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Comment by scj | Hacker News Reader

The 2008 recession knocked salaries down in Canada.

Not just in Canada. I'm about to graduate in the third largest city in my state, and I can only find jobs that pay around $35k/yr. The fact is that most new or good paying jobs are being concentrated to only a few areas of the country. They form economic bubbles that are insulated from the fact that most of the country is seeing a decline in quality of life due to lower wages, higher costs, and less worker leverage. This economic ignorance is a big reason why big cities don't understand the rise of Trump.

The third largest city in a given state could be anything from a million people to 30k people.

I wouldn't expect a town of 30k (or even 100k) to have that many jobs for developers as it's a fairly specialized industry.

50 years ago you wouldn't find actuarials or design engineers in small towns either.

My point still stands. People In this thread are talking like $40k/yr salaries are unheard of, yet aren't acknowledging that the economy of the high growth cities is nothing like the rest of the country.

But if there is 1 job in a 30k town and 100k in a city of 2 million, then the salary of that 1 job doesn't matter much for an average salary calculation.

For the profession of software engineer, most of the jobs are in the higher salary bands there should have an outside impact on the average calculations.

I think it is pretty pointless to make nationwide comparisons.

For example, I looked and found a level 1 Software Engineer opening in Kansas City for 50K. That actually seems pretty good -- the median house price there is 120K. Here in Portland it's 345K, and entry level engineers aren't getting 3x the salary. More like 80K or so.

This actually sounds kinda like a good reason for moving to the midwest, assuming you like everything else about it there.

The downside, mostly, is that your next job may need you to move again. Many people prefer stability in their housing arrangements, and are willing to trade off a lot for that.

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