Not looking to move, but just out of curiousity, how would you say developer salary / cost of living compares, to, say San Francisco? No surprise that both will be a lot lower in Grand Rapids, but I'm wondering how the ratio looks.
You'll need a car, of course, and as long as you're not eating at trendy places downtown, everything else is pretty cheap. Bars have $1 beers and burgers at happy hour.
Additionally, another downside I noticed when I was there was that around 2am in the summer, the streets are often flooded due to people watering their lawns. Besides the absent or poor pedestrian infrastructure, this made my after work walk quite a bit more complicated.
My electric bill is about $80 in the summer to keep my $125k, 2000 sqft house at 72F. Not too bad IMO.
And everyone (40% of the houses in my neighborhood?) who waters their lawn does so at dawn and dusk, not 2AM. If you water in the middle of the night when the grass is cold and dormant, you can get mold.
Air conditioning is mandatory some areas, with temperatures in Sydney peaking over 40 C (105 F) in the summer, and electricity costs 27 cents per kWh (US$0.20).
Australia has some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world, as Australia is completely incapable of managing its infrastructure properly.
Imagine that salary in San Francisco is $9000 / month and cost of living is $7000 / month. The ratio of salary : cost of living is 1.286.
Imagine salary in Grand Rapids is $3000 / month and the cost of living is $2000 / month. The ratio has "improved" to 1.5, but the more important figure of (income - expenses) has fallen in half.
So, you might find that it's a 50% lower salary, and an 80% lower living cost. That would be informative.
So, about half the cost of living.
[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
It's true, the market is becoming pretty flat with globalization for costs in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZs4NDC4yrI
Air tickets are significantly cheaper in NY than ruralish areas in my experience
That's a massive cost difference, especially when you're looking at 2-4 person vacations. That's a problem in pretty much every rural area (flying out of Ithaca was expensive as heck). I'm able to travel way more as a result.
I had to buy a family member a flight from Seattle -> Detroit for next month, it cost $600. I'm about to fly myself from Istanbul to San Francisco, that flight cost $500.
There's a reason they're called the flyover states.
That said, you can probably move from here to a non-SF tech hub and get a 50-100% bump in your salary with only a 20% increase in cost of living.