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Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that “talent” in a superstar city jumps around between major companies every year or three in search of better salary. There is an expectation then that each new hire is immediately put to work and depending on your level, you are coding almost 100% of the time.

I’ve now lived in a much smaller city for the past 5 years. My company hires both senior developers tired of the mercenary treadmill as well as many recent grads that stay for longer than three years since we invest in their career growth and provide much more mentorship. Also the biking distance commute to work are a big selling point.

I loved living in a big city in my 20s but don’t regret moving away in my 30s. my quality of life and financial freedom is immeasurably improved. This regularly surprises my acquaintances that stayed.

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This seems really dependent on finding a good company with openings, which is not always the case. I tried to stay in the Midwest as a recent cs grad with an internship under my belt, but after spending 4 months doing job search I just gave up and went coastal.

1. The offers I got were abysmally small and out of touch with the market even when adjusting for my experience and local cost of living.

2. Most places were either extremely poorly reviewed on glassdoor, or were not hiring junior/midlevel developers.

3. Places I interviewed at were using ancient software stacks from 2000-era that would have hampered my professional growth.

Until all these things are fixed and accounted for there is no way brain drain is going to stop. I literally spent 4 months interviewing, fully willing to relocate in the general Midwest to stay in a smaller more affordable town within reasonable driving distance of my family. If people want to keep smart people around, give them reasonable offers in line with the global market, and take risks on junior developers.

It's very easy to explain. Even very weak companies that are located in "hot" cities have chance to catch really experienced and knowledgable talent. One good guy employed for 6 months can be an amazing catalyst of great changes, you can very quickly modernize process and technologies if you have passionate people on board. It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. The "less popular" places are the polar opposite of this mindset. If talent is not easily available, you will find companies with no proper culture, stupidly old technologies and "old guard" not wanting to change much if anything.

> It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay.

How about no. I think there is a big divide between people who do project maintenance and those tornadoes. Most new hotness people want to put on their resume will bite you in the ass 2 or 3 years down the line. But the super hero tornado will already be 4 companies out of sight so they'll never see what the things they started ended being. And when they stumble upon an old project started by another different team of tornadoes they'll complain.

There is resume driven introduction of new technologies and then there is introducing modern source control, a CI pipeline, a modern compiler toolchain with activated warnings, a usable bugtracker... all of which is often missing in small companies that only do software on the side, or live in a slow moving market.

I work in defense contracting and version control is either non existent or dated at most companies. I've gotten very good at selling git to management.

2 months to introduce those kind of changes usually mean it will still be in the "people don't want to change their way of doing things" phase. With most of the infrastructure half deployed, the process ready to be cargo-culted and a lot of things directly copied from stack-overflow into critical parts of this process. The know-how never got shared and won't appear to fill the void.

That our hypothetical tornado managed to start introducing change during just 6 months is imho a strong sign that at least some people want to change. In my experience introducing changes takes years.

In my experience, a lot of the companies in the Midwest wouldn't survive if they were paying salaries aligned with big coastal tech. I.e., they exist in the Midwest because they can't exist elsewhere. And the rest are taking advantage of people who don't have the motivation or freedom to move out. (I knew a lot of CS grads in the Midwest who didn't bother applying to coastal companies.)

Tell me more about your interview process? I'm trying to get out of the midwest as well. All my friends from school are out in the coastal cities.

I moved back to the Midwest from the West Coast once having kids to be close to family and be able to afford a house. I do think it is hard to find the pockets of exciting jobs in the Midwest that pay reasonably well. I personally got lucky with Amazon in Detroit which is an engineering office with exciting projects. One good thing is the pay for Amazon doesn’t change from Seattle to Detroit which is awesome.

This is a fairly global phenomenon I think.

I've been living up in Northern Sweden for a bit, which is obviously a smallish market.

I was getting offers for less than a third of what I made in London, and mostly for old enterprise tech stuff. At that point there's no reason to even bother negotiating. I went back to remote.

Living costs aren't realistically that much cheaper aside from housing.

The only people you're going to hire for the long term are locals that are staying in the town for reasons unrelated to work. Which is fine and describes many people - but it's definitely a huge limiter on access to top talent.

Is this a Northern Sweden problem or a Sweden problem in general? I've looked at a couple of hiring boards and hourly contractor rates are only €50-€70, even in Stockholm. Compared to the €70-€90 in London and Amsterdam that sounds a bit low, but please correct me if I am wrong.

