You need to qualify that. Most people would not kill to work in a warehouse or customer support, which is a huge portion of Amazon jobs.
It's a fine place to be a software engineer, so long as you enjoy the high stress/low perks part of the tech scene, but that's a very different, air conditioned environment.
Remind yourself that the warehouse employees are in areas where their choice of work would normally be Walmart or a coal mine. Working for a big name company like Amazon has as much prestige for them as it does for us "tech scene folks".
https://www.matrixres.com/resources/salary-survey/
If I can make $140K in metro Atlanta, where a newly built 3000 square foot house can be had for less than $350K in a nice neighborhood, why would I want to live in Seattle?
"Metro Atlanta" consists of either 5 counties or 10 depending on which definition you go by. There is so much sprawl in Atlanta and so much undeveloped land that builders will jump at the chance to build. This is still the South. The government doesn't make builders jump through as many hoops to build.
The weather point is, of course, tough. Seattle summers are bloody amazing. The winter sorta blows.
Says nobody that's been to Atlanta or has taken two minutes to use the internet to check preconceived notions about Georgia against the city.
https://www.myajc.com/atlanta-neighborhood-2016-presidential...
Lived in Atlanta for many years. It is much more liberal than surrounding areas, true. However, Seattle is in another league when it comes to this sort of thing.
Which is not to say that we don't have a ways to go, either. In particular, we have some really hard problems to consider out here.
Seattle has one bad season, one good season. Atlanta is the same.
Now, the winter is much darker. The shift in sunset and sunrise is much more pronounced. This is somewhat offset by how much bloody sun we get in the summer. Which is truly insane. Sun is up by 4:30 most mornings, and you can see outside till near 10 most evenings. (Sunset, I think, is well earlier than that, but our twilight is bright. I am likely mistaken on this understanding, though. Haven't taken a journal or kept records, etc.)
Commuting to downtown was only about a 30-35 minute drive.
a. That salary is not low. If you chose to run a family of 4 on one salary of 160k, it's your choice. It's still quite good.
b. If you discount 30% of the comp because you feel like it, I wonder how many of the 20 other metro areas are going to match up.
- looking at another recruiting agency I've used, I found this job posting.
https://prestigestaffing.jobs.net/job/lead-net/J3W7C8754PTSH...
- from anecdotal experience, I have a group of four friends from a former job. We all still get together about once a month and we are in a private Slack group. All of us are in our early 40s and none of us have any desire to go into management. We all consider ourselves "full stack developers". Our salaries range from $125 to $145K.
- I just turned down a job for $145K as a lead developer (still hands on coding) because of the commute. I accepted a job that paid slightly less that was better commute and used newer technology.