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Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

>The position is based onsite at Apple's campus in Cupertino, California. International candidates are welcome to apply but will need to relocate; the company will sponsor a visa.

what's the point :o

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> The base pay range for this role is between $138,900 and $256,500

> The average Cupertino home value is $2,663,389

I'm sorry wtf?

A compiler engineer can always live in a car park :-)

There has to be an analogy... Like working in a register but sleeping on disk or something... Just can't find it

Low latency local caching

>I'm sorry wtf?

Now you know how us European devs feel like in ragrds to wage/housing prices.

How? Northern Europe salary is more than enough to afford local housing.

>How?

Come to Austria and see. Same in Germany I think. A mate from Stuggarts has no idea how house prices are justified there looking at his wage.

>Northern Europe salary is more than enough to afford local housing.

Where exactly in Northern Europe? I heard the Finnish countryside is very affordable. If you can stomach the weather and isolation.

10x-15x gross income to house price ratio seems pretty much spot on. A dev will earn 50-80k here (taxes are going to be ~40% or so) and a SFH in the area will cost 600-1000k.

What do you mean? Vienna has rent control and you can rent a place for like 500€ monthly. (City public housing is even cheaper.)

This probably also means it's not a great investment to buy property there.

There is also the option to live near Vienna and commute by trains.

>Vienna has rent control

Rent controlled public housing are only for Vienese or long term resisdents of Vienna. I am neither.

>you can rent a place for like 500€ monthly

Hahah, no you can't, not even close on the private market, in 2024. Maybe during the pandemic you could when travel was frozen and the rental market crashed.

>This probably also means it's not a great investment to buy property there.

It is. That's why prices are kept so high, so those who own stay wealthy. I don't want a house for an investment tho, just a place to live.

600€ monthly, 9th district, looks nice.

https://housinganywhere.com/room/ut902932/at/Vienna/marktgas...

Plus another 500€ monthly for gas and electricity written in the fine print, when I only pay 100€, bringing your monthly rent to 1100€, which is closer to the private market value of such a property.

What is the higher end of Austrian tech market pay, in your view?

The higher end is always the highest you are currently being offered. No point in fantasizing over fictional numbers that you're 99% unlikely to get in order to be unrealistically optimistic with yourself and your financial planning. It's why average/median pay is important.

Can’t disagree with that

>Northern Europe salary is more than enough to afford local housing.

Not in the UK.

you can get paid 300-400k in London and average house price is probably half that of Cupertino.

Still tight though.

GBP? Who is offering these salaries?

Nobody does in tech. The parent comment got it wrong.

I wonder how can people throw around such fantasy numbers with a straight face as if anyone can easy get them with a bit of work and elbow grease. I don't doubt he's making that kind of money but it would be nice to not push cases of obvious survivorship bias as being the norm.

Yearly tech compensation ranges from 100k to 1M. I'm sorry you feel like that must be a lie.

Yes and I make 5M. A month.

I'm just pointing out the reality of the market, while you're just spouting nonsense.

Reality? Reality needs some proof or sources mate. Can you provide any of those for your claims? Because otherwise online everyone is the crown prince of Arabia, over 6ft tall and 12 inches uncut.

You wouldn’t have a job ad link would you? Give me a generic description of any 300K+ position you know of? I will understand whether it’s real. Something like “Business-side director level position on a trading floor in a multinational investment bank” (those people don’t make 300K, this is just an example).

You can find the pay by role for any of the big tech companies online -- it's all open.

Obviously the range I gave goes all the way from junior engineer to CTO, is in USD, and reflects pay at top institutions.

I see, so you won’t

I assume it's one of those contractor gigs in the city that pays 1000+ GBP/day.

£1000/day is still “just” around £250K/year, and at this daily rate you won’t have it easy as a contractor. Highly paid gigs are not as plentiful, are normally shorter, and require very active search and sales work. You always need to find your next similar consulting gig quickly once your current one is over — every day of downtime or non-billable work between gigs costs you £1000!

In short, parent comment got it wrong, tech in London doesn’t pay you £300-400K/year.

> around £250K/year

and once you’ve taken public holidays and leave into account, it’s closer to 200k

Consultants make less than employees can, since they have no upside.

Trading firms?

Not as a base salary, no. They would have a performance bonus (you’ll keep a percentage of your trading income done via firm), but even then making £300-400K/year is… challenging

I live in Iceland, and I can assure you this is not the case. However it has got this bad only in the last year or two

Looking at the qualifications, this seems to be an entry level position, as there is no years of work experience listed.

Not by the base pay, which would generally be 120k-200k for an entry level role.

Base pay, of course. I’d expect a senior engineer at Apple to be getting 300k-400k in total compensation.

Rule of thumb for home affordability would still price the person out of that home, even at 400k/yr. Meanwhile, the median home price in the country as a whole is 350-400k these days. SV has priced out even their senior engineers, which does seem like an issue for hiring.

Mean average home price in the city of Cupertino is not a useful statistic to determine if someone is priced out of a job located in Cupertino. There are lower priced areas that are within commuting distances acceptable to sufficient people, plus dual income couples.

The median home price for the SF Bay Area is roughly $1.4M -- that means this sort of role is the bottom of who could afford a home alone. Making half as much money somewhere else is likely going to provide a higher quality of life than barely being able to break into the Bay Area housing market and potentially needing a long commute to your "desirable" job. This was not the case for the previous generations of engineers moving to the Bay Area.

> of who could afford a home alone

I don’t think that’s much of a thing any more, not just in the Bay Area.

Yikes so this ultra rare skilled engineer is going to have to have a long commute and essentially live like a peasant?

Who would accept this role??

Cupertino is smaller than you think it is. I don't know if much of anyone at Apple lives there. It's mostly old retired people from Taiwan and India.

Incorrect, as common sense would dictate lots of people who work at Apple live close by the office (homes aren’t the only option, there is a thing called renting)

To rent in Cupertino they would have to let you build apartments, which they famously don't.

You're not buying a house with your yet-to-vest stock.

I recently got approved for a mortgage with a mainstream lender where they took unvested stock into account for the pre-approval. Thankfully I'm not reliant on that stock vesting to pay the mortgage. As I understand there are quite a few lenders that will do this.

“Total compensation” usually refers to base salary together with your yearly bonus and vested stock. Mortgage lenders will typically look at your W2 income which includes the bonus and stock.

Private bankers will do this if you have enough of it.

There seems to be a massive disconnect between people who live in these expensive bubbles and everyone else.

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