Hacker News Reader

Comment by tidepod12 | Hacker News Reader

It honestly makes me feel a bit queasy when I read posts like this. 22 and 23 year olds making $200k+ a year? For doing what, exactly? Contributing 0.001% of the codebase to an app that sells advertisements? Meanwhile teachers, researchers, nurses etc (of which many also live in SF, by the way) are making pennies and some literally starving to survive.

It makes it even worse to see the casualness that people in this thread are talking about $200-300k+ salaries, as if they have no appreciation for the fact that a $300k salary is unheard of even for most people in their 50s, let alone a kid in his early 20s. This is the type of attitude that I fear really makes Silicon Valley outsiders have a good amount of disdain for SVers.

View on HN

These salaries don't come from thin air, they're constrained by the market rate at which engineers can be hired and retained. It's unfairly reductive to say that the engineers aren't contributing value since they work in ads. We work in all sorts of fields from the frivolous, like consumer electronics, to the decidedly less so like self-driving.

If the discrepancy between engineering salaries and research/teaching/nursing salaries is bothersome then perhaps the blame should be placed on the economic environment that has produced this result, not the twenty-somethings that are accepting great compensation.

I don't believe you'll find anywhere in my post above that I placed the blame on anyone. Why so defensive?

Are you sure? Because it sure sounds like you disagree that these people deserve to be making large sums of money and then also not be appreciative of it. I would call that placing blame.

22 and 23 year olds making $200k+ a year? For doing what, exactly? Contributing 0.001% of the codebase to an app that sells advertisements?

It may not have been your intent, but your comment has (at least on my read) an accusatory tone. You ask a number of rhetorical questions which indicate that you have low-regard for the work of the engineers in question.

You appear to be doubling down on this with your recent comment.

Why so defensive

Calling someone defensive because they disagree with you is uncivil and a great way to start an argument. In the most literal sense of the word, my comment offers some justification for these salaries because yours appears to discredit them.

>It may not have been your intent, but your comment has (at least on my read) an accusatory tone. You ask a number of rhetorical questions which indicate that you have low-regard for the work of the engineers in question.

I do have low regard for the engineers in question (low regard in terms of their ability and worthiness of salary, obviously not low regard in terms of their person). The majority of engineers in SV are working on products that primarily exist to serve advertisements to customers. They don't deserve $200k+ for that, and it makes me sad that society has decided these are the people that are paid this much while teachers and nurses are actually starving.

You say that self-driving car engineers deserve it? Really? Show me the 22 year olds that have contributed meaningfully to self-driving technology. But you can't. Because the people making the meaningful contributions (read: worthy of being paid $200k+) are much more experienced, have been working in the field much longer, and are much older. They are not 22 year old new grads.

>Calling someone defensive because they disagree with you is uncivil and a great way to start an argument. In the most literal sense of the word, my comment offers some justification for these salaries because yours appears to discredit them.

And claiming that someone is accusing blame (when they haven't) is also uncivil and a great way to start an argument.

>teachers and nurses are actually starving

Citation needed.

Do you really need a citation for the common knowledge fact that teachers are one of the most low paid professions in America? Do you not know that many of them have to take up second jobs in order to pay their bills? You can read about that here, or by doing a Google search:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/...

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/repor...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/02/21/why-oakl...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/04/...

Did you miss the entire #ClearTheList campaign last month for when teachers started up school again? If so, the tl;dr is that teachers were having to ask their friends and family to buy school supplies for their classrooms because the teachers could not afford to do so themselves.

Amazon, ironically, created an entire section of their site for such lists. Does it not seem even a little bit of a problem to you that Amazon, one of the richest companies in the world, with some of the richest employees in the world, rather than using some of that wealth to help the teachers, actually created a service where Amazon actually profited off of the fact that these teachers needed assistance buying school supplies?

