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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

The title of this article talks about Silicon Valley but then uses national numbers. There are very few software engineers in the Bay Area making only $110,000 a year. If they want to talk about tech that's fine, but this includes programmers working at insurance companies in Tulsa, which isn't exactly the image that comes to mind with "Silicon Valley."

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Still though, on a cost-of-living adjusted basis, it works out the same. The other day someone asked me if a $100k offer at WalMart in Bentonville, Arkansas was a good offer. The effective purchasing power is well over $200k in Bay area dollars, not to mention the lower tax burden.

Granted, there is huge opportunity cost living in Arkansas.

Do Tesla’s cost half as much in Bentonville? What about MacBook Pros or student loan payments?

No, but food and rent cost far less, meaning you can buy more Teslas and pay off more of your loans.

The math doesn’t add up. Food isn’t uniformly half as expensive and rent is only a limited percentage of your take home. A 1k apartment vs a 4K apartment is a yearly difference of $36k, not $100k.

This. 10 out of 10 discussions I have around this topic with people looking to move out of the Bay Area results in the other party realizing money isn’t going to net out in their favor.

Also, don't forget that need based aid (assuming you are talking about student loans for children) are calculated off your total earnings and assets, irrespective of location.

biggest purchase of anyone's (average/above average people) life is always a house. When we say purchasing power, we have to include the "weight" of a house (which is proportionally much much greater than say purchasing a macbook pro.)

No, but if you are careful with money you can pocket more. For example, Texas and Washington do not levy a state income tax, letting you keep about 10% more (even more true now that you can no longer exclude state tax from federal earnings).

Property taxes and housing tend to be far cheaper in Texas and until recently, were also lower in Washington.

Regardless of local cost of living, it's a bad offer becasue Wal-Mart can afford to pay better. That's "company town" pay right there.

There are plenty of developers working at startups earning close enough to $110k plus "equity", and even plenty in other more mature businesses. For example, the company I work for has that as the midpoint for our entry level software engineers: we're a mature, public company with over 300 engineers and about 10% of our staff is in that classification. Take a look at angel.co. I haven't run an analysis but there are plenty of Bay Area jobs posted there for sub-$100k salaries: some of those are going to be filled. Then we have a number of older tech giants and tech divisions of companies who haven't caught up with salaries paid elsewhere: IBM, Visa, Raytheon, Oracle, etc.

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