If you're contracting in Sweden you are 90% looking at Stockholm (the remaining 10% being Gothenburg or Malmö/Copenhagen). My experience is that Stockholm hourly rates are around 750-1200 SEK which would be ap. 70-110 EUR.

I have not worked in London but a quick search says the rates are pretty similar.

In that case I was looking at the wrong rates, thank you for the correction.

Not the midwest per se, but Salk Lake City has more software jobs than you shake a stick at.

One of the bigger software companies, Qualtrics (acquired this year by SAP for $8B) eventually gave up fining enough local engineers and opened a Seattle office.

Grew up and graduated from a small University in the Midwest. All of those are a big problem especially with remote work which I prefer. Before we moved for school I interviewed a couple places in the city and they would offer 60% of offers for remote positions and I would have to commute ~30 mins each way? No thanks.

The other problem with my city in particular was everyone seemed to be locked into the same tech stack (C#\.net) that I was not interested in

The dirty secret about staying in smaller markets through your 20s and 30s is that your pay never catches up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for you, but I'm swallowing some pretty bitter pills here having just crossed the 30 year mark and watching my company hire in people at my level for 20-50% more.

I don't think that's the market. It sounds more likely that you're just not negotiating well or selling yourself to your best advantage, or you're accepting a tradeoff for something else in return. My advice is to search for a new job ASAP seeking 50% more than what you're making now, tweak how you're applying and interview, and you'll have it within a year or less.

Remember also that remote work is becoming much more normal.

great advice; i agree completely. that response was so passive and defeatist i'm almost upset on his/her behalf. it is almost beyond belief what high quality engineers can earn by simply changing jobs.

>it is almost beyond belief what high quality engineers can earn by simply changing jobs.

(and not just top engineers; just about everyone benefits from competing offers. If you haven't gotten a competing offer in the last year or two, you have no idea what you could be getting, and you are probably underpaid.)

This, I think, is one of the major advantages of silicon valley; I can walk from my house to tens of big name employers; hundreds of smaller ones. I can switch jobs and I don't have to move. I can pretty easily still get drinks with the same people after work (if that's what we all want) - and the culture is such that it's okay to go work somewhere else for a few years and then to come back. it's not even a little weird.

I'm curious if what is current / high level work in midwest is different to what you are exposed to at least in SF -> there is a risk in some quieter areas that you just are not current and plugged in with the meetups, the hackathons, exposure to strong other talent.

When I was in my late 20's someone gave me a real kick in the butt to go the distance -> which paid off in hindsight big time.

You have to change jobs, nobody gives raises worth anything.

Changing jobs is only way to fix this.

By "just crossed the 30 year mark" I'm not sure if you mean you just turned 30, or that you have been working at the same place for 30 years.

Assuming that you meant you just turned 30, I am 31 and managed to get myself a 50% raise this past year by getting the offer from a different company in town and then negotiating to stay in my current role for the same pay as the offer.

To get better pay, you need to force your employer to acknowledge that someone else out there is willing to pay you more. That requires you to do most of the legwork, and to actually be willing to switch jobs.

So this is just (relatively inexperienced) me, or maybe it's just some misplaced mistrust of even the best places to work but...

I would never have confidence in my job security after negotiating a 50% raise with a competing offer.

I have negotiated some large increases in compensation in short period of times due to changing output and expectations from a role, but I feel like bringing a competing offer is inviting being replaced or made redundant, because companies don't want everyone to hold that level of negotiation over them just by saying "I could leave you know?"

Also, in my head, if they were underpaying me by 50%, I'd assume a big part of my value proposition was I cost 50% less than market rates.

And maybe this is even more paranoia, but I'd imagine a laser pointed at me and my performance afterwards, which ironically might end up affecting my performance (or at least my enjoyment of work)

Also for context, I just accepted an offer from what will be my first company in a "superstar" city last week, even the signing + relocation bonus almost felt like life changing money compared to what I've made at other companies.

One big problem is companies are moving to "up and coming" cities then paying less based on cost of living... but the cost of living on those cities is rapidly rising due to their "up and coming" status, as more and more "superstars" move into the area.

So COL ends up rising faster than your salary unless you're on a seriously fast moving career path.

I had every intention of taking the competing offer, things just ended up working differently.

The company I work for is very small (~10 people), so the negotiating dynamics were probably different than they would have been somewhere larger.

Plus, even if I did get "made redundant", that just means the next time around I have a larger base salary to negotiate from.

