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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I know someone who works as a low level manager at Amazon and I've seen salaries of the average Software developer - for both the salary is like $140-$160K. That's nothing to live in Seattle with the cost of living. You can make that in 1 of 20 other metro areas that I know of with a much lower cost of living and much lower stress. Even when considering the signing bonus and stock, I was never enticed to actually fly out there and interview even after I got through some preliminary phone screens.

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I'm not sure what planet you live when $140k dollars is nothing. As a software developer you might be able to do better, but you are incredibly lucky. I assure you the median wage is significantly lower than that, and of course many people make minimum wage.

In context - $140K for an experienced software engineer in a major metropolitan city isn't outrageous. A "software architect" often does hands on coding. For reference:

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?

Politics. Nicer weather. Better environment for women/girls in schools. :)

The weather point is, of course, tough. Seattle summers are bloody amazing. The winter sorta blows.

The weather in Atlanta isn't much better than Seattle, if you compare season to season.

Seattle has one bad season, one good season. Atlanta is the same.

It is overcast 8-9 months of the year in Seattle.

The weather in Atlanta is just more extreme, honestly. Which can matter a lot if you like hot weather. Out here in Seattle it is almost always cooler. Hardly ever actually "cold" though, in that I think Atlanta actually got more snow and I had my pipes freeze more there than I have out here.

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.)

>Politics

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...

Politics isn't just local laws but also state laws.

Which state laws affect individuals more than they would n liberal states? Atlanta being such a major city makes GA very pro business. Businesses are doing a lot to keep pressure on the state to keep it from becoming more conservative.

Laws about abortions, bathrooms, access to the social net, etc.

Apologies for not responding. I actually forgot I posted this. :(

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.

So not sure what you define as experienced (2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years?) but a 5 years of experience SDE at Amazon may make that in salary, but their total compensation will be quite a bit more than that.

If you hang on through your last 2 years of vesting (which is notoriously painful).

Don't fret, there's a good chance HQ2 comes to Atlanta and hikes those home prices. In fact, if I lived there, I'd probably make sure to buy ahead of time

There are plenty areas of metro Atlanta where the house prices are much lower than $335K for a nice size house. I purposefully chose the most affluent county in Atlanta (and one of the top 25 in the US) for comparison.

"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.

Yeah, exactly. Amazon pays less than Google and FB, but it is vastly more than your average SF startup, for example.

You know median seattle family income is like 80k right? Less if you consider more of the metro area. That's the family income, so it includes two earner households. NYC is like 50k.

What does the average household income have to do with someone who is choosing between a software engineering job in Seattle and another area with a lower cost of living?

That it's absurd on its face to say that 160k is "nothing to live in Seattle with the cost of living". The vast majority of people live with much less. The rest of your comment was fine re: programmers have other options.

It came with the assumption that I wanted the same standard of living. But the truth applies the other way. You won't live in a neighborhood with top rated schools (they will be safe), but you can live in a nice neighborhood with a 70k household income. When I bought my first home in 2002, it was a new build and 2800 square feet for around $170K. I was making around 70K. Looking now, that same house I use to live in just sold for around the same price about a year or two ago. The neighborhood is a safe, quiet, place.

Commuting to downtown was only about a 30-35 minute drive.

(wife works at amazon (but in palo alto) (and is 1 year out of grad school))

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.

Comparable houses in Seattle compared to metro Atlanta is a lot more than 30%. For reference, the area of Atlanta with both the highest average house prices and the highest household income is Forsyth County. The average house price is around $350K and the average income is around 90K.

I don't know if I'm just being taken advantage of, or if your data is just wrong, or you're lucky, but I've never been offered more anywhere that wasn't Sillicon Valley big tech, or Seattle big tech.

- I posted a link from a recruiting agency (that I have used) but because you haven't been offered that amount, my data must be wrong? The link is "2017 salary survey".

- 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.

Thats like a military Major's payrate when converted to civilian pay (bc allowances)

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