None of those links support your claim that teachers and nurses are starving. Having a relatively low income (according to polls!) does not mean you are dying on the streets due to malnutrition. Taking a second job does not mean the alternative is peril. I could take a second job to afford a better Ferrari but that does not mean I can't afford a car. Try again.

The third link literally has 'starving' in the title, referring to the schools and teachers that work there. It is common parlance to use the term 'starving' to refer to more than just 'dying on the streets due to malnutrition'. You know this, but you chose to nitpick the word instead of interpreting my comment the way you knew I meant it. Please do not do that, it is against the HN guidelines.

>Taking a second job does not mean the alternative is peril. I could take a second job to afford a better Ferrari but that does not mean I can't afford a car. Try again.

We aren't talking about teachers taking a second job so that they can afford niceties or a new car. We're talking about teachers taking a second job just so they can afford rent. Many of them are on federal subsidy programs just so they can afford food.

What was that you said about it being VERY important that we agree on the usage of words? Apparently “blame” only has one definition but it’s okay to say a person is actually starving (your exact words) and really mean that their organization is short on resources. I’m glad you searched “teachers starving” and copy and pasted the first 4 links you saw that had the words in the headline but they don’t support your argument. In fact, no one here has supported your argument because it is nothing more than virtue signaling coming from the very person you hate.

"Place blame" has one definition. It is not used in the manner in which you earlier tried to accuse me of "placing blame". "Starve" on the other hand, is used in multiple ways, one of those actual definitions is to be deprived of resources. It does not always mean "dying of malnutrition".

I showed you multiple links that show evidence of teachers being deprived of resources, aka starving. If you can't accept that, then you are not arguing in good faith and I'm through trying to have a discussion with you. Please try to abide by HN guidelines in further discussions.

Please don't do flamewars like this on HN. When people descend to arguing about what they said or didn't say, or how unfairly other commenters are treating them, the discussion stopped being interesting a long time ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that, and I don't want to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future—no matter how wrong or annoying another commenter is or you feel they are.

Just curious, did you have the same feeling towards the many decades when law and finance new grads were making $200K-300K (and many still do)? Is writing reports about financial statements of a company or proofreading legal text a more worthy endeavor than making apps/websites that attract users? Are those new grads making meaningful contributions to society?

>Just curious, did you have the same feeling towards the many decades when law and finance new grads were making $200K-300K (and many still do)?

Yes. The difference (aside from the fact that this particular post is specifically about SV, not about law and finance) is that I have never seen lawyers, doctors, or even investment bankers (although yes I have seen Wolf of Wall Street) be so casual about the fact that their salaries are so high. In another comment in this thread, someone suggested that having an extra $5,000 disposable per month was not a lot of money. That is absurd to me, and I have never experienced any of my doctor or lawyer friends have that same attitude.

Do you think having extra $50 disposable per month is a lot of money? There was a time when it would be hugely important for me, and now it is not.

What "lot of money" means is entirely relative to how much money you have because for most people it means "would it translate to large difference in lifestyle".

Also, if we are talking about the comment by refurb, it said "rolling in cash" which does not carry the same connotations as "lot of money".

>What "lot of money" means is entirely relative to how much money you have because for most people it means "would it translate to large difference in lifestyle".

Yes, and my entire point (or at least, the one started by the original top level comment) is that SV has strayed really far from the typical level of "relative" that most of the rest of the country operates on.

thank you for responding so elegantly in a 7+ depth argument to multiple posters each with their own critiques. This is what i read HN for. The parent node comment having to provide a rebuttal for every child lol

Maybe doctors and lawyers just know better than to talk finances with outsiders.

I see.

I saw somewhere else in the thread that you yourself are a new grad, so I'll chalk this up to lack of experience but on sufficiently large products it is trivial to make incremental changes that will produce more value then your salary. In my own career I saved a big tech company 250k in reoccurring costs with a 9 month project I completed as a junior. Yes, that number is a rounding error for a large company but the value is clear.

