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Go West

florentcrivello.com

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The author notes most of the reasons why 'Move to SF' isn't great advice, but then totally disregards them.

Maybe having to worry about stepping on a syringe isn't a way that someone wants to live! Maybe it's healthy to meet and associate with people who aren't in tech! Maybe you can get a great job working for one of those world class companies and still get 5 job offers a week - they're all from recruiting agencies, anyhow - and live somewhere far more livable (Austin, Boston or Raleigh come to mind quickly).

Can't argue with the weather, though. Damn, Northern California has amazing weather.

Interestingly, I've always hated winter and pined for NorCal weather. But I'm really looking forward to the serenity of dark, cold, snowy streets this year.

We'll see how I feel in February, of course...

The Sunset is Lit. No need to keep it a secret, it’s just not trendy enough yet. Right down to tech unawareness and wide open 280 commutes, it’s a different place.

I have lived in SF, Raleigh, and Austin and I would take either of their weather over SF.

SF has chilly fog, high wind, and no sun or sky for 200 days a year. Miserable.

I hear that South Bay is completely different, and I occasionally trek down there on the weekends just to get a few hours sunlight. It seems a lot better.

And I don’t even live out by the ocean, I’m technically not in the crazy fog zone.

I like living here overall but to me the weather is NOT a selling point.

I grew up in Raleigh..I love it but the weather is anything but good IMO. Too cold in the winters and too hot in the summers.

I did an internship in Seattle and enjoyed the weather there more myself.

This is not true for most SF neighborhoods, and not true for basically any east bay neighborhoods.

I agree, I can't stand SF weather but love South Bay weather. Every time I have to do the drive to SF for some concert I whine about it :)

> SF has chilly fog, high wind, and no sun or sky for 200 days a year.

San Francisco averages 259 sunny days per year: https://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/california/san_franc...

I honestly don't know what you're talking about.

San Francisco is famous for its microclimates, where it can be sunny in one area but cold and foggy a short walk away.

I’ve looked up sources for that before and I believe they use the airport and sometimes a weather station on Rincon Hill. Some of those also don’t count the marine layer (is the fog). That’s probably twice as many sunny days as Alamo Square (middle of the city near me) and three times as many as Sunset or anything on the pacific side of town.

You can get a better picture of this on http://fog.today which has a tool showing historic cloud cover including the marine layer.

Sure, but most of the people SF / Oakland don't live in Sunset. Saying that SF's weather is dismal just isn't true for the majority who live and work here. Which isn't to say that everyone experiences glorious weather daily, to be sure, but it's pretty nice for most people.

I’m saying SF’s weather is dismal to me. I’m not saying anything about the rest of the Bay Area, or to people who like not seeing the sun from May 15 to August 15 each year.

It depends. If you live in the Sunset neighborhood that's not true - in SOMA, yes.

(OP) Yeah maybe I should have made my position more explicit regarding these downsides. I think they're real and annoying; but all cities have their downsides (eg Paris is gloomy all the time and people are insanely grumpy), and that getting a 100-200% salary increase is worth suffering the dirty streets and dysfunctional public infrastructure.

Funny that you're being downvoted. These issues are very real in many parts of the country(other cities have drug problems, expensive housing, homelessness, traffic) and yet SF bears the brunt of these criticisms. Anyway - I agree - I don't live in SF but it is a pretty awesome city and I have loved every moment I have spent there.

It's just the center of attention, I guess. It's almost as if people expect SF to not have the realities of city life? I'm all for progress and solving problems though - don't get me wrong....

> These issues are very real in many parts of the country(other cities have drug problems, expensive housing, homelessness, traffic) and yet SF bears the brunt of these criticisms.

Most of my "metro" experience comes from the midwest (Chicago, Minneapolis/St Paul, Kansas City) and maybe it doesn't count for much, but moving to the Bay Area was like taking those city-living annoyances and putting them on steroids. I can completely understand why SF takes the brunt of the criticisms.

A bit off topic, but I lived in Kansas City for a couple years. I heard gunshots almost every night. There were shootings, stabbings on an almost monthly basis down in Westport. The library branch my wife worked at had a bullet go through the window while she was working there. I saw a dead body on 71 south headed down to my Cerner office as a result of a roving gun battle on the highway. Not to mention the weather.

