USA is super expensive. Yes you can get a large paycheck, wait until you see house prices.
Also current situation does not inspire confidence in somebody who may be identified as white male.
Also current situation does not inspire confidence in somebody who may be identified as white male.
I'm considered a spender among my peers, and even I am amazed when I discuss with american friends, watching the money they throw away.
Most of them have huge food budget: they never cook and eat outside all the time. They have so many recurring payments for so many services. They spend tons money to refund a student load for a degree they never finished, or a mortage on a car or credit cards fees. Cigarets, alcohol, weed, then various kinds of meds.
Some of them have several generations of console, one PC, and changed their phone every 2 years for the last decade.
When I visited the USA with my father (he worked for an airline), we always ended the trip with flipping through garbages in nice neighbourhoods. Once we found a printer. Another time we found a tennis racket.
So when they tell me they are having a hard time with money, it's not easy to be compassionate.
I know there are people working 3 jobs, living paycheck to paycheck and eating junk food to survive. But they are not coders in the valley.
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
I've lived in Atlanta, Phoenix and SF/MV/Santa Clara, and no, none of those come close to the quality of life for the money. For reference I live in a 2300ft^2 house in the country, and it was great for raising a family, but now I'd rather rejoin civilization. So I'm aware of the tradeoffs.
Seriously, if you think housing is expensive relative to incomes in Bay Area, or NYC, it will seem like a bargain compared to London or Paris.
As I mentioned, I've lived in Mountain View and Santa Clara. Sunnyvale is in the middle. I'm a cyclist and loved to climb up the various two lane grades and over the top to the coast and back. I visited MV and San Jose last spring. And SF. It was much more interesting in the '90s. Now the South Bay is just another dead US suburb.
I wouldn't live there again for $500k/year.
We haven't even discussed why most families move to the suburbs: children. We have done the two commute raising a child in the Bay Area. We evacuated when the school logistics became visible, and in hindsight, rightly so.
In Nice, I would pay 1100€/m for the same thing, and that's also considered an expensive city.
In my current country side town, I pay the ridiculously low price of 300€/m for a 3 bedrooms flat. Now that's the lower end of the spectrum, because it's a very poor deep country side village.
But yeah, some devs start their career at 2400€ a month as a salary :)
Even if it still costs less than SF, your paycheck now looks adequate. Covid era raised prices everywhere.
It still happens but you need to go further East, like Romania, for example.
But Romania is far more disorganized compared to Czechia, so there are downsides.
Then staying there and working remotely becomes family friendly, and moving becomes super selfish. Most people assume moving to get a good job, which will lead exactly to the consequences above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
You can see this effect clearly from your own source, where Australian Americans and South African Americans both have higher median incomes than almost all Asian American households, as well as white Americans. Same thing goes for Pakistani, Iranian, Lebonese and Austrian Americans compared to other groups in the US.
No one made that point. And yes, it's true, if you look at certain much smaller demographic groups you can find groups that are somewhat more economically advantaged than white men.