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Comment by konjin | Hacker News Reader

https://www.federalpay.org/employees/headquarters-nasa

That's a painful looking salary range.

If a majority of those salaries are in Florida or Houston, I'd say that's a generous salary range, plus they're eligible for a pension (of course, I still think NASA should be funded more to compete for top talent and resources)

The problem isn't that NASA tops out salary in low-cost cities barely above entry/mid-sw engineer salary levels in SV, it's that entry/junior engineer salary levels are the "minimum" amount to live comfortably + save in those high cost cities in the first place. I don't think many would mind a pay cut (and the subsequent tax cut) if their rent + cost of living was cut accordingly.

(E.G. $150k in Houston, TX is equivalent to $312k in SF: https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...)

I don't get how people can think like this.

I buy a SF house and start paying the SF mortgage with my SF salary, I spend the next 10 years living there with a cost of living that's around 40% higher than Texas.

At the end of it I sell at SF market rates and move to Texas. I now have an extra $1.24m even if prices didn't increase by a cent.

It’s easy. I don’t want to live in San Francisco for 10 years to have an extra $1.24m. Most of my family would not be “just a plane flight away” where as right now I make good money and it’s a 3 hr car ride to see them. Those things mean something to me that money won’t replace. The cost of living being nice here just means I can also do all the things I want to do easier with less money.

Sure, but you're anticipating CA housing prices keep rising or the very least don't crater and that Texas real estate prices don't continue skyrocketing (in the past 5 years, the average 3bd/2ba home in Dallas has doubled from 200k to 400k. As all major cities in Texas are among the top fastest growing in the US each year, it looks like there's a good 5-10 years of 10%+ property value growth, at minimum). Like almost all arbitrage opportunities, the spread will eventually be narrowed as more and more people take advantage of it.

Furthermore, your 1.24m figure is over-inflated, as CA has high state/local sales/income taxes. And don't forget San Franciso transfer taxes on real estate (around $50k-100k due at close)! Texas has no state or local income taxes, aside from property taxes.

Not to mention that if you have kids, you don't really have the luxury of waiting that long. You can put them into a better school district for cheaper, or you can even send your kid to top-tier well-known private schools for $25k/year rather than $60k/year. Even in-state college tuition at UT, a nationally renowned public university on par with UCLA and UC Berkeley, is only $5k/year, versus near $20k in CA.

I live in Los Angeles now, but I grew up in Dallas. Obviously I'm choosing to stay in California for a reason, but I'm not ignorant as to why someone would move from CA to TX.

That perspective fails to consider some things like really good healthcare and a pension.

The perks don’t look like tech but they are really really good

Pensions are deeply under-appreciated when comparing government to private jobs.

Indeed. I have a pension through a state job with a pension and my partner has a federal government job with a pension. It makes retirement planning much easier and it allows us to be much more financially aggressive in our 30s.

Also good health insurance, paid parental leave (in the US!), job security, a known and transparent progression path...honesty I’ll take lower uncertainty for slightly lower pay because it saves me money over time.

I've had better health care on private plans and promises of pensions in 30 years are worth less than startup stock options. Which is really saying something when I consider stock options from startups to be worthless.

Maybe the Feds can tax Mega Tech more and grow NASA's budget accordingly.

NASA's budget isn't the reason they don't pay more. They're just not allowed to because of federal pay scales. People generally don't like the idea of their tax money funding cushy salaries.

If you look at the defense industry the contractors can pay way above the federal pay scales. That's why people with security clearances often just move to a contractor and they literally end up on the same project doing the same work but get paid double what they were while working directly for the government.

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