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Comment by EddieEngineers | Hacker News Reader

Five Guys has always been that price, but I agree with your point. As a Brit, the US is pretty crazy too though. I just saw a single broccoli for $7 at a grocery store in Palo Alto.

On my $172k salary I pay $59k in taxes which is roughly $1k more than I'd pay in the UK but in the UK that includes national insurance while in the US I pay health insurance on top. So while taxes sound crazy in the UK it's not actually different to the US - it's all marginal. VAT is only 7.25% in California but then you have to add 15-20% in tips when you're out.

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California's tax rate is much higher than the rest of the country. The bay area's brocoli prices are much higher than anywhere except times square. The vast majority of the country is not facing prices like these.

I'm sorry, I have to ask. Do people often shop for broccoli in Times Square?

I am aware of many events and activities that go on in Times Square, however broccoli consumption was not at the top of my list.

I unfortunately have gone grocery shopping in Times square when staying with a friend who for some reason decided to live there.

If you're capable of earning $172,000 in salary in the US, you can trivially get an employer that covers essentially all the cost of your health insurance (if that's an important arrangement wherever you're at in life; ie if you want that packaged into your total compensation vs taxes calculation). That's the typical situation for someone with a salary that high in the US. Your scenario is pretending that people earning so much are commonly having to cover the cost of their health insurance, which is not the case.

Which is simultaneously in no way defending the mess that is US healthcare.

> If you're capable of earning $172,000 in salary in the US, you can trivially get an employer that covers essentially all the cost of your health insurance

Employers rarely cover all the health care premiums for you entire family.

Most non-startups will cover 100% for the employee, but if you're not single you'll end up paying quite a bit to cover your spouse & kids.

I pay $50 a month for health care but have to co-pay so specialist appointments are a few hundred.

>VAT is only 7.25% in California but then you have to add 15-20% in tips when you're out.

I don't know about the rest of the UK because I haven't been but most non-casual places in London charge an automatic 12.5% service charge. It's the same thing.

I'd tip at a restaurant but not at a pub. If people ask for a tip on the card machine I, being British, feel obligated to tip meaning I have to tip at weird places. For example I recently tipped at a cigarette stand in a casino in Las Vegas where all they did was sell a packet. I've even seen images on Reddit of people getting asked for tips at self service stations!

Another thing I didn't talk about is annual leave. Annual leave in the US is usually rubbish compared to European countries.

broccoli in socal hovers around 1-2 dollars a pound. that's just an outlier

Yeah I know, it was just so crazy I wanted to mention it somewhere and this post worked lol. Fwiw it was from https://www.draegers.com.

Draegers is probably the most expensive grocery store I have ever set foot in. The one near San Mateo has a crazy wine selection sometimes but I literally cannot fathom buying a week's groceries there. Beautiful produce, but you can get beautiful produce at a farm stand for a couple bucks too.

Not sure how to feel about the existence of luxury grocery stores. I'm sure the people who shop there are happy.

It's the only place that has guanciale and decent pancetta near me, plus they sell pasta from my in-laws village in Italy, which is fun to cook carbonara with from time to time. They also sell wagyu which is hard to find in the Bay Area! I absolutely would never ever do my actual weekly shopping from there!

Speaking as someone who spent an hour last week fruitlessly looking for pancetta that wasn't factory packaged in plastic, you raise a good point!

Check it out! It's really quite good - comes in a proper slab you cube yourself. They also have some pretty nice American Wagyu steaks around the $30 mark which I've been using for yakiniku parties (thinly cut and cooked on a grill in the middle of the table)! As long as you want something semi-specialist they're great but general items like chicken breasts or broccoli are just mental.

You wouldn't be making nearly that much in the UK though.

Two years ago I was making $160k in Oxford with 7 years work experience and no degree - contracting in London for > $500 per day or working remotely for startups in the Bay Area are both easily accessible if you have a couple years under your belt. I'm moving back to Europe this summer and talking to companies at 550+ a day.

This sounds like an outlier though, no? The overall averages there are much lower.

Also everyone I know in tech over here is making much more than that still.

That thats the case for the US as well. The average salary for US software dev, according to glassdoor, is 88,395/year, which iirc is about the same I've seen form other sources. Everyone working in FAAG is an outlier compared to the rest of the US. These conversations are usually pretty poor because context is very important and job + location + circumstance is seemingly pretty much impossible to compare to each other.

I spent a while when I was trying to find a job trying to comes to terms with that "average dev salary" number, since the vast majority of jobs for an entry level position were at least 80k, with plenty being more (I was looking nationwide, wanted to move out, didn't care where). I think it's heavily biased by the fact that the field is growing at an extremely fast rate relative to others, which means the average software dev has dramatically less experience than an average, say, accountant.

So when looking at salary figures, the only sane way of doing it is to control for experience level, otherwise the variance in the explosive growth of the industry will dominate your results.

HN's conception of software developer is just very different from the labor bureau. Someone who makes wordpress sites, knows a little html, css, and teensy amount of javascript is a software developer.

These folks do not actually earn a great wage because they know less than what many bootcamp grads come out of a 12 week program with, but they exist in multitudes.

Yeah, this seems to be a stronger contender. The median income for someone with a CS bachelors in the US is $110,417, which is a much more believable number for what I would consider a software developer.

Not really. You have to compare the equivalent rarity between the two countries. He's describing a 99th percentile income in the UK. The 99th percentile income in the US is $350K. It's not even close.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charting-income-distribu...

Thanks for the link I guess... I'm not sure why this data is anymore useful alone, like I said, in a discussion about cost of living without cost of health care, taxes, etc. Your response perfectly illustrates my previous point, that having a discussion about an incredibly nuanced and specific comparison for cost of living (look at the post title) is made difficult by people who just say "Look at this thing here, it means I'm right! All I need to prove my point about cost of living is X". Man, I love throw away accounts.

To be fair, the average salary for hospital worker is quite different than the average salary for neurosurgeon. Yet both work in healthcare at a hospital.

Would you be making that much outside of CA?

I'm not in CA, never have been. I'm in NYC. And the reason I'm in NYC is precisely because these high-paying jobs are available here, which is also why I'm not in the UK.

Good to know. Thank you for answering my question

I mean what you said is right. In general though, one would be earning much less in UK in IT/Tech/SW jobs compared to US. So overall earning remain higher in US.

> VAT is only 7.25% in California

(Sales tax, not VAT)

But you need to also add local sales taxes, so your sales tax in Palo Alto is actually 9.125%

agreed. US price is bat shit crazy. 'some' things are reasonably affordable in the U.S., like processed food in bulk, grains, dairy, etc. But eating out, rent, service labor, healthcare, are insane.

Rent is definitely insane. If I wasn't in tech I'd be miserable.

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