Slashdot Mirror
New York Falls and Seattle Rises on 'America's Top Tech Cities' List (geekwire.com)
CRBE has released their annual list of the top tech cities in the U.S., analyzing 13 metrics (including salaries and housing costs) to "gauge the competitive advantage of markets and their ability to attract, grow and retain tech-talent pools." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes an article from Geekwire:
Seattle is the third best tech market in North America, trailing only the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington D.C.... Seattle passed New York for third this year on the back of a growing, well-paid and well-educated class of tech employees and a strong roster of big companies...with New York and Austin rounding out the top five.
The report shows a big divide in Seattle between a prosperous tech community and everyone else. Tech workers in Seattle make $110,999 on average, and their wages have increased close to 20 percent since 2010... The 177,380 people who work in other professional fields like finance, sales and marketing make an average of $57,603 per year and their wages have only increased 6.3 percent since 2010. During that same time period, apartment rents increased 39 percent to an average of $1,619 a month.
San Francisco had the highest annual salary for tech workers -- $123,921 -- followed by Seattle, which also had the highest percentage of workers with at least a bachelor's degree -- 59%. And there's also an interesting second list of the top small tech markets, which is led by Columbus, Ohio followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon.
The report shows a big divide in Seattle between a prosperous tech community and everyone else. Tech workers in Seattle make $110,999 on average, and their wages have increased close to 20 percent since 2010... The 177,380 people who work in other professional fields like finance, sales and marketing make an average of $57,603 per year and their wages have only increased 6.3 percent since 2010. During that same time period, apartment rents increased 39 percent to an average of $1,619 a month.
San Francisco had the highest annual salary for tech workers -- $123,921 -- followed by Seattle, which also had the highest percentage of workers with at least a bachelor's degree -- 59%. And there's also an interesting second list of the top small tech markets, which is led by Columbus, Ohio followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon.
Anyone who has lived and worked in the Bay Area knows: "San Francisco" and "Silicon Valley" (Mountain View/Sunnyvale) and "San Jose" and "East Bay" are very different, very distinct markets. Heck, we're talking about an area the size of Rhode Island; why wouldn't they be distinct? But oh so many studies, done by so-called professionals, confuses the areas, or mashes them together.
i suppose 50s there were similar lists of america's top industrial cities.
its a nasty (rather than celebratory) thing when a city/country is not economically diversified.
Of course the big news in Portland is that Intel is and will layoff well over 1,000 workers. It is unclear that this city with a metro population of 2 million has the high paying tech job to absorb that loss. Expecially in market when you need $1500 a month just for rent.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Do what I did. I pay about $450 per month for a T1 to my condo and resell wireless connections to my neighbors. My net cost is less tha $200 per month for more than a full Mbps.
Can you pay $3,000 every month to share a closet with three other people?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Manhattan is about $4,000/mo for a decent 1bdrm. $3,200/mo if you're willing to forgo some amenities. At $124,000 salary, take-home pay will only amount to $70,000, and you'll easily give another $35,000/year at least on rent. So your take home will be 28% of your salary, or about $35,000/yr, which will be further spent on food and entertainment. So you're really down to $20,000/yr in savings. And you're not buying an apartment any time soon because at $1.5 million and 20% down, it will take you 10 years to save up just the downpayment and then you'd still have a mortgage of $96,000/yr on top of that. And AMT will start biting you because you won't be able to deduct that large mortgage.
Consistently, the top cities for I.T. jobs/careers also have some of the highest costs of living in the nation. And often, the average salaries paid in those "top cities" are really pretty sub-par for the areas. (Lots of I.T. job availability also means a lot of competition for openings, as people migrate there from all over the country who have those skills.)
As someone who moved to the DC area for an I.T. job, let me tell you -- when you factor in the combo of housing prices at LEAST double to triple what they were in the midwest (whether you're buying or renting) and the commuting challenges up here? I'd advise any of my mid-western friends in I.T. to stay where they are, vs. moving up to this part of the country. Exception would be some kind of sweet government contractor position guaranteeing you 4x your current salary or more.