Who knows.

you know, you can just lie about your base. It's not unethical to lie if the only reason they're asking is to use it against you during negotiations.

when interviewing, tell the prospective employer you already have the base you want, and that you're only looking for a small pay bump, or retaining the same pay. New employer is now forced to evaluate your pay on an "absolute" basis (Are they really worth X?), rather than a relative one (am I willing to give them a pay increase of Y?). This eases tensions a lot. Don't let anyone hold you back because your previous employer underpaid you.

Yes, someone in HR might find out when they process your tax slip (P45 in the UK), but:

a) the salary person almost definitely won't be looking out for that, they have no interest in screwing you out of a job, unless it's a very, very small company, and the CEO is also the HR guy and the team lead.

b) they're probably not allowed to tell your manager, legally speaking.

c) they simply won't care.

If they really do find out and kick up a fuzz, who cares? you have a legally binding contract. besides, screw those people, if they thought you were worth the money before, what changed? Nothing, that's what. Besides, you now have proof you're worth that money, so someone else will think that too.

I second this. Never tell an interviewer what you are currently making, only what you want them to pay you. There is no need for them to know and it only gives them leverage.

That's the strategy I took, but there is also a psychological aspect to asking ridiculous amounts more than you are currently making. Particularly if you are unsure what the true market rates are for the area you're living.

What I more-so meant was since I pulled it off once, I'd be more confident the next time I went to interview to ask for even more.

If I wouldn't tell my salary to my parent or friends, I won't tell it to some random recruiter. They get lies when they ask for salary.

The people you _should_ tell your salary to are colleagues at similar levels, especially those from often-underpaid groups (immigrants, women, etc.).

Isn't the risk here that they find out what your real base was in the background check and rescind the offer? I have been honest up until this point and feel that I have been anchored by my base pay at least two times. Still got 5 figure increases but who knows how much I could have got.

The way I did it was to never directly say my salary, so I wasn't lying. I just said, "I need an offer of $X to seriously consider this position", which was true.

It just happened that $X was a 50% increase from what I was previously making.

Your company will continue to pay you the maintenance rate to keep you on. If you are willing to go through the process of finding a new job, someone will pay you more, but to your current company you're a fixed asset. That's just the market now. If you want a 20% raise you're gonna have to go across the street to the competitor. Otherwise, why would they pay you more money when you're obviously willing to settle for what they're paying you now.

By that logic, companies shouldn't offer raises.

A company cannot assume that someone is "willing to settle" just because they accepted an offer. Good companies try to proactively keep people, and part of that is making sure their compensation roughly keeps Pace with the market. By the time a company gets the signal that the "maintenance rate" isn't it's too late to do anything about it.

Companies who want to keep you need to offer you enough that stay. You can skip raises to keep people for a few years, but they will remember that and expect you to make it up latter. (the ability to keep your paycheck through a downturn - and thus house and local friends - is valuable) Eventually employees catch on that their pay is significantly less than they can get elsewhere and they will leave. It is better to proactively give raises to everyone so that they don't go looking: replacing someone who leaves is going to be more expensive than keeping them in general.

> If you are willing to go through the process of finding a new job, someone will pay you more

Be careful, though - there’s some cartelization/collusion going on. If you change jobs too many times, that’ll be used as a strike against you, and a reason to offer you lower pay.

> recent grads that stay for longer than three years since we invest in their career growth and provide much more mentorship.

definitely not why recent grads stay. wet behind the ears folks don’t know any better so don’t know how good they have it. they stay for either the reason they are there in the first place: quality of life; or out out of inertia; or from lack of thinking big. NOT because they realize they’ve got it good.

Not to mention that the quality of life outside big cities is far healthier and more human scale and human paced. People are more focused on things like children than on Kubernetes — the world needs progress but boy does it take a toll. In the Bay Area I worked with people making $400K who said they decided they could only afford two kids. Meanwhile where I live now it’s very feasible for a schoolteacher couple to afford five kids, and not in privation. I like that Elon Musk exists but holy hell I do not want his life.

people don't realize the enormous difference in living cost of bay area vs midwest. 400K on the penninsula is less than 150K in the midwest. I once calculated the average salaries of the bay area vs mid western cities and adjusted those salaries based on the cost of housing: https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-...

I’d rather earn $400K for several years, live as cheaply as possible, and when I start to feel fatigued, then switch to one of these slower companies in the Midwest. By that time, your portfolio is decent strong and you’re already set for retirement.