While the issues may have been hidden from a lot of people living and working outside of KC proper and shielded from the eastside...KC has an insane amount of problems esp wrt gun violence and segregation. Now I have never had the chance to live in San Fransisco, but I would've jumped at the chance to leave KC for SF...and I'm the kind of person who would always choose to deal with midtown KC's issues than to move to the 'burbs.

Edit: A cursory search to try and back up what I am getting at: https://bismarcktribune.com/news/national/the-cities-with-th...

Comically enough, Kansas City shows up on this list twice due to the state boundary. Anyway - most of these cities are back east. I would take being harassed by a couple hobos, tents, and the occasional human turd over sky-high homicide rates any day - though from what I gather Oakland compares to midwestern cities in this regard.

I suppose I wasn't lumping crime into the "annoyances" category, but yeah I heard gunshots fairly regularly in KC too. I wasn't living out in OP (not to start a JoCo flame war lol).

I'm outside SF now (down in San Jose). I still hear gunshots from time to time, but the crime rate (both violent and non-violent) is way lower than it was back in KC.

Go to Silicon Valley instead -- no syringes and no fog. Of course it's the suburbs, so most people will have to drive.

And more tech-focused (apple, google, FB of course, but also robots, various hardware and life sciences companies...not as many people selling socks online as up in SF).

But with a lot fewer interesting things to do after hours, when done writing software

I spend a lot of time outdoors. But you can also go to the city.

I hate to break it to you, but Boston is full of junkies and housing is prohibitively expensive. Also, the weather is nasty, and the people that don't work in tech work in pharma. In the Bay area, one could at least survive the winter in an uninsulated car or tent

"If you’re good, it’s not uncommon to see software engineers with 5-6 years of experience make $300k-$400k per year in total compensation (which includes your base salary, yearly bonus and stocks)."

So I've heard this before, but it never matches up with data that sites like Glassdoor provide. Like, right now, the listings for "senior software engineer" with 10-14 years of experience in SF seem to top out around $200k in salary + bonuses, and that's the extreme upper end. The average is under $160k

Is the Glassdoor data bad, or is this a case of the author's information merely being anecdotal? Or are we comparing apples to oranges - do such people get 1/3 to 1/2 of their total compensation in stock?

The problem is that "software engineer" encompasses both the architects who design skyscrapers and the construction workers who install drywall in them

I have a lot of engineer friends in silicon valley making $220-280k, anecdotally

This would all be much more useful if the salaries were stated in some form that's normalized for COL. Maybe it could be factors, like earning "2" means you earn 2 times your COL. Or at least just earnings minus COL.

Minus makes more sense to me, because you can save up and then move.

People really overestimate how much COL affects how much you earn in San Francisco. $70k in Atlanta is not close to $235k in San Francisco (both typical new grad starting salaries). Assuming you spend $40k on rent a year without having a roommate in San Francisco you still have $101k after taxes.

I agree completely. Cost of living is dominated by your housing expense, so to scale you're basically just looking at the net delta in rent or mortgage divided by the tax rate, so like current_salary + rent_delta/0.6 seems a reasonable way to find a break even point.

> $70k in Atlanta is not close to $235k in San Francisco (both typical new grad starting salaries)

Say what? Not even Google starts people at a 235K salary. Total comp package sure (so starting bonus, bonus, RSU grants). In the last year or so, the new grads I'm friends with are averaging around ~150K a year starting base salary from the big companies in the bay.

> Say what? Not even Google starts people at a 235K salary

Yes, that was my mistake. $235k is a total compensation.

Glass door data is stale and I believe that’s only largely true at large companies unless you do real gymnastics with your stock options. It is true though.

> Is the Glassdoor data bad

it is, use https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html instead

This is most accurate for mid-band TC specifically.

I personally know people with < 3 years experience making $300k+. I know others with 0 years experience getting $210k+.

This is in Boston, Seattle and Chicago, not SF.

What.

A junior level making >200k?

Please elaborate.

What’s to elaborate? If you do well in your interviews at top tech companies or get a $75k signing bonus after you intern it’s very common.

It makes no sense to include a one-time bonus as part of one's annual income, unless one is trying to brag rather than inform.

It absolutely is considering that can be invested with a stable ROI. It still means more in a year than your peers without signing bonuses.

