Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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Sounds like people like this have made their own lives unhappy.

I ran the numbers, and $140k/year is more than enough money for a family of 5 (even including the taxes you pay to that evil warmongering government). You can comfortably spend $2000/month on your house/apartment, which gets you a nice size space even in major cities. (This assumes $6000/month after taxes; a 50% tax rate. You get to save $1000 and spend $1000 on non-essentials, and still have $2000 for food and bills with this plan.)

9% sales tax and 9.3% state income tax doesn't really matter. 9% sales tax doesn't affect essentials, like food. It just means that your new flat-screen TV is going to cost $1100 instead of $1000. Big deal. In exchange, you get a free school system, free roads, police / fire / etc. Taxes are a fact of life when living in a developed society. Lop the 9.3% off your salary and forget that money was ever even yours -- it's an employer's expense, not your expense.

Anyone making this amount of money can have a large living space 10 minutes away from work, savings, and plenty of money to pay your bills. And $1000 to spend on whatever-you-want every month.

If this doesn't make you happy, I guess it's time to work harder, or something. Most people would consider this a very comfortable life, perhaps even "the American dream". But taxes, the government, and society in general is probably not keeping you down, as your post seems to imply.

Your numbers sound really low.

I spend 1700$ a month on a nice 780 SF one bedroom apartment just outside of DC. If I want an hour long commute each way I can drop that down to 1200$ a month. (More if I move to a sketchy area.)

I spend $1400 for 850 SF in downtown Chicago (on the 16th floor, with a lake view). Bigger units that you could easily raise your kids in are around $2000.

I'm at $2725 for an 1100 square foot apartment in SOMA, which is way too much.

I guess what I have learned from this is that the problem is Silicon Valley, not IT.

Clearly you've never been to the bay area. Especially if you're working in San Francisco, then you're looking at living in the outer richmond or sunset if you want $2k to stretch out to enough space for a 5-person family. Expect to pay more like $3k on rent, or $5k on a mortgage. Anybody spending more than 25% of their net-income on housing is living beyond their means.

Add in $700/month in food, $300/month in insurance premiums, $1,000/month for a car (between car payments, gas, insurance, average of 10 parking tickets per year and $200/month for a garage parking spot). All of a sudden you're living paycheck to paycheck.

My point is, executives in that article are complaining that they are unable to coerce engineers into giving their companies an extra 50% of their time for free. I'm not saying it's poverty, but I fully understand how the life of a corporate wage-slave is stressful enough to induce unhappiness and an unwillingness to go the extra mile.

The past decade has been a loss for the economy. IPOs are gone in exchange for M&As which only benefit the founders and investors in any signifiant way. Yet startups still dangle football of IPO-induced wealth to hoodwink engineers into working themselves into an early grave in order for the founders to become marginally wealthy. And the big companies who would like us to work ourselves to death would gladly outsource our jobs if they could overcome the lack of talent and communications issues of workers abroad.

And in the end they're still renting, and not able build wealth of their own.

Agreed. I've never made so much while still feeling so poor as when I lived in the Bay Area.

And honestly I can't think of a city I've lived in that you could comfortably live with 3 kids for $2000/mo on rent/mortgage alone. You wouldn't be living in CA, NY or DC thats for sure.

Clearly you've never been to the bay area.

Apparently dating sucks, IT careers suck, housing sucks, transportation sucks, (... list continues ...) if you've been to the Bay Area.

I have an alternative explanation which is quite a bit shorter...

The weather is nice...

Its COLD in July.

Depends on the neighborhood. Some neighborhoods are always cold. SOMA is pretty sunny and consistent.

As someone who lives in LA your rationalization by neighborhood micro climate is falling on deaf ears haha

I have never been more consistently disappointed by weather than that of the bay area. Personally I'd rather have a snowy winter than be greeted with 58 degrees and overcast every single morning all year long, but maybe thats just me...

This is BS. A relative of mine has many rent-homes in the Fremont/Newark area, 3-4 bedrooms, nice homes in nice areas, for around $2k a month, including utilities. You don't have to live in Palo Alto or SF just because you work there.

Places like Fremont/Newark/Hayward are 45 minutes to everywhere. 45 mins with BART to SF, less than 45 mins (w/ traffic) to Mtn View/Palo Alto/Sunnyvale, and 45 minutes to San Jose. That's a perfectly reasonable commute.

If you really want to raise a family of 5 in the Haight, than that's awesome, but don't cry when your 140K household income isn't enough to give each kid a room AND still have a covered spot to park the M3. Moving to the Sunset is just kidding yourself, since the commute to downtown is going to be just as it would be if you moved to the 'burbs.

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