Starting your career in the Midwest at their typical salary levels and given the kinds of problems many of these companies or their IT departments are solving is a very short sighted approach. I say that having been there.

I pivoted my career. My first 6 months I had more impact and learned way more than in working 4 years in the Midwest.

These calculators are highly misleading. You absolutely can live comfortably and squirrel away much more cash at 400k anywhere in the US vs 150k. I’ve lived this experience between “low” COL and high areas.

Lets compare salaries on a city by city basis and adjust those salaries based on the Cost of living in dollars per square foot (cost of a house/condo from Zillow). To calculate the location adjusted salary, we simply multiply the salary by 500 (rough average of $/sq foot) and divide by the cost per square foot in that city.

This comparison makes sense only if your salary is spent on literally nothing else but housing.

Lots of truth here. Having lived in both types of places I can say with certainty that yes, housing is a big difference. But otherwise much is the same and the vastly higher salaries lead to much accelerated retirement savings and wealth generation.

Some very expensive places like nyc allow you to factor out automobile expenses making the rent burden manageable.

Food is a bit more, going out is the same if you figure out where to go, and day to day expenses aren’t too far off either.

I’d say it’s about 20% more overall all things considered.

Yes, more detailed math here: https://thestartupconference.com/2018/09/21/about-that-silic...

Well their yearly savings is a bit off to be sure. Unless you live in a dumpster which isn’t compatible with a spouse. But the general idea is right.

Pre-tax savings and having more to set aside after tax as well as faster appreciating real estate equity is the winning path in today’s economy.

This is commonly brought up but isn't correct simply because what matters more is generally the absolute amount of disposable income you have, not the percentage of your total salary.

If you make 400k / year (typical for a FAANG senior engineer, which plenty of people people reach in their mid-to-late 20s) your expenses might break down as:

- 160k taxes

- 50k housing (luxury 1 bedroom in SF or Palo Alto)

- 10k food (eat at work on weekdays for free, $200 a weekend to eat out at nice restaurants)

- 10k transportation (Tesla Model 3 like everyone else)

= 230k total

So you end up with ~170k a year of disposable income while living very well. If you were willing to cut expenses to the bone (roommates is the big one, cook for yourself, old car) you'd probably end up at around 200k of disposable income. 170k-200k is more than most software engineers can hope to make in gross income in the Midwest. Sure, you might not want to buy a house for $2M, but with just two years of savings you can move to the Midwest and buy a house outright. After 10 years (remember, most of these people would be in their late thirties) you could easily save ~$2M before investment returns and retire to a low cost of living area.

For people who are not tech workers and live in the Bay Area making <$100k / year, there is definitely a great argument that the cost of living is way too high. For software engineers, it's worth remembering the cost of living is so high only because software engineers get paid so much.

Wow, I swear every time I read one of these salary threads the "typical" salary for a FAANG engineer jumps by 50k.

Not doubting it, it's just fucking nuts. I do wonder though what percentage of engineers are making that type of money though? How typical is it really?

Percentage of engineers, or senior engineers?

Overall, I'd guesstimate 40% make 400k or more, with most senior engineers making that much. Not at all atypical, particularly if you've been at one for a couple years.

Is this really accurate? And even if total comp is somehow $400k, how much of that is equity, and how many senior engineers are liquidating it every year to get $400k in cash? That seems wildly overblown. And that equity shouldn’t be factored into the above breakdown anyway, at least not in the taxes calculation!

Equity is a whole lot of that. And yes, people liquidate it immediately. RSUs count as income.

I'd say most of the FAANG engineers I know cash out their RSUs when they vest, or within about a year or two after.

RSUs are not the same as private equity in a startup. While they are subject to market fluctuations they can be liquidated immediately on vesting (annually then frequently quarterly). They are taxed just like regular income... because they are regular income.

As to how many engineers are liquidating at vest? It’s honestly the most sensible option to diversify quickly since you don’t want your investment, savings and income all tied up in one company.

So you're saying 40% of FAANG engineers (not just seniors, but all engineers) are pulling in 400k? That's nuts... I swear the number being thrown around for FAANG was ~250k not that long ago. Next time I check one of these threads it will be 500k....

250k is probably the average figure? Lots of L3s and L4s out there (more of them than L5 and above), who bring the average down.

$400k is pretty high for senior. Most senior FAANG engineers will be in the $300s somewhere, rather than north of $400k.

> Wow, I swear every time I read one of these salary threads the "typical" salary for a FAANG engineer jumps by 50k.