Additionally, perhaps you have never built a team before, but the value of a potential employee extends beyond their year-to-year output. If, for example, I have great confidence that a currently junior hire will output ~$1M of value over a four year period than I am willing to overpay that first year as they grow and develop.

This isn't going anywhere interesting and I am uninterested in continuing the conversation further. Have a nice day :)

(There is a certain irony to me about this back and forth. A large portion of my personal time is spent volunteering in an organization that agitates for unions and other forms of direct action aimed at tackling the gross inequity of this society head-on. You're clearly keyed in to a real and present problem, but rather than suggest any solutions you've decided to whinge ineffectively about... developer salaries?)

For the companies in question, the senior engineers making bigger contributions are earning $400k+.

Some day, the money people will figure out that there are lots of experienced talent outside the SV bubble.

It doesn't appear to me that the parent implied that these salaries come from thin air. It seems much more obvious that this person is pointing out just how disproportionate it is compared to other very crucial professions, with no obvious labor differences for why this is.

Chalking it up to it being the "market rate" sort of ignores how the market has failed for these other professions. They have to deal with the cost of living just like people in tech. The issue with the new grads, as the parent pointed out, is the attitude. Most could care less about this. That deserves critique.

I should also add that this dynamic does play out in other parts of the country. In other states in the US with much lower costs of living, nurses and teachers for example still have an average salary that is much lower than that of those in the tech industry, especially software development.

> with no obvious labor differences for why this is

One difference that stands out to me is that the supply of people who can perform the job is constrained.

Other professions may be crucial - indeed, the truck drivers who deliver supplies to all stores from which we purchase daily goods are crucial - but that job in particular can be performed by almost anyone with minimal training.

Words like "crucial" don't have much meaning as far as determining job compensation: it's a supply/demand interaction. If the supply of people who can perform the job is not constrained, because the job is relatively easy to get into, then that will suppress the compensation.

It's difficult to obtain a computer science degree and perform at the level required to solicit job offers from the kind of companies that pay new graduates $200k. Imagine for the sake of argument that these jobs require an IQ of 125 or higher: then only about 5% of the population will be capable of performing at that level. (This is just an example. I'm not saying that I think programming has a particular IQ requirement.)

This is also reductive. If market value was the sole driver for selection of profession, we would suffer a critical lack of specialists in a variety of fields.

...as we do... E.g., K12 and University CS professors.

It's almost as if it didn't matter how crucial the work you do is, and instead what you make is determined by how much leverage you have and perhaps in part by how close to the money you are.

tbf, I think far more people can do jobs where they talk to people and teach (teachers) and take care of people and nurture (nurses), than jobs where you look at a screen all day, do abstract symbol manipulation and spend most of your focus inside your head building structures of code and programs.

I showed my relatives how you 'follow the line of execution' in a program running down all the instructions. They sat back in shock, thinking how alien that job would be and how so few people are probably able to do that, and that i should be lucky (?) to have the skills to think that way.

Not only that, here we are talking about software engineers who are the best of the best, probably less than 1% of all applicants.

As someone who has done both professionally, I think you're severely underestimating how hard teaching is. I think it's much harder to teach well than to code well.

Don't forget, too, that good teachers are experts in the subjects they teach. Teaching computer science or math well requires the same facility with "abstract symbol manipulation" that working as a software engineer does.

I didn’t mean to single out teachers specifically — as parent was using them as example — but I meant that in general , professions where you have more human interaction is more desired by the majority of the human population .

But it isn't really required that teachers teach well. If I were to try and give an honest assessment of the teachers (specifically primary school both public and private) I've had I would say maybe 5% were good teachers, 5% were genuinely bad and the rest just kind of coasted by having students do rote memorization.

If you have done both professionally, then by definition, you can code. I think your parent poster's point is that too few people can. They are not saying that teaching is easy.

Thank you for elegantly saying what I was trying to say. You were able to put a much finer perspective on it that appears to be more digestable than my comment.

