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Comment by eldavido | Hacker News Reader

The real question is how dev salaries stack up around the rest of the US. Bay Area developers have higher social status than their colleagues in other places, which (admittedly very anecdotally) seems to correlate with better pay.

Are there dev jobs paying, say, $150k in Chicago? If so, I don't see much advertising/discussion for them...

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$150K is chump change in the financial industry (prominent in Chicago). But that is a weird/competitive market.

I'm not going to give my personal numbers, but that number is in line with senior compensation when I moved from VA in 2008. My gf recruited for SharePoint developers for the DC area - asking ran from 140K to north of 200K. This was a few years ago; I don't know the current market; I strive to stay far, far away from anything enterprise based.

You don't need to be making $150k in Chicago to be doing better than Bay Area developers. It seems like it's not uncommon for junior level developers to make $75k in Chicago, but 1-bedroom apartments only cost somewhere between $1k and $2k/month depending on what neighborhood you live in. And I'm not surprised you haven't heard about jobs in Chicago. People on HN seem to be pretty down on Chicago, which in my opinion, is a shame.

Are there dev jobs paying, say, $150k in Chicago? If so, I don't see much advertising/discussion for them...

Yes, there are. Not as many of them, but they exist.

My experience is that base salaries in Chicago are comparable to the Bay Area. It's probably harder to get a $75k+ per year RSU package, because the people who are at that level are more likely to be older and to work in finance for cash rather than RSUs of an illiquid company.

If you're in Chicago and look for good programming jobs, you should reach out to me (claes.bergryn at gmail) because I have some ideas.

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