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Comment by monkey_slap | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently interviewing for a position in SF that will likely be a dream job, but as a midwesterner, the rent situation terrifies me. Salaries certainly seem to be inflated because of this, which is fine, but could anyone offer some insight or precautions about moving to SF at this time?

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If you want to live in San Francisco proper without paying a terrifying amount, try looking at some neighborhoods that are not the same places where everyone wants to live (Mission, SOMA, Lower Haight, North Beach, NOPA, etc). The Inner Richmond or Sunset are good picks if you don't mind having a 20-30 minute commute. Still expensive, but not as bad as the aforementioned neighborhoods. Those can easily be $2k per person if you are signing a new lease and not moving in with someone with rent control.

If you want some substantial space for $2k or under, I would look at the East Bay exclusively.

Be prepared to be shocked either way.

I've been doing some browsing and I'm preparing to have to pony up $2.5k-$3k, but it just seems crazy. Commuting is fine as long as I can avoid driving (bike or Caltrain). And a neighborhood with things I can walk to. I don't need to be in the center of SF, so I've been looking around the Redwood area.

Do you mean Redwood City? That's a 1.5 hour Caltrain commute each way if you work in downtown SF. for $2.5k per month you should be able to do a lot better, and avoid the life-sucking commute.

I'd be in Palo Alto

I take that route quite often. Baby bullet is 35 minutes, and full-stop non-express train is about 70 minutes.

Also note that, if you're commuting to the east part of the city (Soma, Fidi, etc.), it's worth researching commute times. To get to Powell station, the commutes are probably fairly similar from Sunset/Richmond and from Oakland/Berkeley.

I have a friend who recently moved to SF. The tip someone gave him was basically to not take anything less than $150K for a salary.

And be sure to get a big raise every year, to cover your 25% annual rent increase.

Only 28 out of 638 startups on AngelList in San Francisco list software engineering jobs at over $150k.

https://angel.co/jobs?utm_source=home_gs#find/f!%7B%22locati...

There's a growing gap between people who know how to negotiate and position and people who do not. Despite heavy competition for talent it's still easy for an experienced, capable engineer to make "only" $120K in SF.

If you really have the chops, and know how to stick to your guns and position yourself in negotiations, companies are willing to break the $150K barrier (even the $200K barrier). They're simply hoping you're not smart enough to know how.

This includes not advertising the fact that they're willing to go above that barrier.

That's because startups aren't interested in paying market rate. They're interested in paying below-market rate plus the lottery ticket known as "equity." AngelList companies are especially amusing in that regard (I saw compensation packages as low as $60,000 + 1%-5% "equity" at one point in the last year). They're okay for a single person or the rare "family person" with no debts from college or misfortunes in life. They're otherwise not good choices for employment. Of the companies in your list, I seriously doubt more than 2-3 of them would ever hire near the top of the listed salary ranges.

Fortunately they aren't the only choices. I work at a pretty big and well known company (not Google, Facebook, or the like). My salary is about what you list, and I'd hazard a guess that I could get something comparable by hinting at the army of recruiters around here I'd be interested in changing jobs, while avoiding startups.

The reality is that for the value even average software developers bring to the companies they work for, the average salary for the average developer in the SF Bay area ought to be at least $150,000/year. Top notch engineers and computer scientists working on cutting- or bleeding-edge systems and research ought to be north of $200,000 on average.

I was offered $150K for an SFO job a long time ago, but didn't consider it because at the time a 3-bedroom house next to a freeway was $900K. Now that house would be north of $2 million.

If the office is within walking distance of MUNI rail stops, you can expand your search to more inexpensive areas of the city (like Outer Sunset). If within walking distance of BART, you can expand to even more affordable areas in the East Bay (like Berkeley, Oakland, or further out).

The only thing I can say is that the salary makes up for it. The pay rate here is enough to survive, at a minimum. If you're making less than 80K and want to be more than paycheck to paycheck, you may want to think about living in the East Bay instead.

This is an interesting attitude.

It basically sounds like "Come work at your dream job, where you competed in a global talent pool to get, for employers that conspire to suppress wages, where you can't actually buy any real estate, and we will pay you just enough to survive"

That's an interesting way to look at it..

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