I'm not suggesting that anyone should turn down the money, but it's unhelpful to include one-time payments like a signing bonus when comparing salaries across the industry.

It’s common for engineers here to get a significant portion of their pay in stock. Stock, of course has a tendency to change value, and in a historic bull run if you count stock growth you can get to some very high numbers for total comp.

I've noticed that as well. The problem is Glassdoor very rarely actually includes stocks (though they say they do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). All my friends making $400k+ make more than 50% of that in stocks.

As individuals, we look at the world through a microscope, so all personal experience is anecdotal. But these $400k+ earning SEs are a double-digit percent of the engineers I know with 6+ years of experience (N > 10).

> these $400k+ earning SEs are a double-digit percent of the engineers I know with 6+ years of experience (N > 10)

Well they would have to be, wouldn't they?

In most places you'd be happy for a Kwarter of that.

Can you elaborate more on "make more than 50% of that in stocks"?

It looks like GOOG is up about 120 points compared to this time last year. Is that $200k / year just from projected stock growth / dividends / etc? Do employees in this situation get issued $200k worth of stock every year? Or is it done via options? Is it a case of stocks vesting over time?

I find all this fascinating because it's so different from my experience. I work for a software company in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I have about 15 years of experience (all over the place - C#, Java, some C++, JS, etc.). When I compare myself to my local peers, I feel like I'm a pretty decent developer.

$200k+ / year total compensation seems absolutely massive to me, even factoring cost-of-living adjustments. Like in the realm of "too good to be true" or "results may vary". But now I'm wondering...

A few points, based on my experience at Facebook and Google. Facebook and Google use a surprisingly similar job title system (maybe Bret Taylor copied the Google system while he was at Facebook?) When you are just hired, you are usually a level 3 but maybe a level 4. After 3-5 years of experience, it is expected that everyone be promoted twice to level 5. Level 5 = "senior software engineer" so that is what Glassdoor will tell you about.

So, there are also plenty of levels above level 5, and it is not uncommon to get there with 5-6 years of experience. If you are world-class famous in your area, you might be a level 9 engineer, even though your external title will still say "Software Engineer". If you are the top engineer on your team you might be a level 6 or 7. Each level is approximately a 30-40% raise on the previous level. So one thing that's happening is that Glassdoor just isn't reflecting the upper end of what you can make.

Another thing is the value of stock. Stock can vary a lot from person to person and company to company. Some companies will give you essentially zero stock. Some will give you stock that's worth a comparable amount to your base salary. More common is somewhere in the middle. Obviously the value varies depending on how the stock does while you're working there, but there are also various ways to get extra stock bonuses for different reasons. In particular you can get stock bonuses for high performance, and if you are being recruited for your particular expertise you might also get an extra-large stock offer.

> world-class famous in your area

s/area/specialty/

All the anecdotes we hear about high compensation come with a heavy dose of survivor bias---we only hear about the high salaries. There are lots of good devs making more modest figures at less glamorous startups or small shops. Glassdoor reflects that.

I know someone who turned down a job in Cupertino because they were only going to make about 20% more than Seattle, which would have effectively been a huge pay cut for a little more upward mobility and some prestige. The glass door numbers you cite are within margin of error of those numbers.

Is this just people throwing around VC money pretending it will attract the best of the best?

Almost half the compensation comes from stock grants, which Glassdoor doesn’t measure. Look up what people have entered in the levels.fyi spreadsheet if you want to see actual comp.

Those values are almost always inflated upwards and should be taken with a few grains of salt.

I recently did a lot of interviewing and found the levels.fyi numbers very accurate to the offers / potential offers I was seeing.

They also depend heavily on the performance of the company in question. Amazon's stock went up 8x in the 6 years I worked there, so the original numbers vastly underestimate the reality.

I think Glassdoor data is bad. Check Blind to see what people are actually getting paid.

I do think that you can get the same software experience in NYC, Boston, Seattle, and probably Austin too. I always tell people to start their careers in a big city or SV, but it really is an atrocious area to raise a family. California is nice and SF is a cool enough city, but SV is just sprawl, sprawl, sprawl. You’d expect more give the COL.