> This is the type of attitude that I fear really makes Silicon Valley outsiders have a good amount of disdain for SVers.

If you are experiencing disdain because of this, you need to look inside yourself and see what needs to be fixed in your own thinking. Envy of new grads is not their problem, it is yours.

I have seen Americans casually discuss what cars they own and what cars they would like to buy. I have never once chastised them and asked them to think about the homeless and poor kids in Africa before casually discussing cars like an everyday thing. For ref, my family was too poor to own a car growing up.

>I have seen Americans casually discuss what cars they own and what cars they would like to buy. I have never once chastised them and asked them to think about the homeless and poor kids in Africa before casually discussing cars like an everyday thing.

And why do you say that as if it's a good thing? Perhaps its this exact attitude of extravagance and wastefulness (especially when taken to extremes like in SV) that has led us to the exact income disparity issue that so many people (many of which are in SF) decry.

Of course I'm not saying it has to be top of your mind all the time, but when we're in a post that is explicitly created for the purpose of discussing how high salaries are in SV, it is disingenuous to try to shut down discussion about how they might be too high.

> And why do you say that as if it's a good thing? Perhaps its this exact attitude of extravagance and wastefulness (especially when taken to extremes like in SV) that has led us to the exact income disparity issue

So you are recommending Americans should stop buying/discussing cars and SV new grads should stop accepting/discussing high salaries because it is "wasteful and extravagant". I am trying to look for some element of logic in your reasoning but I can't find any. Now is a good time to start a discussion on envy.

>So you are recommending Americans should stop buying/discussing cars and SV new grads should stop accepting/discussing high salaries because it is "wasteful and extravagant".

At no point in my comment, or any other comment, have I said, suggested, or implied that anyone should stop buying/discussing cars or that SV new grads should stop accepting/discussing high salaries. In fact, the entire point (as stated in my previous comment) is that this is a discussion about high salaries, and I am simply discussing the fact that the salaries are high.

Your interpretation of my comments is clearly in bad faith.

> At no point in my comment, or any other comment, have I said, suggested, or implied that anyone should stop buying/discussing cars or that SV new grads should stop accepting/discussing high salaries.

> It makes it even worse to see the casualness that people in this thread are talking about $200-300k+ salaries,

> This is the type of attitude that I fear really makes Silicon Valley outsiders have a good amount of disdain for SVers.

>>I have seen Americans casually discuss what cars they own and what cars they would like to buy. I have never once chastised them and asked them to think about the homeless and poor kids in Africa before casually discussing cars like an everyday thing. > And why do you say that as if it's a good thing? Perhaps its this exact attitude of extravagance and wastefulness

Thanks for your comment. Can you please point out, anywhere in it, where it is suggested, implied, or stated that people should stop talking about/buying cars, or discussing/taking high salaries?

If not, I'm going to stop this discussion because it's probably just going to devolve into incivility from here.

It is important to understand that those salaries aren't normal.

300k for a new grad is not something I've heard of, that's a tad high even for phds. For an undergrad, that would be something approaching an acquihire. That person is being hired for a specific and rare skill, not as a back bencher. A lot to live up to.

Even 200k is very high for new grads. Think "strong student at MIT/Stanford/CMU with proven track record of performing very well during internships, maybe some research publications, and multiple internal stakeholders vouching for them". In other words, perceived as "potential deadly weapon to a competitor and/or a possible founder", not "model employee". That is why they're being paid well.

Below 200, keep in mind that 150% of 80 is 120. SF sucks. NYC isn't much better.

Teachers are underpaid. Not sure how that's relevant to whether some other group of people is overpaid. It's not zero sum.

As for researchers, in CS they do well for themselves. Don't worry.

I think you are conflating what is possible with what is normal, and in the process under-estimate the amount of time and effort some people choose to invest into themselves during their 4 years of access to the best and brightest minds in their field. Speaking of, MIT gets disturbingly close to 6 figures all in these days...