In my own case, I was simply burnt out and tired of living and working in the same city I grew up in. I was ready to relocate someplace else because 40 years or so in the same city was enough for me, period. The DC area was the opportunity that kind of fell into my lap and I got to work for a firm where 2 of my friends already had a job. So I packed up and went for it. There's not a week that goes by, 4 years later, that I haven't questioned if all of this was really such a good idea. But my wife and I scraped and scratched out a living that's now pretty equivalent to what we had before. We're "doing okay" by most standards.
I'm just saying -- these surveys of "best places to work" are often only looking at a few isolated factors, and they don't REALLY help you make good decisions.
Seattle misery: HUGE problems with traffic. New construction makes the traffic worse. Amazon and Microsoft abusing employees. Shockingly slow internet connections.
... CenturyLink (CTL) customers trying to access particular sites from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. will have unbearably slow speeds."
Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (February 23, 2014)
Microsoft: Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book (May 23, 2012)
Traffic: Seattle one of the worst U.S. cities for traffic congestion, tied with NYC (March 31, 2015) Quote: "An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic may not sound like much, but when it adds up over a year it becomes 89 hours." (Whoever wrote that must be accustomed to Seattle misery. An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic sounds HORRIBLE.)
Slow internet: Many areas of Seattle have poor internet connections. See the article, These places have the slowest Internet in the country. (June 25, 2015) Quote: "... Seattle
I nearly got lured to Seattle by Amazon, but balked when I realized how much higher the cost of living was, especially in contrast to the only slightly higher salaries. For every dollar they put in your pocket, the location takes three back out. The famous tech places like SF, NYC, DC and Seattle are a huge trap.
To rent a 4-5 bed house in Tampa is about the same as renting a shoebox sized studio near the amazon campus. There's really not much overlap between the price ranges for housing costs. If you're willing to commute an hour and a half in Seattle or San Jose or NYC or SF, you can maybe get houses that cost under half a million. That same commute here gets you 50k houses.
I had a similar experience coming from CA to FL in the first place- the salaries are definitely higher in CA, but the cost of living is astronomical by comparison. When I was in my early 20s, fresh out of college, getting a 50% bump in salary to move to CA seemed awesome... and then I realized I was getting a 300% bump in rent to go along with it. And state income tax. And federal AMT. And CA state AMT. When I moved back out of CA after a few years of salary gains, I took a 20k/year salary cut but somehow ended up holding on to an extra 2-3k a month in savings.
A lot of people move to the big tech hubs for a few years and burn out their finances trying to survive there. It's seems like you're doing great, but a few months being unemployed (which happens from time to time in any career) can wipe out even significant amounts of savings. The only people I've seen survive in those places long term have family there from before those places got expensive (ie, free place to crash and lots of real estate equity) or they got lucky and struck gold from an IPO. Everyone else is just trying to get rich before they go broke.
I'm not surprised to see Nashville listed as a "momentum market" in this report, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there (I lived there for 9 years before relocating in 2014) and for 20-somethings it's an exciting and affordable place to live.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Things that cost the same everywhere cost the same in SF. Your 401k's cap is the same. Your smart phone is the same, your kid's college education will be the same (assuming they move anyway).
If you're dumping money in rent, that may or may not make you come up ahead with the above. If you dump your money in a mortgage instead...then you're -way- ahead, unless you're expecting a massive crash before you sell.
You can also do interesting things: home renovation doesn't magically get more expensive. Labor might be a little, but the price of wood and appliances doesn't significantly change, so you can go all out.
I don't live in SF, but I still live in a high cost area, and once that mortgage is in place, your disposable income shoots up the roof. That's basically the whole reason cost of living is so high...because for a lot of people, it's worth it.
Now, I'm not gonna argue against how messed up it is, privilege, how it screws the poor over, etc. That shit has to change sooner or later before we end up in another civil war. But as far as an individual software engineer goes, it can very well be totally worth it.