Anyways. I think this author has some serious rose colored glasses on, but I think the basic advice still stands. The earning power you can command for the rest of your career will be monumentally different if you start your career in a city.

I started a career on the West coast and made enough of a name for myself that I work remotely in the MidWest with an SV salary. There’s no way I could be doing what I’m doing now if I hadn’t started in a city.

Why is it an atrocious area to raise a family ? I have kids and I think it is an amazing area to raise children. Great diversity, getting to know people from all over the world, year round hiking and outdoors fun, endless nature, trails, parks, lakes, free concerts, movie nights, healthy food, fresh produce, great schools (some are very competitive though). Great museums, aquariums, oceans, bays etc. easy access to SoCal with all their theme parks.

I was speaking from a monetary perspective. The affluenza in SV is downright toxic.

Are there any other cities that have survived as desirable places to live after they've lost everyone outside of the monoculture?

To someone like me who has interests both in- and outside of software, there's no question that San Francisco is the top place in the world for software today, but that doesn't mean I'd want to live there -- any more than I'd want to live in an highly productive industrial district.

> Beyond the opportunities you’ll receive personally, tech is currently reshaping the whole world — and San Francisco is at the center of it. I feel lucky every day, getting to witness what’s happening here. It’s often compared to the renaissance in Florence during the 15th century.

Except Florence was all about art, and earlier in this blog post you observed that San Francisco "chased away" all the artists. Those sound like completely different environments. Life is not just about living at an economic inflection point. Oil reshaped the world, too, but that doesn't mean I'd want to have lived at a refinery in the 1950's.

> Some people get super annoyed when you say this.

I'm not surprised. If the only thing you take from the history of Florence is that it was economically successful, I think you're missing the point. Quick, name anything at all memorable from 15th century Florence that is not about art.

Even Florence couldn't survive without art. There were just as many merchants living there after the Counter-Reformation began, but it couldn't save them from the fall.

Last I recall checking, out of the residents of San Francisco, only about 5% work for a tech company. And many or most of those people work in non-technical roles. I think a lot of the feeling of a "monoculture" is self-enforced; it happens because people in the same industry cluster too much in where they live, what activities they seek, and how they try to meet new people.

Imagine if artists and people in other industries looked around and saw people just like themselves and cried "monoculture!" They could, I imagine. The people who work a KQED probably interact professionally with other media people, same for SFGATE. Now, outside of work, of course, if they have lived here, gone to school here, then they should have formed friendships outside those industries...

It's interesting to see people who move from elsewhere round the country come to SF for a job and then winder why many people they know are in the same industry. I'd understand the complaint if they grew up in STL, for example, went to school there, got a job there and then only had friends in the industry...

"3 years in SF will not only have been an amazing experience you’ll always remember; they’ll pay dividends for your whole life."

I lived in Mountain View in the 1980's, and I have found this to be true. My wife and I left the area to be closer to our relatives when we started our family, but every job I've had since that time was easier to get due to that experience.

The Swiss call this the ZAG degree that looks good on your resumé: Z'Amerika gsii (Been to America).

But I love Colorado. The weather is great year round (IMO), tons of sun, even in the winter, which keeps it comfortable and melts the snow quickly. Boulder is also more feasible for commuting than the bay area, allowing you to be removed from Boulder housing prices (which are still not at bay area levels).

You also get a better variety of different people with different attitudes (more so in Denver and CoSp), as compared to the ironically homogeneous bay area tribe. I take an active interest in encompassing as many different things and ideas as possible, and like having people around me that fuel that.

CO is amazing but damn.. that dry air. I can't live with a constant headache.

Also, for some reason, the fact that the lowest point in the state is around 3k' sort of freaks me out. I want my sea level oxygen and UV protection.

Really, I actually love the dry air and am extremely humidity averse. I do remember getting headaches when I first moved here though.

And we'll still be kicking if the rest of the country is underwater; convenient vacationing to the Arizona Bay :^)

From my perspective, SV isn't an option for two reasons: I don't want to raise a family there, and the politics of the Valley aren't compatible with my own.

I rarely see the latter mentioned, but it's increasingly a driving concern for many Americans.

Can't agree with you more, the political atmosphere in the Valley and the tech. companies is simply unbearable.

Living in the valley in general and especially in SF basically means being subjected to a daily deluge of left-wing ideology that the people living in that bubble self-perpetuate and feed upon.

