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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

All the criteria you chose seem like bad proxies for the things that really matter. I would count the following as the fundamental metrics that really count.

- Average (high-end) programmer salary

- Amount of VC funding

- Total number of full-time tech workers

The 1st and 2nd criteria determine how attractive the city is, for employees and founders respectively.

The 3rd criteria determines how much clustering/network effects the city enjoys.

On all 3 criteria, NYC is either 1st or 2nd. NYC hedge funds have bid up programmer salaries to levels that are virtually impossible to get anywhere else besides SFBA. The data on VC-funding shows NYC as a solid #2, only behind SFBA. And the linked article shows that in terms of networking potential, NYC is #2 as well.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/10/venture-capital-concent...

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You get paid more gross in NYC than Seattle, but the take-home is less due to taxes. Cost of living is also approximately double. I did the math last year -- offer was 5% higher in NYC, but the after-tax and living disposable income was 50% higher in Seattle.

2/3rd the gross pay in Austin probably gives a significant "raise" in terms of relative standard of living and maybe 1/4 the money in many parts of Asia would move you even higher.

All I'm saying is that Average Salary is probably a bad way to compare across geographies.

I thought while Cost of living in Seattle is relatively lesser than NYC, the house prices are exorbitant. NYC has advantage of very close proximity to NJ, Connecticut where you could probably get a better home than in Seattle-Bellvue-Redmond area.

The time, effort, and stress of commuting easily offsets any gains from living outside of NYC. Any city with decent neighborhoods will be at least a 60 minute commute door to door, plus you have to budget another 30 minutes for delays and whatnot because the public transit is terrible.

It's very difficult to plan anything on work days if you're commuting into NYC, and you get to pay super high rents and property taxes for states with huge deficits and infrastructure debt which means the situation won't get any better. Seattle offers better food, recreational activities, growing future, and no income tax. I'd say the weather is better too, but some people really miss the sun, but you can easily fly to a beach resort for multiple weekends of the year with the savings of not living in the NYC area.

On the other hand, for NYC most of your commute is by train. Resting on the train is a lot less stressful than driving.

Wouldn't be bad if the train was reliable, but if you monitor njtransit.com, it's late all too often, and if you have connecting trains then it will add to the stress.

If it was like Japan and you could actually make plans, then it wouldn't be so bad.

"It depends"

As someone who has gone through this for some 20 yrs, it's usually a faster commute to travel from Hoboken to pretty much anywhere along/south of the PATH line during peak hours (so 34th down to the southern tip of Manhattan) versus a starting point of the UES/UWS (which is where the comparable housing exists).

My commute from Hoboken to various startup locations in NYC was consistently ~45 minutes door to door, versus an hour for my friends on the UES/UWS.

Hoboken might as well be a borough of NYC, as well as the waterfront part of Jersey City. I was referring to places most think of when raising a family and wanting to own a home with a driveway.

I'd be curious to see more of those CoL comparisons. How big of a place are you pricing for NYC, and in which neighborhood? Are you factoring in the savings from not needing a car?

You can find CoL calculators out there, and they have their faults, but Seattle is already an expensive city in its own right, and I simply don't see how you possibly got NYC to come out double. That's way out of line with the calculators.

I've also done this math -- price per sqft is wayy better in Seattle and you don't necessarily need a car. In any case, a metro card isnt cheap. The cost of groceries/alcohol is also much much higher in nyc and at a lower quality.

I have a postdoc friend who lives in Seattle on slightly less than I do. They have a huge 1br in cap Hill with parking next to the subway with a short committee downtown or to UW. Meanwhile my apartment is the same price with a minifridge, a 40m commute, and no dishwasher/laundry/disposal.

Plus the PNW is just more enjoyable to explore than the northeast in my opinion. You definitely can make more in Nyc but the COL and QoL is just awful compared to the pnw

While I agree with your opinions here, those things are also somewhat personal. I place a lot of value on large housing, cheap car ownership and easy access to nice outdoor spaces.

A lot of other folks place more value on not needing a car ever, lots of easy food delivery options, and access to any kind or show or performance you might ever want to see without having to travel.

As someone who moved from LA to SF to Brooklyn, this exactly. There’s a ton of factors that are very personal. I need a big city; SF is just too small, among all the other reasons I disliked living there. I’m happy to pay for a place that has the things I actually prefer. This sentiment, of course, goes both ways. NYC isn’t for everyone. I don’t want to live in Midtown...

You're right, COL adjusted salary is a more accurate metric. According to NerdWallet, COL in Brooklyn is ~22% higher than Seattle. If you're looking at Manhattan, you should be comparing Manhattan vs Seattle-Downtown. Living in Seattle outside of downtown is more comparable to living in Brooklyn.

The really lucrative jobs in NYC, are the ones with Hedge Funds that are based entirely in NYC. Places like 2-sigma, Jane-st, DE-Shaw, Jump, and others. The offers they make, are hard to match anywhere else, even after COL adjustments. If you're considering a job at a random NYC tech company though, I agree that the salary may not make up for COL.

