Don't get me wrong, that's still way too expensive; but your exaggeration is _way_ off the mark.
Apologies, I saw "A West Coast software engineering career [...and...] a house from which you could reasonably commute to it" and assumed they meant San Francisco, which is accurate for me (I live in Berkeley, and my office is in the FiDi of SF). I had thought that the Bay Area was both more expensive and more tech-centric than SoCal, but I could be wrong there.
> You make >500k a year and still live in a pretty small house then
Just under 300k, but yeah - it's 3 bed 2 bath, so not huge but not tiny either. And I've saved enough over the ~5 years of living here to be looking at building a 3-4 room extension onto it into the yard next year.
> And if so, like basically no one in the united states?
Again, I didn't claim that my situation is a) typical, or b) ideal - housing in the Bay Area is far too expensive, and it's perfectly valid and reasonable to prefer living elsewhere for any number of reasons. I'm just pointing out that /u/closeparen's statement was a _wild_ exaggeration (if they did indeed mean Bay Area like I assumed and not SoCal. If they did, I have no data to contribute!)
Alameda County is cheaper because the commute to South Bay and to S.F. destinations not near BART is unreasonable. If you’re willing to rule out those jobs you might be able to get away closer to $1.5m at $120k/year.
I’m guessing you bought with a 3% mortgage and before the COVID asset price takeoff.
Another way to look at it is that for each $100m of company value created, you’re looking at perhaps $20m of employee equity, or about 10 employees being able to buy homes (before taxes) if the equity were distributed evenly.
there are many other cities in the us that likewise have a great tech scene. The bay is not unique - it has a little more but it isn't unique-
People are nice, but everyone who I ever interacted with in stores or outside of work was from somewhere else. The natives just weren’t up for making friends or casual conversation.
Despite the cold, Winters in Minneapolis are 100 times better than winters in Chicago.
Food in Minneapolis can’t hold a candle to Chicago or New York.
Public transportation barely works even if you have a government job where you can leave exactly the same time everyday. You still need a car for everything else.
You really can’t compare it to a tech hub, or even a major city like NYC or Chicago. It’s just a different league.
I miss the twin cities quite a lot and will likely eventually move back - but definitely not for professional reasons or the opportunity to expand my exposure to cultural diversity.
Living in both a few mid tier cities like MSP and a major “real” city comparing them is pretty tone deaf to me. Calling public transit even usable in Minneapolis is a joke - and I lived without a car for over 20 years there taking it every day. Not even a comparison to a large city with a rapid transit network.
The Bay Area may have fallen off since I’ve been there, but the tech density even 10 years ago gave opportunity for career growth that Minneapolis simply did not remotely have. If you were a super star developer doing Internet things in the early to mid 2000s you left a lot of money on the table by not being willing to move.
Personally, I had to leave because the pizza out there is unbearable but damn I miss the bay area weather.
When the sky turned orange in 2020, my wife and I were just done. Also, there's something to be said for living in a place with four seasons, and a sense of time passing by.
Additionally, Silicon Valley in particular benefits from having multiple companies in overlapping specialties. Suppose I’m a GPU expert working for NVIDIA, and suddenly I hit a setback and it’s time for a new job. Well, Apple is just a few miles away, and Apple makes GPUs and NPUs, and so I’d have a shot at working for Apple.
Contrast that with people living in areas with little diversity among tech companies. For example, Intel recently laid off a ton of engineers working near Portland, Oregon. There are few alternative technical employers in the region, especially in the specialties Intel focused on in Portland. Those laid-off engineers are facing the prospects of pivoting to a different tech specialty with more employment opportunities, competing for remote jobs at a time when so many companies are requiring their employees to return to the office, or relocating from Portland, which is massively disruptive and can potentially be very expensive. Some may be forced to retire early.
Silicon Valley may be insanely expensive and ultra-competitive, but it also has critical mass, which is vital for highly-specialized engineers and researchers.
for the intel emplopees I doupt there is anyone else in the us who needs them. Maybe one or two to a military contactor but most have to find a new spectialty. I wish them luck. Fortunately specalists are mostly easy to retrain.