This is doubly so if you're not in need of Google-caliber talent. Then you're not even directly competing with Google et. al. in the first place.
No matter what the actual number is, if your salary translates into a sales pitch that looks like "comfortably afford a 3-4 bedroom house in a beautiful neighborhood, and enjoy an easy 15 minute commute by car while your kids go to a safe, reliably decent public school nearby", then you're going to get people interested.
Relocating outside of major hyper-expensive tech hubs shouldn't be seen as a failure. It should be seen as opportunity. There are reasons to be in San Francisco, and there are just as many reasons not to be in San Francisco or anywhere close to it.
You would think, right? The last two offers I made where to people in very low cost of living places. I offered them our "Bay Area, not Google $$ salary" and they both said they expected Google salaries and turned down the offer. Until that point, everything had been clicking perfectly.
EDIT: last three people.
As I said elsewhere, we had a developer poached from Google for $250k.
It sounds like you offered $75k a year [which you calculated as equivalent to a $125k/year offer for their location].
I'd turn that down too. People try to pull that adjustment trick on me all the time when I was looking to relocate, I'd go up there and they'd give me a number the day after I got home and I'd be like "...that isn't equivalent at all." and then politely decline.
Just fyi, maybe I misunderstood.
Can I ask what number you went with?
The reason I ask is I don't live in the Bay Area and do live in a lower cost of living area [but still not cheap] but the figures for any decent senior engineer here are still $100k+.
I mean, the broader question seems to be, is this just a thing we're going through or has the world changed and are developers just demanding more money for the kind of work you're doing?
In retrospect it may have been more important to get your foot in the door of a company or industry that you wanted to stick with for a career. Alternately, if you get paid a lot when you are young it becomes your quote. In my experience, people who don't get paid a lot at the start tend to get paid less for the rest of their working lives.
I definitely know folks who claim Bay Area $ to be $60-$70k and play the numbers game... but then they play the numbers game (and 3 isn't a numbers game).
1. That was deemed illegal and they've stopped.
2. Salaries are not being kept down in SV. The whole topic here is that they are out of control. Have you actually tried to hire anyone? I have. Even people that telecommute from low cost of living areas want SV salaries. I've had to go outside the US for my last 2 hires.
options in a startup, especially since ~95% of startups fail, are generally worthless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10946880
He's spot on.
that is called market economy. Whoever can use programmer more efficiently and thus pay higher salary would get that programmer. In a big picture, using a resource less efficiently means pretty much wasting it. Do you make revenue per programmer like Google? If not, may be you need to look at where is a waste in your business process. Your employees wanna be productive and as result wanna do a lot of money for you and the themselves. You owe them efficient organization of business.
> 10 years ago the pay we offered was competitive,
the point of technology industry is to facilitate the process of natural selection out of anybody anywhere who hasn't changed in 10 years.
I'm not trying to offend you. I've been sitting in my current BigCo for 4 years already, and see how i myself starting to be the candidate for being selected out if don't do something in the near future. 10 years is a historic epoch in the industry. The industry did look completely different back then.
On my grad student stipend.
You are talking about something completely different than the rest of us.
Hell, I'd probably still keep a better lifestyle staying put here in Florida where I make about half of that (and I'm considered highly paid around here). I would never expect SV pay for a 100% remote job that allowed to me to stay in my lowish COL beach town, and I don't know who would. That doesn't even make any sense.
Obviously, this just underscores your point, but I wanted to give you some datapoints since you seemed surprised that someone might not take the $125k offer. It's a seller's market.