> 300k for a new grad is not something I've heard of, that's a tad high even for phds.

300K-ish total comp is a typical starting package at the big tech companies now. 150-160K base salary, 30K bonus target, and 100K stock grant maturing per year gets you to that ballpark.

Well, a lot changed in the couple of years since I've helped students with the process.

Good for those kids.

FWIW it's still fair to say these aren't normal. Plenty of students from top schools don't get offers from the top cos.

At which company? I work at one of the big companies and undergrads come in at around 150k and phds around 250k. Facebook will give 100k signing bonuses to their top interns but that's a 1 time bonus so it shouldn't be factored into your yearly total compensation.

I always find it funny when people refer to age of employees -> there is this ageist idea that your salary should increase as you get older, and senior positions are reserved for older people. We also say that we believe in meritocracy, that is the most capable person gets the job, and market decides their salary. The two ideas are in conflict. Markets can be cruel, but the ageist idea is mostly prejudice.

Surely the problem is that those companies are earning absurd amounts of money while contributing very little to society. They've got billions stashed offshore that they literally don't know where to invest. Even after paying this much to grads.

I don't think it's that much in conflict. If a 22 year old legitimately brings enough value to the table to justify a $200k salary, then sure, give it to them. But the reason we usually associate salaries getting bigger with age is because older people, on average, do have more experience and are able to bring more value to the table.

There's some truth in what you say. Very few new CS grads are making substantial contributions commiserate to their salaries. They probably do hit that level in a few years so maybe that balances out. But the companies/shareholders seem to be happy paying those salaries, and we might believe that they probably know what they're doing.

What is defined as "valuable" to you? People and companies have different definitions, and as your age into the workforce, how you contribute to your work changes.

As a 22 year old dev, "valuable" can be defined as writing code and building products while working 60+ hrs a week, which is what many do in SV. As you age, you write less code and contribute to building products in different ways like architecting the platform and thinking about the business more than the product itself. This is what experience gets you as you age.

I think you're saying that the later deserves more compensation and no 22 year old is worth $200k. I don't think that's true. And most of SV doesn't think that's true. SV likes people that can build and make things, and will pay someone handsomely to build a product and iterate.

I'm a late twenties software engineer. Years ago I worked on a tiny team that was integrating an upstart financial product from a well known legacy company. Billions of dollars have flowed through the system integration. My company got a nice high six-figure "implementation" bonus for implementating it along with a small percentage of the money flowing throughout.

My team of a designer, product manager and two software engineers built this. We created millions of dollars in new revenue for our company.

Prior to this another off-shore team had tried to integrate something similar from our partner's competitor. They failed to complete the integration.

This is why good software engineers are paid so much.

20s year olds are burning out 80h per week until their health allows and until they are replaced by another batch of 20s after ~10 years. Meanwhile, teachers and researchers enjoy their relaxed and stable lifestyle for the rest of their lifes. In fact, there are lots of candidates fighting for such relaxed permanent positions in academia, which is ruled by nepotism and protectionism, unfortunately.

I get your point, but teachers hardly "enjoy their relaxed and stable lifestyle". Professorships at universities may be different, but elementary/middle/high school teachers often work long, long hours, suffer from burnout, make low money (low as in ~$30-40k/year), and more recently, there is a trend that a lot of them are ending up in therapy to cope with the teaching conditions.

The path to tenure is publish or perish. I don't know specific hour commitments, but at an R1 university, you're looking at 4-7 years of long hours with a risk that you won't get tenure. And unless you bring in BIG money or work in a super HCOL area, you probably won't ever make 200k/year.

4-7 for the PhD alone, plus a few more years as a postdoc, plus the run-up to tenure (another 4-5 years).

None of these are particularly stable or relaxing.

> researchers enjoy their relaxed and stable lifestyle

A few faculty with tenured, hard-money jobs might be able to kick back and relax, but those positions are the unicorns of academia.

