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This is not relevant:

> The best city for software engineers was Menlo Park with an average salary of $130,640

The best city for software engineers should not determined on salary only.

If the cost of living is 10X cheaper in Huntington Beach and the average salary is $125k then the best city by far is Huntington Beach. Then again there is a lot more than salary to consider before moving to a city...

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You're right. But I had to use some metric and I thought it was interesting to show some data about cities.

As an interesting point, engineers in Menlo Park earn $30k more than in San Francisco. I'm not sure Menlo is that much more expensive to live in.

Remember that Facebook is the largest employer in Menlo Park by a factor of about 10, which will totally skew those rankings.

Edit: to be more clear, I'm making two points. Firstly, Facebook is not known for the sort of Tata/Infosys style abusive H1b (and there'll be almost none of them in Menlo Park) whilst SF is much larger, and there could easily be such a company with an office in SF.

Furthermore, the bar for entry to work as an engineer at Facebook is possibly higher than in SF as a whole.

Good point, would be interesting to see a comparison with cost of living included.

May further want to account for income tax laws according to state. Take-home pay is really what we're after.

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