depressing, midwest software engineer here, 6 years experience 60k.
Now, I'll grant you, Palo Alto and San Mateo have a fair number of unexceptional ranch homes in this region, but it's bullshit to claim that you have to spend $1M to secure a minimally-decent family home in the Bay area.
Edit: Little bit of reality here (like $500K+ homes in San Mateo, and rentals in the $2,500-3,500/mo range): http://www.zillow.com/homes/san-mateo,-ca_rb/ http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Palo-Alto-CA/26374_rid/...
San Mateo, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, greater than 1,200 sq. feet house, greater than 2,000 sq. feet yard, built after 1980, not a foreclosure, sold in last 90 days, least expensive home... $900,000.
http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/San-Mateo-CA/fsba,fsbo,...
2) Of course you don't have to spend a million dollars to buy a place in SF if the median price is one million. Half the houses for sale obviously cost less than one million.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...
Yes, housing is expensive here. Yes, everything else is expensive, too. But it's still easily worth it. Because a lot of the things we buy -- cars, computers, cell phone plans, a european vacation -- cost the same whether you make $60k in Ohio or 2-3x that in California.
Also, while moving is never cheap, and I've never had a 100% all expenses paid including housing relo package, I have gotten the basics paid for, meaning full-service pack-and-move and other travel costs.
Remember you can always move back. When I first left Ohio, I started thinking about it in June, sent my resume to a few places in July and August. Got a call back mid august, onsite interview early september, offer a week later, a start date 5 weeks forward from that.
STL maybe in the west burbs. Not the best city, especially for a family.
Currently, if I take on a side-job a month (and I currently do that a few months of the year), I can fairly easily match my monthly salary with considerably less effort and work.
Thanks everyone for the info/advice
I think it makes no sense to compare salaries on Startups to salaries on typical engineer work in argentina. 99% of the work here is third-hand, cost-effective contractor outsourcing.
If you buy into the idea that where (and with whom) your children go to school will heavily influence their success/happiness, you'll find yourself choosing between expensive-area public schools and expensive private schools.
Most of the public schools in California are pretty crappy (and the bay area is no exception), and to get into the ones that are good (by some measure), you have to swallow either huge rent or a huge mortgage so you can live in their area.
There are some good private schools, and you don't have to live in super-expensive areas to send your kids there, but aren't there excellent private schools outside the bay area / in lower cost-of-living areas ?
For your particular situation, you may find that the math works out to stay in the midwest. Additionally, that's just the raw numbers; there are lots of "intangible" factors that favor the midwest over the bay area, especially if you have any kind of roots there.
But honestly, it seriously depends on what technologies you have experience with.
But to give you a number, you could very easily get $125k. I bet if you somehow got 100 offers, the vast majority of them would be normally distributed between $110 and $140k.
Mitigating factors: 1. The universe of companies willing to fly-in a candidate and pay for relocation is smaller, so you have less bargaining power. I was able to secure a 20% raise the first time I changed jobs here -- a year after relocating.
2. If you have impressive skills in more lucrative technologies you can certainly make more.
I talked to 2 companies in Atlanta in 2010ish (MailChimp and a smaller private company) and their salary ranges were well below that ($90-110k iirc). I'm surprised to hear it's so high!