The Trump election came as a much deeper shock to the SF/Valley locals than the rest of America: most people there were totally dumbstruck when he won.

The very idea that this was even remotely possible was simply not part of their tiny self-contained world.

We may never know but I would say that most people were surprised that Trump won not because his policies are conservative but because he is a very crappy person and makes statements that no political leader should ever make in the 21st century, IMO. You can have lots of opposing views towards the common political ideas found in SF and not have to be someone like Trump. I think the fact that won was very shocking because of who he is and how he acts rather than the fact that the rest of the country would vote republican.

>because he is a very crappy person

I don't disagree with you there.

But you have to realize that the rest of America is so disgusted with the silicon-valley style lefties at this point that they are willing to vote for someone like Trump.

Self-introspection time imo.

Silicon Valley? Left wing? You've got to be kidding me.

SF is like the ultimate neoliberal bubble.

This kind of comment is exactly what we're referring to. I'm sorry to be blunt, but it's so false that I wonder if it's a parody. SF's government is one of the most left wing of the entire country. Taxes are very high, the economy is extremely regulated (getting a building permit can easily take 6-10 years) and there's a ton of public aid.

In case anyone is wondering SF county (& many of the counties around it) pay 16.2% of their income in taxes putting them in the top 20 of the country [1]. SF/Oakland have some of the longest waiting for permits for residential at 10.2 months on average [2]

I can't seem to find any good sources on exactly how much public aid is spent.

Because I was wondering, the SF MSA ranked 25th out of ~1k in terms of worst income inequality [3]

All of these data points come from different sources and from different years.

[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/map-income-taxes-in-y...

[2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/building-permit-delays-choke-u-...

[3]: https://www.epi.org/publication/income-inequality-in-the-us/

SF and California at large is run by liberal Democrats, but that's a far cry from actual leftism.

Do you know how many members of the San Jose City Council are Republicans?

One. And he's Vietnamese.

I grew up in the American south and was also dumbstruck. Heck I’m pretty sure the man himself was.

I hate SV politics too. The upside is: the kind of conversations you can have behind closed doors is very different from what you hear on the public place :)

> The upside is: the kind of conversations you can have behind closed doors is very different from what you hear on the public place :)

How is this an upside? That seems extremely toxic.

Meant the silver lining* (ESL here)

Silver lining makes more sense IMO.

It's not really true. Many of us are living "in the closet". Indeed, some of the staunch virtue signalers are just pretending in order to fit in.

Just because OP doesn't agree with the prevailing politics doesn't mean they agree with your particular beliefs.

This is true. Now that this is a couple of days old and unlikely to start a flame war, I’ll say: I’m an anarchist-capitalist. I tend to get along with the right merely because I grew up around them and my “social camouflage” fits them better.

Yes, and that is f*ing annoying to have to do. Even if there are others doing the same thing, you end all end up being quiet about it. Super dumb that it's become acceptable to openly talk leftist politics in the office

personal anecdote on monoculture

It's a big deal, and hard to mitigate. I love tech, I get paid to know and care about new technologies. However, when I'm not working I want to hear about it less and less. My current roommate has very little personality traits other than "hey I'm good at tech", he's also a self proclaimed "rationalist". Other than that, we've got zero in common, he doesn't listen to music, doesn't watch movies, only reads technical books.

I've met numerous people in the valley that have zero other redeeming personality traits. Including myself (when I first moved here), I find talking about climbing or hiking or biking or history is MUCH more interesting than talking shop about various machine learning techniques.

I completely agree. I'm not a developer, but when I hang out with people in my field who can only talk about that field, it gets really old really fast.

I live in SF.

There is a very clear trend of companies starting to look elsewhere for talent, such that in the long term, I really doubt the tradeoffs of SF will be worth it. The cost of living here is just terrible and I think companies are starting to accept that the government and people just really don't want tech to be here, at all.

Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about:

New Relic - serious tech company - note how much elsewhere: https://newrelic.com/about/careers

Carbon Robotics - Guadalajara - http://www.carbon.ai/careers/

Front page of the SF Chronicle: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/For-San-Francis... "Politics, economics and real estate could make jobs boom elsewhere"

Absurd cafeteria ban - showcases the general attitude of the city government toward tech, something between a never-ending money fountain to pillage, and a nuisance: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-proposed-em...

