Does anyone know why engineering salaries are so low in Chicago? Especially with regards to city size / cost of living / amount of tech?
It baffled me when I lived there, and it still baffles me when I don't.
It baffled me when I lived there, and it still baffles me when I don't.
Places I looked at also included parking. In a place like NYC or SF a parking spot can cost over $800.00/month. There's just so many wealthy people in NYC and SF and so much more demand for limited living space.
Cost of living will influence salaries a lot.
And if you can suffer the commute, in the suburbs, you get a condo AND a parking spot for $800 a month. o_o
But alas, the move was not to be (for now anyways).
Anyway, I've begun the house search in New York City. I'm looking for a 1 bedroom apartment, in some place like Brooklyn Heights, Carrol Gardens, Gowanus, etc. Not Midtown Manhattan or Tribeca. Setting the budget to $700,000, literally everything available is a tiny shithole. I did find a small 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights that's nice. 3 million dollars.
I did the same search in Chicago. For half the money, you can get 1500 square feet, with nice modern finishings, 13 foot ceilings, etc. right downtown. If I were buying in Chicago, my conundrum would be "this is really too much space, my house is going to feel _empty_".
The NYC and SF housing situation is really quite insane. The best career move I can imagine making is keeping my current salary and literally moving anywhere else in the world, except maybe London. The rest of the world is dirt cheap compared to NYC and the bay area. It's so crazy.
I'm not an expert but my opinion is the NYC housing market isn't a deal right now or even a fair value. I'm not saying it's a bubble, but it's certainly not cheap. If I stay here I'm just going to keep saving and see if I get lucky with a housing dip and my savings intact.
Plus, if you buy into a co-op (more common in Manhattan I believe) the purchase requirements are steep. Often 30% down, 2 years mortgage/maintenance/taxes in liquid cash available, among other things. High entry requirements but creates some stability.
I really think renting is cheaper than buying in NYC right now when you factor in all the costs. You get a nice tax write off with owning, to be sure, but it's a wash I've figured. I don't see how prices can keep getting higher and higher right now. But I thought that 4 years ago too in places in Brooklyn and I was wrong.
What's funny is my only other real option is to move to London since my wife is from there and would eventually like to move back I think. Their housing market is in fact a bubble and I simply wouldn't buy anywhere near there right now.
You're definitely competing with households that have two incomes, hence 3 million dollars being spent on one bedroom apartments. If you have a household income of $1M a year pre-tax, certainly a possibility for two programmers mid-career, then you have a lot of options.
Personally, I don't care about living in New York except that my job is here, so it may be nearing the time to move back to Chicago.
http://streeteasy.com/for-sale/nyc/type:D1,P1%7Cprice:700000...
Note, I could be wrong. These could be the worst places you're talking about. But it seems like there are at least a few around 800k, and the housing market moves fast [so you'll see lots of options if you look for a couple months].
20% down: $160,000 24 months mortgage in the bank: $68,000 24 months maintenance/property tax in the bank: $36,000
For a total of $264,000 not including closing costs. I don't have $264,000 lying around at this precise moment.
$600,000 is my real budget. $700,000 is for searching and getting an idea of "what if I wait another year and save up some more money".
All in all I'm not that excited. My apartment that I rent for $2500/month is way better than any of those places that turn up. And by "way better", I mean "still an embarrassment compared to the house I grew up in when I was a kid, that cost less than the down payment for a studio in Brooklyn". I don't even have a microwave.
20% down is usually the bottom. A lot of places want 25% or 30% down and there's also a chance you're going against someone with 100% cash and the board will pick them nearly every time.
Lastly, if you're using every dime you have so you get a mortgage well over 500k that may be a bad choice. The opportunity cost of tying that much cash up into a mortgage is a lot of risk (all your net worth in 1 investment) and you're unable to use that cash to make other investments and leverage them if need be.
I don't look at real-estate as an investment, but rather as a sunk cost. I need somewhere to live, I want to screw around with walls and plumbing fixtures when I feel like it, owning seems like the right option.
Of course you don't actually own your co-op, you just own shares in a company that actually owns your property.
Housing sucks.
But to nit; I believe a coop is only 10% down (condos are 20%. Either way it doesn't really change your math). And I'm still years from being able to buy a place in NYC, so sigh
Please find me a Co-Op in NYC that lets you in with 10%.
According to cost of living calculators, I would need ~250k in SF to be equal to my comp in Chicago, and my wife would need ~135k. My salary increase to be at parity is probably doable, but from other people's posts, it would require a pretty good job that included RSUs. I'm also not in a 100% development role, which I think I would need to do in order to get that kind of pay in SF, and it would probably be hard to break into (plus I just turned 30, I'm an old man now, hah).
Chicago's 'tech scene' is mostly either trading or tech applied in an incremental way to an existing business model, eg Groupon. The trading firms do pay quite well, but you'll be in an extreme niche and likely have limited insight into how you could ever leave, given you've not been building products/programming so much as coding performance improvements. The few "hard tech" companies I've seen come from Chicago are either a generation old at this point (eg Motorola) or have gone under (eg TempoIQ).
The other fact of Chicago is, most of the tech talent here is here for reasons beyond having the best job ever. When I moved back, just about no one could believe that I didn't have a family/significant other/etc reason to move back beyond the job itself. When you have a market like that, employers have some buying power with the talent that does need to stay here. There's simply so few alternatives to the situation, given there's also little appetite for significantly striking out on your own, compared to the coast.
Edit: I'll also say the appetite for go big or go home company growth is limited here. Can't tell you the last time I saw a "shoot for the moon" idea originate in Chicago. There are pros/cons to that, admittedly.
"Oh, you already have offers on the table in NYC and Boston, with no family here? Yeah, I understand why you wouldn't be interested in Chicago"
That being said, I think there are plenty of interesting tech companies here if you dig a bit. For example, CleverSafe (https://www.cleversafe.com/), Signal (http://www.signal.co/), and BrainTree (https://www.braintreepayments.com/) are larger ones with real engineering challenges.
And, if you are interested in a smaller Chicago company doing interesting things, feel free to check out Earshot (http://earshotinc.com/careers) - we are hiring. </plug>
Even if Earshot isn't right for you feel free to connect with me if you are interested in the Chicago startup scene.
I'm in Chicago making ~95k and these threads the last couple days have been ever so mildly depressing, with people graduating same year as me and making $323k.
[1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/money-improves-qual...
There are people in the top 1% who "feel poor" - because they live in expensive homes, drive luxury cars, feel the need to send their kids to the most expensive private schools, and have friends who own yachts - and there are millionaires who basically live like they make $80,000. I would aim more toward the latter (although obviously going too far in that direction can be unhealthy too).
A lot of them cannot or just don't want to move far away for more pay. A lot of the grads are from chicago or smaller midwestern cities.
I don't care what people say, pay is all just social status. Even relatively objective measures like, "I made the company XX" are only possible in the scope of narrow consulting engagements, and such estimates are hazy.
Trying to quantify the long-term economic value of an employee is even worse.
Someone here recently ranted a bit against the fact that bright minds work in finance on useless work instead of greater things. The one answer from such a worker was about the huge difference between management compensation and worker compensation in those other, "more important" fields. Not the absolute salary.