Slashdot Mirror
Scraping By On Six Figures? Tech Workers Feel Poor in Silicon Valley's Wealth Bubble (theguardian.com)
Big tech companies pay some of the country's best salaries. But workers claim the high cost of living in the Bay Area has them feeling financially strained, reports The Guardian. One Twitter employee cited in the story, who earns a base salary of $160,000 a year, said his earnings are "pretty bad", adding that he pays $3000 rent for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco. From the article: Silicon Valley's latest tech boom has caused rents to soar over the last five years. The city's rents, by one measure, are now the highest in the world. The prohibitive costs have displaced teachers, city workers, firefighters and other members of the middle class, not to mention low-income residents. Now techies, many of whom are among the highest 1 percent of earners, are complaining that they, too, are being priced out. The Twitter employee said he hit a low point in early 2014 when the company changed its payroll schedule, leaving him with a hole in his budget. "I had to borrow money to make it through the month." He was one of several tech workers, earning between $100,000 and $700,000 a year, who vented to the Guardian about their financial situation.
As a resident of the east bay, earning 100k and being able to own a house can be a problem so I sympathize with them.
But if your making 200k+ then you're just being jealous.
Serious question, how are people working in retail or supermarkets or places like that manage to live there?
How do people with kids make it work?
It's not like there aren't any other metro areas with strong tech communities. California is a great place to visit, but I'd never live there again.
I make $50K+ per year as a virtual ditch digger (IT Support) and live in Silicon Valley. I get by just fine by living a modest lifestyle. Never mind that everyone else thinks I'm poor because I don't have the big house, big cars, big wife and big kids.
Do it. I did. I thought I was banishing myself to a life of dreariness when I decided to leave the startup bubble in the Bay Area where I worked for the better part of 12 years. I worked for 2 very successful startups which are no longer startups but long term viable businesses now. I took a job in the midwest and I really thought I was actually doing it as sort of a lark or social experiment. I knew I would have a much better quality of life in terms of traffic, home I could afford, etc... I figured I would be comfortable but have no one to date, no one to hang out with, nothing to do. What I discovered was such an epic drop off in general douchiness, not just among the tech crowd but SFers in general and where I moved to. What I also found was a dating life that was amazingly more real and fulfilling that it ever was out there. People who were just much more substantial, even if not so well versed in all 12 kinds of Moroccan coffee presses. I think I was desensitized to the sheer amount of douchebags and vapid women in my every day life in the bay, both professionally and casual social circles.
The amazingly more affordable lifestyle was the was the only improvement I thought I would see, but it turned out to the be the least of the improvements I saw in my life.
Computer Programmer/Analyst here making $38k per year... i could make more as an H1B employee.
I live in metro New York, another very high cost-of-living place, but slightly less insane than SV or LA. I can understand wanting to live in places where the cost is high. California has really great weather. Metro DC has a combination of extremely stable federal jobs and gov't contractor jobs that are basically like pulling money out of an unlimited ATM. New York has a very good public education system, access to a large, diverse pool of jobs and the city itself. But, I've never had the desire to move to Silicon Valley or San Francisco despite my interest in the computer field. Especially now, there's no justifying the huge cost of owning a house there or throwing away thousands a month to rent a bedroom.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a hipster to "get" startup culture -- but why would anyone other than a new college graduate want to sign up for paying a million plus for a tiny starter home that they're never in because their "all inclusive" company provides all their meals and 16 hours of work a day? Worse yet, why would anyone pay _more_ to live in San Francisco, then let their all inclusive company bus them out to the suburbs 2 hours each way?
I can definitely sympathize with the "scraping by on 6 figures" sentiment -- but the keys to living in a high cost area are living below your means, and not living where everyone else wants to live. I don't care how gentrified and hip some of the former industrial sites in Brooklyn are; there's no way I'm paying $2 million for an apartment there...I live further away where house prices are still way high but not bubble-esque. Plenty of New Yorkers pull up stakes and move to North Carolina or Texas all the time; they hate paying taxes and (IMO) don't take full advantage of the place they live in. If you're childless and don't care where your house is as long as it's huge and on 2 acres of land, then there's no reason to pay the premium. I know plenty of people that have gone from a starter home with $10K in taxes to a McMansion out in the country in a gated community with $3K in taxes. They're happy and that's fine, everyone's entitled to do what makes them happy.
