via the internet. The internet infrastructure is just sufficient to do that (which is one reason why I can't live in Cambodia). Internet telephony here is good (at least from my location). If your job is portable so you don't have to physically see your clients more than once or twice a year then this might "work" for you!
By the way, the cost of living here is not going to be one-tenth that of the U.S. unless you live like a native. Instead if you insist on all the perks of the U.S. it's probably about half the U.S. cost of living (more if you want a car!). On the other hand, wealth is relative; compared to the natives you WILL be very rich and will be treated as such. That has its own perks.
* this recent study (which, to my travelled eyes cannot possibly be true) was based on a bunch of factors including how much (or little) the average person "impacted the environment". Since Vietnamese people are still very poor they don't impact the environment very much which led to a inflated score. Still Ho Chi Minh City has its charms; zero violent crime (it's a police state), pace of life (you can actually meet people and develop friendships), scale of the city (more like one giant neighborhood than a forest of skyscrapers). But act soon, things are changing fast and in 5 years it'll be unrecognizable. In that case you'll:
Miss Saigon.
Job A:
$50,000/year, $10,000 annual rent.
Job B:
$100,000/year, $40,000 annual rent.
Relative to the cost of rent, Job A is phenominal: You're making five times the cost of rent. Job B sucks: you're only earning 2.5 times rent. By this measure, job A is far and away the better option - by a factor of 2.
The thing is, once you've paid the varying rent, where do you spend the rest of your money? The decent spec new PC will be $2,000 in Rancho Santa Fe, Manhattan or BFI. The new $25,000 car will be $25,000 wherever you buy it. The big TV is the same price wherever. And, most important of all, the internet porn subscriptions run the same wherever you are too.
At that point, would you rather the job that's 5 times "cost of living" but only leaves you with $40,000 or the one that gives a sucky 2.5x but leaves you with $60,000 extra.
Next, on the simple level, let's look at that cost of living. Assuming you get on, buy and pay a mortgage off, in 20 years time the place with the poor salary relative to cost of living will leave you with a $500,000-$1,000,000 home vs. the $200,000-$250,000 place in the "better" area. Now, aged 40, you can up and move to the cheap place, selling your home, buying one of the nicest places in the cheap area and having a nice large nest egg lfet over to let you get to retire early. My in-laws have just done exactly that and apparently a lot of people in Texas are getting seriously pissed at all the Californians coming in, buying huge homes after selling up smaller places in CA and pushing up the Texan cost of living for people who're still paid no more.
And, finally, there's a reason rent and property are so expensive in some areas. Go to California and look out of the window. Rumor has it that other parts of the world have a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder. Land is expensive in California because you never shovel snow, you rarely deal with crazy humidity, you rarely have the insane heat of Arizona, you rarely get mosquitos the size of Volkswagens and you can sit on the beach on New Year's Day. In short, supply and demand means that when there's a crazy price, there's generally a great reason for it.
So, yes, some areas have high costs of living and lower salaries in relation to that cost. But I.T. is famous for the fact that we out earn most other professions and, once you get past earning about three times cost of average rent, everything else is gravy. Sure, you reach that point faster elsewhere - but once you do reach it (and you do in I.T.), you keep going even further when the numbers are bigger.
I've watched a lot of friends leave California because they're in other fields and it's just too expensive to live here if you don't earn well. But once you get to the kind of salaries I.T. tends to pay, the cost of rent becomes a relatively minimal part of the total cost of living a great life.
Going to church has nothing to do with crime. I'd bet you just about anything that several of the Enron guys were regular churchgoers. It's all a matter of need and opportunity. It sounds like you live in a relatively low population density area, in which pretty much everybody is relatively well off. Those two things are really all you need to make the crime rate plummet.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
The quality of life than many Americans does not require public transportation. In fact I would be a good number actually see public transportation as a sign of where NOT to live.
Some of course will take that and run off spouting racism,bigotry, or whatnot. The simple fact is that at the end of the day many aspire to nothing more than being away from it all. Stand alone housing and visual separation from the "business world - read: minimarts/gas stations/grocery stores" is key to the happiness of many. Sure we want them to still be convienent and a short hop in the car isn't an impediment.
I'm even moving further out simply because where I bought has changed so much in 9 years that its no longer the area I desired to live in. Lots of good people are here but the little businesses have creeped down the road to where its no longer "open".
As for your "pay and arm and a leg to massively pollute". Yeah, whatever. Three dollar, heck even 5 dollar a gallon gas isn't going to change my behaviour and I doubt that it will change that of others who live where I do. Cars are far better today than ever and that simpleton slight of yours is just silly. If I want massive pollution I will go to the big city with its public transportation because even there in the land of so called "enlightened" thinking a great many of them seem to not use that very public transportation they deem "good for others". I can go see the trash piled in alleys and cigarette butts lining the sidewalk. Oh yeah, massively pollute. Cities have no ground to stand on.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Sure, MAYBE the cream of the crop is better (and I say Maybe), but are you going to be hiring Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison or Scott McNealey (or Bill Hewlett, RIP)?
Stanford was a great producer of educated people, but educated people don't necessarily equate to talent on the job. And the gold rush of the late 90s brought a lot of VERY untalented people out of the woodwork and into silicon valley.
The average silicon valley wonk is far below the talent of what you can find in middle America if you just conduct a reasonable candidate search. And the average wonk in silicon valley is paid 40% more.
My experience? I used to interview and hire people across the country for a MAJOR silicon valley-headquartered company. Hiring in Silicon Valley was the hardest spot I had to hire in - not because there wasn't some talent there, but because there were so many wanna-bes who job hop to rack up their salary and hide their deficiencies.
Who cares what your neighbors believe?
It matters if you kids go to the same school, and they start trying to push ID. Or ban alcohol sales on Sunday. Or prohibit just about anything else they find 'unethical.'