Gecko Robotics, Pittsburgh: https://www.geckorobotics.com/

Others offhand: Boston Dynamics, wherever Amazon puts HQ2 (I'm guessing Atlanta, DC, or Pittsburg), Sendgrid and Gusto moving people to Boulder, numerous great options in Seattle (Zillow, Microsoft, Amazon), tons of great companies in NYC.

I really believe you have to skate to where the puck is going with this stuff, not where it is now. In my view, the future is clearly "the rise of the rest". Salaries have gotten so out of control, the only companies who can afford to be here at the mega-tech giants (monopolies) who can afford the pay numbers people are throwing around. It's not sustainable and I think there will be major growth elsewhere in the next decade, especially as venture funding starts to fan out, traditional industries start to figure out software more (e.g. food processing in Chicago), and people in their 30s with 10+ years experience want to start families and have to take care of parents.

Your examples are very few. May be to balance you can post some other companies, like Uber: https://www.uber.com/careers/list/?team=engineering

Here is twitter, with 95 openings in SF: https://careers.twitter.com/content/careers-twitter/en/jobs-...

That is close to 400 openings for Software engineers in SF among just 2 companies. it will take a lot of New Relics to compensate for that kind of demand. And I haven't even linked to Google, FB, Apple (each of them hire thousands of engineers in SF), Lyft, Airbnb, Salesforce etc. I feel like the advice in HN is more of what people wish it would be, but doesn't reflect. The original article is spot on and is remarkably good career advice for anyone who is starting out. Go West.

All I'm saying is that there's a choice.

You have to ask, why will companies pay $180K or more in salary when equivalently good people (and I really do mean this) are available at half the cost elsewhere?

How is this sustainable long-term?

And to what extent is the behavior of young firms a bellwether for the future? I really wouldn't bet against this trend.

Yes I've noticed this trend as well. Other examples of companies moving from the Bay Area include Expensify (Pittsburgh) and Indinero (Pittsburgh too I think, and the Philippines).

I think that's tragic, as there are strong network effects in ecosystems like Silicon Valley — everyone would benefit from all the talent and capital being in the same place! Studies show that cities get more productive, creative and ecological as they get larger.

That said, even with that trend going on, I still think Silicon Valley will remain by far the #1 tech ecosystem in the US 20 years from now. It just has too strong of a tail wind at this point (the network effects I mentioned above). People have been predicting its demise for about 30 years now. Maybe this time is different, but so far it's always done well for itself.

The site seems to be having intermittent trouble loading. Here's an alternative link: https://web.archive.org/web/20180925150228/https://florentcr...

I would include more cities on this list. For starters, LA/NY/Boston/Seattle. The software scene in Los Angeles is great right now. I don't have first-hand knowledge of the other cities but they definitely have the reputation of being great for developers.

I'm not going to lie, after reading articles and comments like these, I appreciate living in the DC area more and more.

There is really great hiking all around, a plethora of cool people to hang out with and things to do, and it's not ridic expensive (It's just normal expensive. Maybe bordering on ridic at times).

The only thing I hate is the traffic, but it's not too hard to find a job that allows you very flexible scheduling (basically, the policy everywhere I've been is that "core hours are 10-2, be here during that time unless it's your telework day; pick a schedule and stick to it, try to make it to the office as much as possible, and work about 8 hours a day and definitely 40 hours a week.")

This allows almost anyone to optimize for their commute and get on with their lives.

Agreed - LA seems to have an incredible amount of opportunity right now (but with better weather, and overall better quality of life than SF). Unless of course you have a long commute...

Solid advice (runs counter to most HN posts). But young people taking this advice will truly benefit for it. I can personally attest to it, as my income went up 8x just moving from Arizona.

I live and work in the Bay Area (close to SF). I was an early stage employee at a startup recently acquired by one of the big tech companies. Didn't make millions, but I did make hundreds. Honestly, I feel I'm living the dream. I make more money than I thought possible and my job is super creative. I'm in AI. The density of opportunity here is amazing. The startup I was at was able to hire locally the depth of talent it needed to succeed. Fundamentally, if you are talent or you want talent, you need to be here.

