Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

I remember once meeting an old high school friend in NYC. He was hanging out at one of those non-descript but unfathomably loud bars. Some of his coworkers stopped by. The conversation switched to the car one of them had bought. A Lexus SC430 convertible. He was complaining about how he never got to get out of The City and drive it enough. They were all super-sharp CS graduates working for one of the most successful hedge funds in the world.

My point with this story is that if you are making way above the median salary in NYC ($200k+ range at the time, this was 10 years ago) - the world is just different. You are making enough money to enjoy one of the top cities in the world. With the $125k-$140k salaries some software developers report making, they are barely getting to "enjoy" living in NYC. Finance has distorted the baseline of what it means to be successful in NYC. I mean, my school friends' coworkers were 2-3 yrs out of Harvard and talking about the travails of $80k car ownership like it was an Accord.

Software salaries outside of Fintech and top-tier companies like Google and Facebook and a handful of others in globally attractive cities are the equivalent of middle class in the burbs. You're doing OK but you're not going to be relatively 'really doing well'. In a city like NYC, there are more than enough free events to overwhelm anyone. However, in San Jose, what do you do? Hang out on the Palo Alto main drag?

Check out the size of the dogs being walked near Central Park. Where do these people live?!

> Check out the size of the dogs being walked near Central Park. Where do these people live?!

True, it's NYC is an expensive place to try and mix in all of the creature comforts of suburban life. The big dog, the fancy car, lots of square footage of living space. And to young kids, just out of college, who've never known anything other than suburban living before moving to NYC, these may seem like "baseline necessities" that you have to sacrifice in order to live here.

Once you accept that the baselines of city living are different from the baselines of suburban life, things get a lot simpler (and cheaper).

If there are developers unable to "enjoy" living in NYC at a $125-$140k base salary, then that's on them. Plenty of single people love life here on salaries of $45-60k, and are even able to save money.

> Finance has distorted the baseline of what it means to be successful in NYC.

This is obviously only if you try to keep up with them and the other Joneses. There are too many people here. Nobody notices if you don't have a dog, or a car, or a big apartment.

I own a place in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn, don't want for much, and provide for my family all on a way less than Google/Finance salary. I think that's a perfectly fine definition of success.

I took his point to be the opposite--that in expensive cities in general, the typical 'burbian metrics of success (big house, big dog, big car) are unattainable, but at least in NYC there is a lot of other things you can enjoy, much more so than in SJ.

>> "Plenty of single people love life here on salaries of $45-60k, and are even able to save money."

Here's some anecdata: I lived like a king on my $30,000 grad student stipend for years in Manhattan. And maxed out my IRA every year at the same time. The trick is just to get an apartment somewhere uncool, then you're rich.

Where in Manhattan did you live?

I'm going to guess Washington Heights.

Total total non-sequitor.

Really long and good article about Lin-Manuel Miranda who had a hit Broadway musical about Washington Heights.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/hamiltons

Yup, Hamilton Heights in fact. Price per square foot as a function of latitude is a pretty flat curve for a long distance north of 125th, so there's no reason to go into the extra deep boonies to save money. I was on 139th on the West side.

San Jose is not hurting for nearby recreation oppurtunities, though you often need a car to access them. On the other hand, try a city with hot/humid southern weather like Atlanta or even Dallas or Huston...there is a reason they have high obesity rates.

I wonder if Uber 2025 will ever be cheap enough to make not having a car in the burbs almost a mandatory requirement.

Last time I was in the area my aunt took me to the Los Gatos creek trail.

Like someone else commented, cities are not fungible. Maybe Richard Florida is right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida

Given all the other costs in California, having a car is pretty cheap; you could easily support one on minimum wage.

That said, if you can bike or take transit to work, the cost of owning, maintaining, and insuring a $5000 used car to go hiking and surfing isn't very significant.

>With the $125k-$140k salaries some software developers report making, they are barely getting to "enjoy" living in NYC.

This is laughable, have you ever lived in NYC?

It sounds like they were trying to enjoy suburbia in NYC. Why in the world would you buy a luxury car here? As the anecdote points out, you're never going to drive the damn thing anywhere fun.

While the anecdote is interesting, for a couple of years I was happy living in New York while earning around $45K. If I'd played the finance game (I also have degree from a top-ranking CS program) I could have earned five times that. But I also know myself enough to know that route would have left me much less happy.

Meanwhile, living in the 'burbs' is the cultural equivalent of living in Siberia as far as I'm concerned. I spent < $20k last year and had a great time in New York.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com