> "the rule of thumb is that you shouldn't spend more than 30% of your monthly take home on rent",
as they say, but that's just a rule of thumb. What actually matters is how much money you end up with. For example, assuming taxes remove 30% of income (probably close enough; would need to look up federal and state tax codes to be precise),
1. A Zynga employee makes 147,000, loses 30% to taxes, spends 3,545 times 12 on rent, and ends up with 60,360 to spare.
2. A RadPad employee makes 120,000, also loses 30%, and spends 1,475 times 12 on rent, giving them 66,300.
In other words, while the Zynga employee spends 47% on rent, and the RadPad employee a mere 23% - less than half! - the difference is much smaller than that would imply. At the end of the year, the RadPad employee has an extra 5,940.
Certainly a significant amount of money, and noteworthy in that the person has a lower salary but still ended up with more income after taxes and rent, but the amount is in the single digit percentage of the salaries we are talking about here.
More importantly, the problem becomes more obvious if we look at second place after Zynga. Doing the same calculation on a Google employee, then we get that despite paying 42% on rent, the employee is left with 71,128, which is more than the RadPad employee.
In other words, looking just at % of take home spent on rent is a useful rule of thumb, but looking at the actual money is better, and it can lead to different conclusions than the article would imply.
edit: Perhaps the best conclusion from their data is that it actually doesn't matter where you live, since salary actually compensates surprisingly well for location. Whether you work at Google or Zynga in SF, or RadPad in LA, you'll end up with +- a few % of the same amount of money in your bank account anyhow.