Just move to Seattle instead. 0% state income tax, rent is half of SF, and the tech salaries aren't that much lower.

That state income tax(or lack thereof)... It's like having $1-2k every month of free money. That almost pays for the anti-depressants and full-time counseling I'd need to move back to the PNW :)

Also, your traffic sucks... really, really badly. I grew up in the PNW and whenever I'm back I cringe at the mess it has become. With all that money flowing around, you'd figure they'd invest in some infrastructure. I know they're trying but it's really not enough.

I recently traveled to Bellevue, having not been to WA for at least a decade. Downtown Bellevue blew me away. The density was lower than that of SF, but retail shops are still all well within walking distance. More importantly, I felt comfortable walking about _at night_ the first day I'd arrived. The air didn't smell like pot or excrement, and I was never harassed or solicited by $INSERT_PC_TERM_OF_CHOICE.

A simple salad also didn't cost fucking $15.

Every time I'm in SF I couldn't wait to GTFO, and whenever I walk outside, it's always power-walk from point A to B, eyes straight ahead.

Why does anyone live in SF?! Why do _I_ even go there? sigh I semi-seriously considered moving, but a) the weather's too cold for me, and b) non-competes are valid in WA.

> If you’re good, it’s not uncommon to see software engineers with 5-6 years of experience make $300k-$400k per year in total compensation (which includes your base salary, yearly bonus and stocks)

Can you please point me to one of these companies that pay $400k per year in total compensation?

Depends on your experience and what you're working on.

Netflix famously hits those $400,000 type levels with total compensation, as do Facebook and Google.

You can earn $300k to $500k in AI for example. And that's not just in Silicon Valley, Google is paying that in Britain as well. [1]

For 2016, Juniper Networks had a median total compensation of $157,000 ($135k median base salary). Emphasis that that was just the median for their employees. You can imagine what the top 10% of their engineers are earning. I mention Juniper because they never come up in these discussions, there are a lot of tech companies paying extremely high total compensation figures in the bay area.

VMWare's median compensation was $152,000 for 2016. So again, imagine what they're paying the top 10% of their engineers. Not much of a stretch to guess that a lot of them are earning $300k to $400k in total comp.

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"Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent"

"Costs at an A.I. lab called DeepMind, acquired by Google for a reported $650 million in 2014, when it employed about 50 people, illustrate the issue. Last year, according to the company’s recently released annual financial accounts in Britain, the lab’s “staff costs” as it expanded to 400 employees totaled $138 million. That comes out to $345,000 an employee."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/technology/artificial-int...

Google, FB, Amazon at L6, Dropbox, Microsoft, and other public elite companies at mid senior.

Check out levels.fyi

Having attended Berkeley, and gone through that "honeymoon phase", these kinds of articles capture exactly why I left the Bay Area. Sure there's lots of opportunities, but most are morally bankrupt. There's a reason the greatest teachers have all said, clean your room before you change the world. San Francisco can't even clean after itself. It's not going to make the world a better place if it can't even take care of itself.

I feel this would be a better essay if the author had put more of his personal context into the essay. Like what has happened since he has “gone west”. It is not clear how he became a product manager at Uber.

This is sound advice even if that means only starting your career in SF. Once you have an established career in the Bay Area you can command similar a similar salary in other cities and live where you want.

Good luck if you aren't a US citizen.

> 1-3 recruiting emails per week is normal.

Same for me, even before I lived in a fancy city. Some work experience with stuff one finds cool is necessary though I guess.

(This might be obvious, but when you sign in to Monster.com or so, you get even more, at least if you have some degree from a University or so... ;)

Originally from Bay Area, went to school, but so glad moved to a small city in Texas. Good to explore other opportunities and everywhere people need programmers

SF is very walkable! Just pay attention to human feces and syringes on the sidewalks.

I am... Perplexed.

If only the monoculture problem were merely "tech, tech, tech"

The Stockholm Syndrome is strong with this person

The sour grapes are strong with the rest.

In 2018, "move somewhere to do a tech job" should not even be thinkable. Maybe one needs to make a virtual city where VCs find entrepreneurs who hire remote workers to work in a virtual office. Make it a VR space. But you don't need to deal with moving to do all that.

  I tried hard to convince a couple of friends to come.