Everyone else is scrapping to bring in money, just so they can keep their jobs. A lot of places, especially medical schools, expect faculty to cover most of their salary from external grants (~15% of which get funded). I would bet a lot more grad students are burning the midnight oil than FAANG engineers too.

What are these fresh grad supposed to do? Getting paid less while the companies printing money? Where should the money goes?

Having said that, I do understand your point in this statement:

> as if they have no appreciation for the fact that a $300k salary is unheard of even for most people in their 50s, let alone a kid in his early 20s.

I noticed an increasing number of fresh-grad that feels entitled for a big salary. Their attitude is off the chart...

I don't blame the grads themselves (other than the lack of appreciation for what is a large salary), it's more commentary on SV culture (and society as a whole) that so much absurd amount of money is just being thrown around to people in the bay area, meanwhile throughout America our healthcare system is in shambles, teachers have to take second jobs to pay bills, etc...

edit: and for the record, I'm one of those "new grads" making a self-admittedly absurd amount of money for what honestly amounts to a relatively meaningless contribution to society. Yea, I take the salary (and try to donate a good bit of it), but it still makes me feel uneasy that I'm being paid this much in the first place.

If you are any kind of software professional in US (hell, even teacher, researcher or nurse) I assure you that whatever you are currently making looks equally absurdly large for majority of human population.

I know. It’s like these people forgot about how “regular culture” routinely shits on the rest of the world for profit.

If they are able to consistently get job offers and perform well at companies which pay that well, why would they expect any less? Just because they are young they shouldn’t know what the market rate for their labor is?

Honesty a lot of this just sounds like sour grapes

I don't know your environment but these fresh grads around me their attitude is unlike the attitude of the fresh-grad in my time thanks to these crazy salaries.

So while you can say that sounds like "sour grapes", I do have to say that there is an increasing sour grapes among the fresh grads.

It sounds like it bothers you that people know their value in a given market and are capitalizing on it like you could not and maybe still cannot. Sour grapes sounds about right.

It's not just "Hey I should be making $X". There are other baggage that comes along with it: Company X pays more than company Y therefore programmer in Company X is better than Company Y. (X=Facebook, Y=Amazon).

Or things like "your TC is low, you must be suck".

Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Another way of looking at it is: “wealth is being redistributed”.

Obviously there’s still disparity but it looks like a new middle class is forming and we want that, no? Also keep in mind that anything less than 200k means you can’t even buy a decent sized house where you work.

When companies like Facebook make several million dollars in revenue per employee shouldn’t you be glad that the grunts writing code are getting a respectable share of the profits? Would you rather the engineers get paid 50k/year while Zuckerberg becomes a trillionaire?

I mean, when I was 22-23 I was writing/leading whole products, some that make tens of millions of dollars now. I was making less than 130k when I was doing that, just to give a range.

If these guys are contributing 0.1% maybe I was underpaid ;)

But you have to remember one thing: These types of (junior) salaries are largely confined to very few places on earth, which is also reflected by the cost of living in those areas.

Basically, if you want to continue earning at those levels, without sacrificing your life to work, you're locked to living in a few select places. In SF, you need to earn almost $180k to afford a mortgage.

Do you feel the same about lawyers and other highly paid jobs? Is being a lawyer any more intellectually challenging that being an engineer.... (honest question, as lawyers at big firms start at around 150k+ as first year associates)

It’s not more intellectually challenging but it’s a hell of a lot more work. You need to get accepted into a top-5 law school, study like crazy for three years and rack up a couple hundred grand in debt, then you need to grind out 70+ hour weeks as an associate. I have friends who work at top 5 law firms, and friends at fb and google, and the lawyers are working WAY harder. For less money too. But I guess the one upside is that if you make partner, your peak earning potential is higher.

Tech jobs are probably the best combination of pay/lifestyle balance at the moment.

