Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdright | Hacker News Reader

I keep being head hunted to work on SF/SV. And my reply is basically automatic and always the same:

"Due to US external policy and cost of life I can't see it being financially practical to move. Although, I would gladly consider any remote position."

I think the immigration complexity is the lesser problem there. My research based on housing, school, transport and food tells me it looks like absurdly expensive. To be able to even consider to move there I would need a salary bump of 3x-5x. No way this will ever happen.

View on HN

No joke. My team has three branches:

  *  Sunnyvale, CA 
  *  Bentonville, AR  
  *  Bangalore, India

We regularly will gossip about best/worst aspects of each of them. My mind is blown at how much they have to pay to live in the greater SF area. 3-4k for rent on an apartment for a small family. My mortgage is 800 a month. A mortgage with a yard big enough for gardens, a bee hive, compost, a couple of trees, basketball goal, fenced in yard, etc....

Of course they get to poke fun at how they cross two timezones and go back 3 decades culturally in time when they fly out to visit. ;-)

The Bangalore folk poke fun at the US based ones at how cold/wet/expensive/boring we all are. It's all in good fun but it really does hammer in how home is where you currently are.

Edit - I

Did you "gossip" about pay? Despite my sky-high rent (although 1-bedroom apartments can certainly be had for much less than $3k) I'm financially better off in the bay area than I would be with any outside the bay area job offer I've gotten. My net-after-housing pay is higher here than any offer or salary range I've seen in places I'd want to move to like Oregon or Reno.

are you gonna have kids? if so that equation is going to change a huge amount. Just see what it does to your spreadsheet once you factor in 3k/month child care, and the cost of living in a place big enough for a small family, etc. did you look at the massive difference cost in eating out and groceries? housing and taxes?

Yes, I budget down to the penny every month so I am factoring in all of it. I don't have any interest in having kids, so that's an angle I hadn't considered.

The bay is a great area if you are a young, healthy person without kids.

My colleges take their SV salaries and retreat to somewhere else when they want a family.

I think Canada is a better place to raise a family. Or, many other countries are probably comparable (or better).

It doesn’t happen via salary, it happens via stock. Work at a big co over the last decade or so and you’ve seen salary increase at 10% year or so and stock increase much faster. It’s very common for senior engineers in the Bay Area to be earning 175k salary, ~30k bonus, and another 150+ in stock vesting per year. High performers and/or workers at FAANGs do better than that. See levels.fyi for concrete examples.

The whole thing here is stock, which takes a couple years to really stack up, but once it does, you’re making a lot of money.

This is the problem, stock from a few years doesn't house my family or feed my kids. Stock to me is almost as fairly tales as it can be, the few times I received stock as part of my salary it basically evaporated. In the real life, to people that need money each month to survive, stock is a bad joke.

What do you mean? Unless you are living paycheck to paycheck stock is just as real as cash.

Or almost paycheck to paycheck, which is not as uncommon as one may think. And normally stock come with restrictions on when you can liquidate. This is basically money I don't have now and a promise in the future that may very well go wrong.

Normal valley vesting schedule is:

- A grant of a specific number of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)

- Vesting over 4 years

- You get nothing for 12 months

- On the 12th month you get 25%. You can sell this immediately for cash if you choose

One of the following:

A. Each month you vest 1/36th of the remaining stock

B. Each quarter you vest 1/12th of the remaining stock You can sell this immediately for cash if you choose

Some terrible companies like Amazon have abusive vesting schedules such as 5% the first year, 15% the second year, then 40% the final two years.

My stock vests monthly and I have it set to autosell at vest so I get cold hard cash direct deposited into my account every month.

If you are living "almost" paycheck to paycheck as a engineer with 200k+ total comp you are doing something seriously wrong.

>To be able to even consider to move there I would need a salary bump of 3x-5x. No way this will ever happen.

You'd be surprised. Granted it was over a period of 4 years, but I did hit that 5x.

I could work 4 years remotely until the bump is enough to move, but I doubt that would ever be acceptable. :)

May I ask what you do to attract SV recruiters? I can't catch me any of them. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com