Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco or Silicon Valley but still the group somehow want to have Silicon Valley salaries. Why use the most expensive place on earth as a benchmark?
And yet, tech firms still try locate themselves in the most expensive parts of the world: San Francisco, and Palo Alto. There's so many tech hubs other than SF, where they could hire talent for less than half as much, but they choose not to.
The article states the cost of living is 41% higher. That's a large underestimation. In Palo Alto and SF, the average house prices (keep in mind these are mostly dilapidated tiny lot and barely livable) for 400% to 700% higher than the national average.
Taking into account the cost of living, I'm surprised that bay area salaries and compensation are not increasing more than it already has.
Eh that reasoning is weird but the location based income just makes sense to me. Do we really expect everyone to make silicon-valley salaries when they don’t live in such ridiculously expensive areas?
This forum almost certainly skews heavily towards people in Silicon Valley or working at Bay Area companies. AKA the very highest earning people in tech.
Perhaps the question is why the Bay Area is the golden standard here? Half the salary would make you top 10% earners in almost all other places in the world, but because the salary is paid at SF levels all the "poorer" users have to step up and match the SF expectation? I couldn't find where Henry lives, but this setup allows him to go live anywhere he wants.
I'm also unconvinced by the "most popular tool" argument. Sure a huge amount of people make use of babel, but it's only a (very) small part of the complete tech stack an average company would need. I.e. database, frameworks, other programming languages, nodejs, deployment and management tools, the underlying OS; there are dozens of dependencies that are critical nowadays, all which need to share the available donation pool.
Yep, really good points. Basically, the Bay Area is a land unto itself and assuming tech salaries in other parts of the country/world should be at comparable levels isn't really realistic.
You're suggesting that SF salaries are high purely because a small number of the companies in the area make billions of dollars in profits, and the rest are just playing "Keeping up with the Jones" on salaries?
You think it has nothing at all to do with ridiculous cost of living caused by a massive influx of workers, in turn caused by an almost cult-like obsession with a particular geographic location funded by billions upon billions of other peoples money?
Housing costs in Silicon Valley are insane, which prices out lower skill workers and forces companies to pay more for highly skilled workers.
It also reduces the quality of life for those who do live in Silicon Valley, because the salary rises almost never entirely make up for the rise in land prices.
(Yes, I've used salary calculators, particularly to compare the Bay Area's and Boston's software engineering salaries to places like Portland and Seattle that are cheaper but still have lots of tech.)
Most Silicon Valley companies produce products or services whose revenue does not scale with the cost of living in the area. Yet they pay their employees a lot more than in most parts of the world and they pay a hell of a lot more for office space. Contrary to what is written very frequently here by SV dwellers, it is actually not common for fresh graduates to get six figure salaries--only in Silicon Valley and NYC.
The terrible irony of it is that the over-abundance of high salaries has led to those salaries meaning practically nothing; there have been plenty of threads here on how people can barely afford 1br apartments in San Francisco while still saving for retirement and living a comfortable life, etc. Salaries for very senior folks become so massively inflated due to the cost of living--sometimes in the $200k+ range--that very few startups can afford to hire even just a few of these guys. If they were in a cheaper area where a top salary, rather than a starting salary, was $120k, though, then they'd be in a much better position to hire a range of employees in terms of experience and age.
According to the "salary buying power" section, Silicon Valley's cost of living is 23% higher than that of NYC. Having lived in both, I'd be very surprised if that's not actually the wrong way around.
Those of us subject to the wage competition in silicon valley make wages many times higher than the minimum wage. We're talking an order of magnitude more money. Competition in silicon valley does shit all for the people on the lower end of the wage scale in the bay area.
These numbers really make my mind boggle. Not only is it that the salaries are high for the tech industry (not saying too high, simply high), but from my recent interviewing experience, it seems that Silicon Valley bumps up the price for most engineers, data scientists etc. compared to other start-up cities/areas. Does someone know if this simply down to the concentration of start-ups and access to funding in the Bay Area or is there something else that causes the salaries to be so markedly higher than else where?
If I understand correctly, all this fuss is about a 1.5% tax on wages. If so, it seems nonsensical: settling in the Silicon Valley costs much more than that, yet companies still prefer to settle there than in the rust belt or in Europe. There is a significant advantage in being in the SF area, and companies already evaluate this advantage to much, much more than 1.5% of payroll.
Now I understand that big companies try to pretend otherwise, so that they can scare the city and save these 1.5% for themselves, but don't take this for anything other than BS.
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