Oh and the always responsive HR or whoever is in charge. Getting back to you after 6 months. Thanks but no thanks. I would rather make more money in a stupid corporate job than working on more aggressive ways of making people to click on ads.
Oh and the always responsive HR or whoever is in charge. Getting back to you after 6 months. Thanks but no thanks. I would rather make more money in a stupid corporate job than working on more aggressive ways of making people to click on ads.
Could you name a few "stupid corporate jobs" that pay better than Google or Facebook (200k - 300k for a senior engineer) ?
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-expensive-is-san-francisc...
You're already at 91,000 for basic expenses.
That puts 200k right around the mark for a livable wage and 300k pretty comfortable (and also at the high end of a senior dev wage by a fair margin).
To begin with, when discussing wages most people are assuming for a single person taking care of his or herself. The wage needed to support a fully family including enough for a stay-at-home parent would be significantly higher.
Even with all of that a family of 4 with only a single adult working is estimated a living wage in SF area is deemed to be 70k.[1] Not 200k. I'm assuming you're meaning "livable wage" to be different than "living wage".
Even if we were to going with the businessinsider data, which says 90k for expenses for a family, you're claiming that a family would need to spend almost 10k in discretionary spending every month for a "livable wage"? Remember all required expenses have been paid for, this would just be for discretionary. If you've already paid for "housing, food, childcare, transportation, healthcare, taxes and other necessities, and taxes" and are still going through an additional 10k/month, you're beyond a "livable wage".
Looking at the sources of these various numbers, the $91k number in the busnessinsider article comes from http://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ which breaks down the annual costs as follows, annually, for the SF metro area:
* Housing: $23k (seems fairly low for a family of 4 in the Bay Area, but I guess it depends on how far out you live)
* Food: $9384 (quite reasonable)
* Child Care: $10815 (seems unrealistically low for 2 kids if both parents work; hard to tell if only one works, since I would expect that to be near-0 for a bare minimum).
* Transportation: $7300
* Health care: $12,453 (might be high depending on your employer)
* Other necessities: $15689
* Taxes: $12490
I assume that tax number is based in the actually cited $91k income, so to figure out how much more income we need for discretionary spending and savings we need to look at marginal tax rates. Looks like CA state income tax is 8 or 9.3% in the relevant income range (60k-500k for couples). Federal rates are 25-28% (75k-233k taxable income). Medicare is 1.45% until we get to 250k. Social Security is 6.2% until we hit the cap. So a marginal rate of 35% to 39% not counting Social Security.
Retirement savings should be ~15k here (15% of income is the common recommendation), and can often be done "pre-tax" (so only taxed by Social Security and Medicare); let's call this 16k gross income.
Are you saving for college for those two kids? Any other savings (e.g. for a house)? Any discretionary income at all? Multiply all those numbers by 1.6 or so to account for the taxes involved. Realistically I would expect this to come to another 20-30k easily for anything resembling a "middle class" lifestyle.
Looking at the numbers from your link, they have a much lower healthcare estimate (~6k/year), a somewhat higher housing estimate, correctly estimate childcare costs if only one parent works, but still have what look like ludicrously low numbers if both parents work. The "2 adults, both working, 2 children" number from your link is $83k and the difference between that and the $91k from the businessinsider article is all down to the health care number.
Anyway, the correct conclusion here is that in the Bay Area for a family of 4 you need an income in the 70-90k range (mostly depending on how much you pay for health insurance and whether you both work) just to barely scrape by, with no savings and no discretionary spending of any sort. At 150k you can probably do ok in terms of being able to save for retirement, college, maybe take some vacations every so often, etc. 200k should be reasonably comfortable if you have no pretensions to more than 2 bedrooms (notice that housing for 2 kids is claimed to cost the same as for one kid) and aren't trying to get into good school districts.
If you want good schools or more living space than a small 2-bedroom place way far from anywhere, the housing numbers cited above are almost certainly way too low...
A family a 4, with only a single parent choosing to work, with fully funded retirement savings, while also saving for college, and possibly even saving for a house. Using the estimate above, that came to 150-200k.
So now, 65%+ of households have both parents working.[1] A single parent household is a luxury (without any judgement or whether it should or shouldn't be that way, it is). Assuming dual incomes in the above situation we would half our salary range. Taking the upper end, we'd get 100k as the required livable wage to match this household income.
Even more notably it's a calculation for a household income for a family a 4. Not a livable wage for a single-person which would be the other default expectation besides two parents working. Using the same two sources as previously we can see that the income required for a 1 Adult household is roughly 50% that of a family of 4 single breadwinner household. Take our 150-200k estimate multiple by this roughly ~50% factor, take the more generous end and again we end up with the salary in the range of 100k.
From this the most reasonable number for a livable wage would be ~100k.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/22/the-d...
Unfortunately, not quite. If both parents make 100k, your tax burden is higher than if one of them makes 200k and one 0 (because of the social security cap). More importantly, your child care expenses are much higher. So are your food expenses, typically; this part is correctly reflected in the data table you linked to.
In practice, I would expect a two-earner household, both earning 100k, to have 10-30k/year more in expenses than a one-earner household; the range mostly depends on how much child care costs.
100k for a single person is certainly pretty comfortable, even in San Francisco. Much more comfortable than 200k for a family of 4, I suspect, because housing is so much simpler.
Ok, so 105k-115k / yr. I think we're reaching the point (in economic terms) where the marginal cost of corrections or adjustment exceeds the marginal value they provide.
The summary though is that 105-115k is not near the 200k originally mentioned and absurdly far from the 300k.
Now if you want a big house, then most of the cities that Google is in are terrible for that. But there's more to life than having a big house, and the expensive metros have their own pros. It's pretty hard to beat Silicon Valley weather, and for what amounts to a giant suburb the restaurant scene is quite good (especially for Asian food).
It does take a lot of preparation for big-company clueless interviewing processes though. Next we'll see guides for how to ace your kid's application to the top-tier coding preschool.
All this sucking up to big companies with questionable morals and procedures, for the money, is so... 80s. So yuppie, so Reagan-era. Reachin' for the top! Go for it! Eye of the tiger! Pressure, pushing down on you, pushing down on me, no man ask for.