This is Stockholm Syndrome

  You’ll earn more here than you would anywhere else.

Because the rent is proportionally expensive. If money is your focus work remote in Indonesia for a bay area

  If you decide to move here, it means you probably have more ambition than average. Consider that everybody else you’ll meet in the Bay Area will share that with you.

I would say there is a greater chance that people share the same ambition when it comes to tech, but you can't say Silicon Valley has more ambitions people on average if most of them are slaving away at FAANG companies.

  California is stunning. It’s sunny year long

Not San Francisco

> Because the rent is proportionally expensive.

The article addresses that. For many people, the compensation more than makes up for it, and often by a large margin, e.g. more than the entire salary you'd make elsewhere, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18067642.

The truth is that the author makes a ton of good points for ambitious young people like himself, which is the audience he's addressing. Commenters who are (justifiably) tethered to their lives elsewhere have a strong incentive to deny this.

Furthermore, anything you can get off Amazon is proportionally cheaper. An iPhone XS is expensive when you're making Midwest salaries, but not so much when you're on a San Francisco payroll. A car doesn't cost much more in SF than it does in Iowa, so as a percentage of your take-home salary it's actually far cheaper.

Exactly. Travel especially seems much cheaper on Bay Area salaries! I know some people who moved to India, and told me that they'd actually be "richer" once accounting for cost of living. Except they can't leave now, every trip abroad is months of salary.

young people, please don't take the advice in this article seriously.

> My objective in this post is to convince you that you need to move to SF.

There are many ways to have an enjoyable life. Anyone telling you that you have to make all of the choices that they made to have an enjoyable life is worth ignoring.

I mean, arguably people make their choices because they assume they're the best given their conditions. It's not like it was totally random. Isn't it worth sharing the advice with people in similar conditions?

> sharing the advice with people in similar conditions

this piece doesn't do that, since it doesn't analyse what the author's conditions are prior to moving to SF. The reader is not armed with any useful means of deciding whether the author's conditions match their own.

It's also full of sweeping generalizations presented as fact.

> If you’re in tech, you need to move to San Francisco.

that's a sweeping generalization presented as fact, without a hint of irony, suggesting that if you're in tech and you -don't- move to SF ... then, what? You've chosen poorly. You'll regret it. You'll be sad. You'll hate your life.

Hilariously, the author cites Amazon as one of the companies that are in SF, but Amazon is from Seattle.

It says "the coolest companies" under the assumption that the reader shares the author's values. It says this so plainly that it suggests that the author is not even aware that other people could have different values from their own.

> All the coolest companies ... Facebook, Salesforce, Uber

I don't think Uber is a cool company. I think Uber is an evil company that is actively doing harm to society. There is no amount of money that Uber could pay me to work there, because I think that they're unethical. Salesforce ... cool? From my perspective, Salesforce is one of the least cool things that humanity has ever produced.

> A pattern I’ve noticed is that newcomers here tend to fall in love with the city at first sight.

yeah I hate SF, and only go there begrudgingly for work. I would never elect to move there. I know many people in the industry that feel similarly.

but of everything here, this is what I find the most damaging:

> 6 years later, as I predicted, none of them have come, and their roots have gotten deeper. They built companies or careers, took mortgages, got married…

the suggestion here is that people who decided to live a whole life have somehow chosen incorrectly. I would be shocked by the arrogance, but the arrogance of tech industry zealots has long since ceased to be shocking.

I agree, it feels like it's written by someone that has very little experience (professionally and in life in general). One thing experience gives you is perspective. And I actually like living and working in the SF Bay Area.

Nit - Amazon has a bunch of offices in the Bay, including Lab126.

> people make their choices because they assume they're the best

worth sharing their 100% confirmation-biased advice?

I will say that a lot of this is self-reinforcing: huge SFO/SEA companies offer competitive compensation, so the majority of people who have competitive compensation live where they are offered, and this sends a signal to yet more people that that's where the competitive compensation is at.

If you generated that much perceived value in Manchester, NH or Topeka, KS then you could probably manage to have cash flow like that without being in SFO/SEA. Yes, a lot of that value exists only because these people can see eachother in coffee shops and meetups, day in and day out, year round, in the same place; but once you're in, being in SFO or SEA is not why you're worth paying that much.

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