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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

It's also hyperbole. It's closer to ~5K per month for a $1M mortgage with insurance and taxes in the bay today.

By the rule of thirds, that's $60K/yr meaning $180K+/yr salary is necessary. This is for suburban living in a remodeled 70's ranch home, not in an urban area.

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But a $180k gross income is not particularly unusual in the Bay. I mean, that's still in junior engineer territory at one of the BigCos (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.).

For a techie who's in the top 10% of earners, sure, but we're talking about averages. $180k gross is ridiculous for the average job, even in the bay.

What about regular people? Is everyone expected to be some high paid unicorn/big 4 engineer? Society is more than just rich techies.

"Regular people" in big populated urban areas can't expect to own a detached home, they can live in condos/apartments like they do in Asian cities, NYC and other densely populated cities.

The bay area isn't urban - we're talking about large stretches of suburbia. The area also isn't converting to urban despite the demand, which is part of what the article is talking about.

That's a good point. It is a bit unique situation where there are small suburban homes for $2M+.

None of that exists in the bay. There's nothing in terms of affordable housing. That's the entire point of the article. No one can afford to live there except for highly paid engineers. A condo will run you 700k easily in any decent place.

That's why they tore down all the single family houses in Sunset & Richmond to make way for 5 story apartment blocks. Oh wait...

> they can live in condos/apartments

How much do those cost in the Bay Area?

No, that's not junior engineer territory, even at the BigCos.

Yes, it is. $170-200k in comp per year is the baseline at a company like FB or Google. It’s typically broken down into something like 105-115k base, 40-50k liquid stock vesting per year, 10-15% yearly bonus, and some kind of one time signing bonus given as a lump sum on the start date.

That’s for someone fresh out of a top school who hasn’t even negotiated at all. There are many new grads in the bay area that recieve this kind of comp.

That's what all the college grads I knew at Google 2016-2017 were making, probably closer to $200k unless they started trimming the RSU grants because of $GOOG appreciation.

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