Go look at the 2-year or 5-year stock charts of any of the FAANG companies and you'll see why.

An engineer who started working at a FAANG company several years ago got some RSU grants, and the value of the unvested shares grew a lot since then. On top of that, refresher grants every year or two are pretty common. Total compensation really ramps up after a few years even if you don't get promoted.

So are the RSU grants typically done as a fixed number of shares or is it adjusted based on how much those shares are worth on the market? For example, if the stock price tumbled would new offers be granted more shares to make up for the collapse in value to keep the overall compensation the same?

I'm sure it depends on the company, but my company grants a dollar amount and figures out how many shares add up to that amount. If the stock price tumbled I would get more shares next time I get a refresher grant, because more shares would be needed to add up to the dollar amount the company would grant me.

If the stock price collapses, many employees lose their homes.

Nobody knows what will happen when the inevitable finally happens.

Maybe the companies will step in and make employees mostly whole. Maybe they will have to in order to keep their best people.

Or maybe the gravy train will end.

All anyone can tell you for sure is that the companies will continue to pay what is required to get the people they need, and no more.

The point-in-time percentage isn't the best metric. These companies hire a huge number of recent grads each year, with sub-200k total comps. Need to look at expected 5+ year compensation to get a better picture.

Using FB as an example, engineers are expected to make it to E5 within a set time period (~5 years) or they're fired. So anyone still employed after that time is at least an E5. The E5 comp target is 330-400k. So yes, anyone still employed after 5/6 years is making at least that much.

Its not expected nor required to go beyond that, so that will be the career top for many. E6 is a 500-600k range, and I've no clue about E7-9.

Google is similar, and there are equivalent levels at Uber, Lyft, etc.

And then there's Netflix which only hires senior engineers and has a single level with a huge comp range. Pretty much 100% of Netflix enginners are making 300k+, most 400k+. But, Netflix is also an all cash shop - need to pay for benefits out of pocket, buy stock out of pocket, etc; so not 1:1 comparable to others.

Exactly this.

LOTS of grads do not make it to the $500K land. The FAANG companies have also been around a bit, so now google / facebook etc just have a fair number of more senior folks who are making good money. So pay is out of control but these companies make so much gross revenue (check out apple / google financials) that they can afford it.

Totally annoying if you are not in tech! And sometime you are like, do you really need to be spending x billion on comp to run y website?

I've noticed that, too -- the way the typical FAANG salary keeps going up and up and up and up and up and up and up whenever it's quoted here. I've been in Silicon Valley since 2002, always working for tech companies, either as a technical writer or a web developer, and I have never made anywhere near the "average salary" that HN tells me I should have been making.

Even granting that I'm not very good as a salary negotiator, I suspect an awful lot of software engineers, even out here, are making around $150-200K for their base pay, and are not getting another $100K+ annually in benefits and stock options.

Typical FAANG total comp for senior engineers in the bay area will be somewhere in the $300,000s, with moderate tenure (say 4+ years)

Of that, maybe 60% is salary, and the rest is bonus/stock/etc. The breakdown varies by company, and the non-salary comp is somewhat highly variable.

A senior new hire will be more like $250k

More junior folks will naturally make less.

As someone making ~$100k in Iowa, all of those numbers are crazy to me.

But I also make more than basically all of my friends / family, and manage to save 30-40% of my income each year, so I have to say I can't complain.

As a dev making €50k in Western Europe, your salary is crazy to me. :)

And I'd wager COL here is also higher than Iowa.

As someone making £27k in the UK your salary is also crazy to me. The kind of numbers that get thrown around really have no meaning to me.

As someone making 18k€ in Eastern Europe your salary is also crazy to me. And I manage to save >30% of my salary and my quality of living is fine.

I've earnt that as a monthly figure as a London contractor.

There is a market if you're willing to play the game.

Nice. What kind of contracting gig did you do?

DevSecOps consulting for a large brand that was hacked and a bank undergoing a transformation. Managed it for about 2 years, before that the standard rate was £700-£800 p/d.

Did have a large transformation under my belt and critical national infrastructure as feathers in my hat.

That's above market rates. You'd have to be on £1350 a day. Most contracts I see are £450-£750. How did you swing agency / big consultancy rates as a freelancer?

I sold myself as a one man consultancy without the land and expand bullshit. I hit £1500 a day, which was the max before you hit a world of bureaucracy. It's a lot easier to sit on about £1000-1200k a day.

The intention isn't to brag, it's just to point out there is a market here that can be tapped even if you can't travel to SoCal.

