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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Austin and Seattle average salaries of $190K for developers?

And yet SF and NYC are still stuck around $130K, which is only 20% higher than what it was 10 years ago, and these cities are far more expensive to live in?

What's the draw, why don't more developers move to Austin or Seattle?

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It clearly says adjusted to the cost of living in San Francisco. This article does not say anything about the cost of living model. It does say that Seattle's average is $126K vs San Francisco's $134k (Seattle becomes $180k when adjusted to its cost of living relative to San Francisco). The referenced article has an average of $110K unadjusted for Austin developers.

Real estate is the obvious example. If you want to own a house Seattle's market is still really high relative to the rest of the country (this is probably where Austin makes up a lot of ground), but Seattle is much cheaper than San Francisco.

This isn't the raw numbers. It's based on cost of living adjustment to give what the equivalent would be in SF (at least that's what I understood from the article).

It would have been useful to show the raw numbers next to the adjusted numbers in the image.

Yeah it makes it hard to compare how you personally are doing.

"According to her analysis, the $110,000 that an Austin engineer makes is the rough equivalent of being paid $198,000 in the Bay Area"

The subtitle mentions "adjusted to the cost of living in SF"

It's unfortunate that they don't specify what those adjustments are.

Yeah, those would be just as interesting. If not more so.

Those numbers are adjusted to the cost of living in San Francisco, so the comparison is not quite as bad as you think.

But it means that one should really love the Bay Area in order to sacrifice $60K/year of effective income just to live there. I lived in the Bay Area and when faced with this very issue I moved (cost of living being only one factor). It's a special place -- but not that special (for me). That said, for the first 10 years I was there I too was smitten by the place, and assumed I would never want to live anywhere else. Reality caught up with me, which is really a good thing.

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