Moving to SF was a career multiplier. I instantly doubled my salary.
Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities.
Walmart was started in Arkansas. Warren Buffet famously lives in Nebraska.
But the Tier 1 cities create more wealth for more people than Tier 2 or 3 cities.
If I hypothetically doubled my salary _and_ my expenses, that hardly seems worth it. Although NorCal is gorgeous.
If you go from say 120k to 240k in salary your housing may go from say 1k (12k/year) to 3k (36k/year) but at the end of the year 120k-12k is 108k while 240k-36k is 204 which is a net gain of 96k!
Of course you still need to eat and stuff but when you check out the "Regional Price Parity" [1] you'll see that nowhere do things actually become twice as expensive. So you're really getting a 2x boost in salary in exchange for a 1.3x increase in expenses.
[1]: https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-par...
At least for me since the compensation tripled, the salary effectively doubled post-tax.
Given that the BLS puts the median programmer at 99k/yr [1] I think your salary will double if you go to the bay area.
All else being equal, the improvements in other non-financial areas (chances to grow social life, many more attractions, etc) should make up for it.
The savings gap hopefully should widen as well (unless it's a deficit, in which case, cut expenses).
Portland vs. SF vs. Nashville vs. NYC.
I would not limit yourself to just one specific big city.
You can't expect the same quality of life as you did in the lower cost cities, but it is much easier to save way more money when you have a high income, than a low income.
Salary or takehome? Sure, your net in SF will be higher than Orlando or London, but looking at resources such as levels.fyi, internal salary sharing sites at large companies, etc. the math for Seattle comp with no state income tax is pretty close to bay area minus tax.
To your second point - there are always a bunch of well capitalized startups in the valley. Today it’s AI, before it was crypto, etc. These startups pay really really well when compared nationally. You dont have to get into 500k+ faang salaries to win against other locales
On top of that there are many more private companies that also pay good base + offer liquidity events for employees. Again - orders of magnitude more than seattle, austin or even nyc
I'd love to see examples of Amazon trying to enforce noncompetes at levels lower than VP, because I've never seen it. Folks move to direct competitors all the time - AWS to Azure or Oracle, etc.
Easy[0]. I also know a few cases where a 3rd company refused to extend an offer due to legal flagging it
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7975428
> I've never seen one be competitive on actual hard currency compensation - even the hot ones
OpenAI famously was pretty generous. It’s all public data now due to lawsuits
I prefer Seattle over SF. In Seattle, I can own a car and have a safe place to park it.
I go on way more road trips and hikes than what San Francisco ever permitted. While SF has a few good hikes, it expensive to own a car (parking, insurance, break ins, ticketing).
Seattle has access to Canada, islands, mountains, snow skiing, and boating.
There are a lot of good things about living in Silicon Valley, so it's a bit annoying when people take all that for granted. I do miss being able to bike everywhere I needed in Mountain View. But I was happier after we left.
It’s a toxic mix that leads to a social death spiral.