Are these actually "salaries"? Because I know a few SV types who also include one time signing bonuses, discretionary bonuses, restricted shares, and a host of other stuff that isn't salary in their stated salaries. It makes it hard to conduct comparisons.

The way that the majority of these numbers work out is that no, they aren't strictly 'salary', but they are given out in a way such that the employee does get $200k-300k (minus taxes) cash in their bank account if they so choose. FAANG companies don't operate or consider compensation based on your salary, it's all done based on total compensation which includes bonuses, RSUs, etc.

I see a lot of this "well it's not actually money, it's just $150k worth of stocks" reasoning to hand-wave away the absurdity of the high numbers, but it's silly to me. $300k is 300k, even if you have to submit an extra form once a month to convert the stocks to cash.

Right, and that's fine (not sure why I'm being downvoted), but why not just say "I make X base salary, Y% target annual bonus, and I got a signing bonus of Z plus RSUs" like everyone in every other industry instead of adding it all up and calling it salary? There's a difference between guaranteed comp and variable comp, just like there's a difference between annual recurring comp and one time comp like a signing bonus.

No idea why you're being downvoted.

I imagine the reasoning is because at the end of the day, in most discussions, it hardly matters the technical aspect of if the money came from a signing bonus or a stock option. $300k is $300k.

The title says compensation, not salary. People usually say compensation or TC when referring to the total number.

> There's a difference between guaranteed comp and variable comp

All comp is variable since you can be fired or laid off at any time.

i don't know what part of the country you live in, but this 200k to 300k is barely scraping by with a middle class living in the bay area, especially if you just moved here. CA and the bay area's high cost of living means most people here with less than 200k/year are going to be really poor unless they bought a house over 20 years ago. Your not going to be able to attract talent to move to the bay area with sub 200K salaries. And since, Google and facebook have money to burn, they'd rather pay those high salaries than move to a more cost effective area.

I see this comment a lot, but it's just not true. If $300k was "barely scraping by", then it would be impossible for people making less than $100k to even live at all in the bay area, and yet the average income in SF is indeed $75k.

In other parts of this thread, an SFer mentions that with a salary of $300k, he saves $100,000 a year after paying for his 'expensive hobbies' without even trying . Another commenter says they have ~$13,000 per month in disposable income (after rent in a nice apartment, utilities, and food). Thats certainly not "scraping by" to me.

It's different if you already live here. If you already live here probably you have some arrangement: maybe you're in a rent protected home (75% of SF is like that), or maybe you live with 5 other roommates or maybe live with parents, etc.

It's different, if you're moving to here from another area you're not going to be able to get one of those rent protected rentals.

I just went shopping online for apartments in SF. If I were to move there now, a 1 BR in a very nice luxury tower in Nob Hill will run me about $3,700/mo. And let's throw in, say, $200/mo for utilities and expenses? And let's give a very generous $1000/mo for food expenses?

According to a tax calculator, a $200k salary in SF is about $130k/year take home, or about $11k/month.

After rent and expenses, that's still $5,100 in disposable take-home pay every month. That's not scraping by.

This is incredibly out of touch. I moved to the Bay Area on a $120k household income, lived in Menlo Park and did fine. We were never going to be able to buy a house, but I wouldn’t describe our situation as “barely scraping by”

Nah. I started out w/ $65k and lived 40mins from the valley. I would't have considered myself poor (car, motorcycle, computers...)

Nurses do okay. Teachers and researchers don't actually provide that much value. It's a market. The money flows where it provides most value + discounted future value. Just because you have a soft spot for teachers doesn't mean we should command economy the whole thing. This is right. It is fair.

EDIT: Can't respond to below, but private school teacher salaries are lower than SF USD salaries (when you include health, pension, housing).

The market does not even set a teacher's salary, as most schools are state funded.

Academic researchers (other than profs) basically have a command-economy salary already: it's hard to get a postdoc that's pretty far off the NIH pay scale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com