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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

> You realize that that sweet $140,000 Silicon Valley base salary at FaceGoogBox is worth less than that very middle class $80,000 in Atlanta, once you adjust for cost of living, right?

I find that very hard to believe. If you make $12,000 a month in SF and spend $3,000 a month on rent (which is pretty generous for one person), you still have more leftover money per month than your entire paycheck at an $80,000 annual salary.

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$140k after taxes in California nets you about $7,100 per month. $80k after taxes in Georgia nets you about $4,500 per month. A ~700 square foot apartment in a luxury building runs $1,300 in Buckhead (the most desirable location downtown). Looks like a similar apartment runs $3,800 in a desirable part of San Francisco. So immediately, your pay difference is swallowed up by the rent differential. But everything else is substantially cheaper in Atlanta too. It's not the land of $4 toast. Prices at a nice restaurant will be ~70% of that in SF.

Bingo. And the calculation just gets worse when you include expenses for a family.

Yeah, at that point it really comes down to whether your personal utility from living in San Francisco outweighs the disutility of having a smaller apartment or sharing an apartment. I don't know of anyone (who's not independently wealthy) who pays for a 700 sq. foot SF apartment with just one income. Most people I know pay around $2k a month on rent.

Sure, you may weigh the benefits of living in SF higher than the cost of doing so, but that doesn't mean the cost differential when comparing like-with-like isn't significant. Moreover, once you have a family, the cost-benefit analysis changes in a surprising way. My wife and I are dedicated urbanites and currently live in downtown Baltimore. We could afford an awesome house in a dense urban neighborhood walkable to restaurants, bars, our daughter's nursery school, etc. But we're relocating to D.C. where a house in a similar neighborhood would cost 5x as much, and are facing the prospect of having to move out to the 'burbs (or the more boring suburb-y parts of the city).

> but that doesn't mean the cost differential when comparing like-with-like isn't significant.

That is kind of true, but it's also not realistic to just compare identical housing arrangements in very different regions. It makes more sense to compare not just median costs of two regions, but also median housing size/type. But of course, if spacious housing is very important to someone, that's perfectly fine, and it's a perfectly good reason to live somewhere else.

I make 50% more here than in Utah. Before stock, I am saving less than I did in Utah. I had a $1100/mo mortgage in Utah (4 bed, 2 bath). I'm paying $3800/mo in rent here (3 bed, 1.5 ba). Utilities are about 2x. Food about 30% more. I pay roughly 10% salary more in a taxes.

It's expensive to live here. That doesn't mean I don't like it though :)

To be clear, I'm writing from the perspective of having a family with children. Believe me, I've run the numbers and there's no way I could buy or even rent a decent house there without a massive commute (which I can't stand).

Glad to be proven wrong here. I'd go back and entertain offers I've had if I knew I was wrong.

Are there other family-related costs that are significantly lower in Atlanta than in SF? I'm still having trouble making the math work out.

Consider daycare which ranges between $1500 to $2000 per month in SF. Nannies are $2000 to $3000 per month.

Childcare in the peninsula is hugely expensive even when it is available. 150 person waitlists for 50 kid facilities are the norm. A dirty daycare will run 2k per month, and a nanny around 3k. I'm not sure what the situation is elsewhere but I have to imagine it is better. Home daycares aren't available because no one can afford a home. The crazy prices lead to shortages of services because none of the people who would provide them can live there.

Childcare is substantially more expensive and the public schools are not very good. You almost have to put your child in private school, and you are looking at $20k-$30k/year/child. The city is not very kid friendly in general.

And any surrounding districts with good public schools will of course have ever higher real estate costs.

I did a quick comparison. This doesn't include all the costs, but it should give you an idea of what he/she means:

The median sales price of a Santa Clara County 3 bedroom house is $820,000. This is $3,877/mo, plus $850/mo property taxes, for a housing cost of $4,727/mo

That $140,000/yr is taxed at $48,922 in the state of California, leaving $91,078, or $7,589/ mo income.

CA Income ($7,589) - CA Housing Costs ($4,727) = $2,682 leftover.

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The median sales price of a Cobb County 3 bedroom house is $173,000. This is $818/mo, plus $140/mo property taxes, for a housing cost of $958/mo

That $80,000/yr is taxed at $23,600 in the state of Georgia, leaving $56,400, or $4,700/ mo income.

GA Income ($4,700) - GA Housing Costs ($958) = $3,742 leftover.

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I'm not saying my numbers are valid for every person's situation, only that this is an example of a situation where the numbers work in Atlanta's favor.

Your numbers are way off. Salary doesn't paint the entire picture. Median total comp for a fresh out of college (L3) at Google is ~165k.

L4 is ~215k. L5 (Senior) is ~265k.

Factor in free breakfast/lunch/dinner, free gym, free laundry, generous 401k matching, other perks and discounts, and the gap widens even more.

And those scenarios represent a small fraction of the total number of engineers in the Valley. There is a reason Google is so selective in its hiring.

Throwing those out as typical is disingenuous.

Google is a huge outlier when it comes to salary. There are thousands of tech companies in the bay area, and median salary is around $100K.

Do you have a source of this data? I have tons of friends in the Bay Area who work at a wide variety of tech companies, and none of them are making $100k or less. I guess maybe they really are "all above average" but I find it hard to believe that the median salary for software engineers in the bay area is really $100k.

Sure. [1] [2]

Of course, this is just "a couple minutes of google research"--I am not a subject matter expert, as someone on HN kindly pointed out last time I posted these here. Also, they are based on self-reported surveys and don't include sellable equity, so take it with a grain of salt. I don't know where better data would be published. I'm intuitively not too surprised by these figures--I think the HN demographic is probably pretty skewed towards the higher end, judging by all those threads where people toss around $150K and $200K salaries as "normal".

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...

$140k is what we're discussing in this thread. You're welcome to join us.

You left out tax differences and inflated costs for other necessities such as food, transportation, entertainment, etc.

12,000$/month is pre taxes. You get taxed more on 80-140 than 0 to 80, and California has higher income tax rates to make up for messed up property tax rates.

On net you get an extra ~2,600/month after taxes.

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