In San Francisco, Even $180k Tech Salaries Are No Longer Enough (opens in new tab)

I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners.

I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesses want to move out of the overpriced cities. But if that's also where their employment pool and investors are, that's tricky.

UK has had the same issue. The salary gap between London and anywhere else is huge. So everyone aspiring for a high salary wants to move to London. So prices are drastically higher. And there's no rebalancing in sight.

Maybe there's space for some government regulation? Tax cuts for companies hiring in lower CoL areas? No idea. But so long as an increasing pool of people is competing for a barely growing pool of housing, it's not going to get better.

Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas.

We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plentiful affordable housing without decoupling this idea. Houses are a poor financial investment once you remove all the incentives involved like mortgage tax credits, fixed mortgage rates, and obstructive zoning rules. Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.

I always find it odd that stories like this focus on non-Eng roles.

I know it’s not universal, but IME it was very common for new CS grads to make much then what is discussed here, and far more after a few years. And this was before COVID and the AI boom.

The idea I see presented that even the highly paid tech workers at the big companies can’t afford SF is not really true.

Is that really true?

https://www.craigslist.org/search/subarea/sfc?cat=apa&max_pr...

As an AI startup founder, my impression is that $180k in the Bay Area mostly gets you new grads or relatively junior talent these days.

However, remote work has fundamentally changed the equation. Expanding hiring beyond the Bay Area, or even internationally (for example, hiring remotely from Canada), can dramatically broaden the talent pool while significantly reducing costs.