I have a friend who works for a FAANG company. He moved from California to London, staying with the company.

He took a 35% pay cut, and he tells me that cost of living in London is much higher than what he left behind in California.

It made sense for him, because he had personal reasons both to be in Europe and to take the specific open position he took that he wouldn't have been able to get on California, but he was much richer in California.

How many people (actual number) are "FAANG senior engineers" ? I feel like this comp package number gets a lot of attention but my intuition is that it's a rare thing, compared to the number of people working in tech as a whole.

My napkin math tells me about 100-200k engineers at FAANG proper, about 100k more getting paid at FAANG level outside of FAANG (depends on who you include like Microsoft and if you count high-paying startups with high chances of success like Airbnb). Roughly half the people I work with (including first line managers) are "senior" so I would guess about 100k-150k people.

I would estimate that between 10% and 15% of FAANG software engineers are senior or higher.

It does take a few years of being at senior for pay to ratchet up to the $350k range that is typical of long-tenured senior engineers at FAANG companies. A newly-minted senior engineer will be more in the $300k range

That math will change quite a bit if you decide to have a family.

Also, I was under the impression that those 400K FAANG salaries were not that common in the bay area, i could be wrong.

How is driving around everywhere human scale? The rest I agree with.

Outside big cities, driving 10 minutes to work is more human scale than driving 60 minutes in Bay Area. The choice in the US is not really driving vs not driving, but rather about how much.

Small city: everything is in walking or cycling distance, there's little congestion. Big city: distance between points of interest is large, there's lots of traffic and congestion, people complain about public traffic, and take an hour to get from place A to place B.

This is my experience, having lived most of my life in small places (ranging from a monastery to a city with 25k people) while listening to people in big cities complain about their commutes.

Now I live in a city that isn't exactly small but not huge either. I'm already suffering the consequences of traffic and longer distances. Moving out of small cities is when I started to actually need a car... of course having more people and congestion doesn't show up in traffic only; it's also in the grocery store queues, restaurants packed full, parcels not delivered to home because they're too busy to deal with everyone personally, etc.

I've lived in places ranging from 20k to big cities. All base necesseties were in walking distance where I lived in the cities, and mostly in the smaller places as well.

The thing with smaller places is that you can generally get like 80% of what you need locally, but on occasion you have to go a few towns over or into the nearest city to get that 20%. So you can easily live in a city w/o a car, but it's substantially harder to do so in smaller places.

I don't believe in that 20% being a problem. I mean you can take a bus / taxi / train / buddy to get you to the next town if you need to be there. If you need to transport stuff, then you might need a car, but it's not like you would be transporting that same stuff without a car in a big city. So you need the car there too.

Also, my experience is that the 20% is more like 1-2% (when I lived in smaller cities, I needed to visit other towns or bigger cities a few times a year).

Like I said, I started needing my car only after I moved out. As a matter of fact, I only got a car a year before moving out, and I only got it because it was given to me for free.

You guys are having a martian conversation for those of us who live in the States. Not driving is only an option in a handful of cities like NYC.

Elon has 5 kids (just saying)

>my quality of life and financial freedom is immeasurably improved. This regularly surprises my acquaintances that stayed.

The people of Austin once had traffic free commutes and the people of Denver could once easily afford housing. Then other people became aware of those things, showed up in droves and those good things went away.

If you want to keep your perks in the long term you should probably not be telling everyone how great it is.

Build more homes. Put them near these new jobs. Add schools and bike routes. Cities aren't static unless they're dying.

You're not wrong but I have zero faith that importing a bunch of people from the SV tech scene isn't going to stifle housing construction with SV style zoning, stifle infrastructure improvements with pandering to the environmental crowd^, and price out everyone who isn't making six figures in the proces. Of course they all realize SV style regulation of land use sucks, you need to allow for density and all that but everyone is gonna push for the one or two "little things" that they liked and you have a tragedy of the commons.

I know everyone is gonna read this and thing "I would never do that" but as they say, a person is smart but people are stupid.

^not that that isn't a consideration but in an urban setting "plan, build, assess, mitigate any impacts" is a better workflow than "never building anything because there's always one person who isn't yet satisfied with the proposed environmental impact".

We agree - SV is a disaster for the reasons you state, though it's worked tidily for anyone who bought a house there 30 years ago. Texas likes to take an anti-regulation stance as I understand it, so maybe they could address that. The first step could be to remove the parking minimums they impose despite their anti-regulation reputation...

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