I do feel like you get what you pay for though - I have 2 kids who are going to get a decent public education without paying tuition to a private school. I was asked by a former company to relocate to Florida a while back, and even the real estate agents trying to sell me on the idea agreed that I wouldn't get the same educational experience unless I shelled out for expensive private schooling.
Yeah - gotta agree with sibling... 10 years' salary on a mortgage is friggin' insane, doubly so when you get a nice place outside of California for only 2 years' salary.
Not to mention that the figure also changes depending on how close you are to retirement. If you're younger and doing well, maybe get one priced at 3-5x annual salary, but once you get past 40, you may want to lower the sights a bit and be realistic.. that 30-year fixed is (barring early payoff) still going to be there demanding cash out of you for another decade when you turn 60.
Example? No problem - my wife and I just bought our new we're-retiring-here-dammit log cabin on six acres, in a gorgeous part of the Oregon Coastal Range. I paid exactly 2 years' salary to get it from the previous owner. Glopping a bit of extra principal on the mortgage payments will have the place entirely paid off in 10 years, leaving me a nice cushion of time before I retire for good... and by the way, the missus no longer has to work. Meanwhile, I still have a decent amount of extra dosh each month after the bills to put towards, well, anything. That's why you get realistic about it (besides, what the hell was I going to do with a 4-bdrm Victorian-style monster, what with the kids all grown up?)
You can say that I'm in no particular hurry to go get a $1.3m house that would cost me a mint in taxes, upkeep, labor, etc... the Joneses can go fsck themselves. YMMV, though.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I was born and raised in the midwest, and while everyone around me was convinced it was a dead-end hellhole, lacking in any sense of "style" or appreciation for the arts -- the time I spent in California convinced me that was so untrue.
I mean, one thing you will find in the midwest is a larger percentage of folks who aren't highly educated by formal institutions. If you're used to living in an area with far more college grads running around, it can be off-putting. But if you get to know these people better -- they're often far more substantial folks with real concerns and aspirations. They may laugh at the idea of ordering a coffee being more than deciding if you want cream and sugar or not -- but chances are good they have real skills doing useful things the CA crowd has to pay someone else to do for them.
But IMO, it's really nice living someplace where people don't *care* if your clothing choices are just practical and reasonably priced, vs. spending 5x more to chase after trends, and it's something you grow to really appreciate when your neighbors want to look out for each other and volunteer to help you when they see you working on something.
In CA, I just ran into a lot of people who invested WAY too much time in superficial stuff they collectively deemed important. My friends from CA who came to visit me in the midwest couldn't stop complaining about such things as stores that closed by 9 or 10PM instead of being open 24 hours a day. You know? These things really aren't a big problem for everyone who gets used to the concept of things having schedules that don't just cater to your whims ....
Yeah, I'm going to echo some of the other comments back to you, it's stupid to decide to live in the Bay Area in the first place. You yourself moved to Austin, which is a great idea.
I had a startup company in the Bay Area for about a year, discovered the financial black hole that is Bay Area housing, and moved to San Diego as soon as I could. I own a 3 bedroom house here for the same cost as a one room studio in monthly rent in the Bay Area. Two of my employees bought houses last year as well. I have easy access to Bay Area VCs, it takes me 3 hours to get from my door to the door of any VC in the Bay Area, and there are flights hourly (at least).
So why would you base yourself or base your company in the Bay Area? It's a bad idea. As an employer or an investor, you're wasting money paying people bigger salaries than you need to, and the quality of life is crummy. Investors who want you to base in the Bay Area are not looking out for the health of the business, and should be avoided. Anyone working in the Bay Area needs to understand that their location is no longer an asset, it's a liability.
I get $11k a year because I'm disabled.
So when I hear someone that make $160k a year complaining it sort of pisses me off.
You can have it a lot worse, so serious, fuck off.
Be seeing you...