Having lived and worked in both cities, my experience is that salaries in Seattle are higher unless you're in fin-tech. I was quoted consistently better salaries in Seattle.

Salaries in Seattle also work out to be higher given the higher COL in NYC. I owned a mid-sized house with front and back yard in West Seattle; my apartment in Brooklyn is much smaller and more expensive.

Groceries can be up to 2.5x as expensive at some places unless you travel out of your way to someplace like Trader Joe's.

Also, no state income tax in Washington.

That said, New York is New York.

You sort of prove the cherry picking argument. Average salary means nothing in a vacuum without cost of living considered. And when it is... Unsurprisingly NYC comes in at the bottom of the list, https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer... Seattle is actually #1

I can’t trust any of these comparisions because it’s difficult to compare apartments across cities. Average apartment costs in new york are meaningless. I know of no one paying 3k per month. Usually it’s between 1k-1.5k, which completely changes this graph.

Please tell me where anyone is paying 1k-1.5k for an apartment in NYC. I am paying 2700/mo for 650 sqft, 45 minute commute from midtown, and I haven't seen anything better without a longer commute. Studios in my neighborhood are 1.6k+, and I am not in a happenin' place.

Should have specified, but thought it would be implied...roomates or significant other. Yes it’s not an equal comparision to other areas as you can get a whole apartment there by yourself.

If your paying 2700, find some roomates, move to bushwick/east williamsburg astoria, downtown brooklyn. And now your paying 1-1.5

North Brooklyn is slightly higher than that range, but lower than 2700/month, and should be roughly the same commute time.

I lived in Harlem 30 minutes from Midtown in a 2bdrm with a roommmate for 850, I now live in Boerum Hill (really nice neighborhood) 30 minutes from Midtown in a studio for 1800. It's really not hard to find places that aren't that expensive, you just have to be patient / willing to have a roommate or two.

You can get 650 sqft in midtown or the surrounding neighborhoods for 2700, probably in an okay doorman building even.

$1,000/month for an entire apartment? Where in NYC?

Prospect Park

It's not hard. And they're not. You're friends are paying 1K-1.5 to have a room. In the end if you have to pay as much for a room in city A as a whole apartment or mortgage in city B, you are getting paid less. To expand, both the the average and median price per a room per apartment is readily available and easily calculable. If a 2BD is 4K in city A and most people put 4 people in that apartment that doesn't mean all the sudden that it's the same deal as the same 2BD in city B that only cost $1K a month because most people don't share the space. The share cost is still a function of the actual cost, and easily computable and available in every city. Many people in Seattle split apartments and pay 500-600 per a room. They just aren't forced to because on average per cost of goods they get paid more. If anything Seattle has the calculations set up against it, as it has much much smaller city boundaries than NYC.

I understand that, but my argument is that people usually spend up to the amount they are comfortable with because they are not rational actors.

I made this argument a lot when the prius was becoming popular. Lots of people said it was overpriced, that is cost 30k and there were similarly equipped cars for 20k. But that completely missed who was buying the car. If someone is in the market to spend 30k on a car, they most likely will, as they have entered into a different price bracket.

Same thing with apartments. Sure in Seattle you could share a space and pay less, my hunch (with no data to back this up) is that you probably wont. If I can comfortably afford 1-1.5k, then that's what I'm going to spend, regardless of city (Please don't nitpick and say 'Oh I share and pay less', I'm not speaking in absolutes).

You obviously will get a more space/features/quality in Seattle for the money, but my argument against this guides is they say you will actually be making x, because I'll be paying more in rent. but that's not the case. Yes you can argue the missed cost of having more space, but that's not what they compare. My bank account is going to be the same after rent regardless of the major city I'm in.

EDIT: Spelling and Grammar

While there is def some sound logic to what you're saying I think the key piece you're missing is paying the same amount of monthly payments enables developers in Seattle to buy a home, which in the end means they are building equity by default while their counterparts in NYC could live their whole lives paying rent that keeps going up.

That gets into the debate of buying vs renting, and Im honestly not sold on all the benefits of buying. While you are building equity, it’s debatable whether you could make more just nuy putting money into an index fund. Im talking about the down payment, all the maintenace costs and associated costs of owning a home.

But I don’t need to dig into it further. I planning on getting out of NYC eventually to lower my costs and be somewhere with cheaper cost of living. It’s just harder to figure out true cost of living and the amount you earn as a developer then these guides suggest.

I agree those are good criteria but they tell only half the story. The other commenters metrics are more outcome focused.

It's great if you have a lot of VC funding, but if it's not necessarily leading to attractive outcomes for investors or early employees then that's not going to be sustainable.

> On all 3 criteria, NYC is either 1st or 2nd

It's second on all three. First on zero.

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