I have lived in Austin for a couple of years, and also lived here (and owned a house here) about 8 years ago. The cost of homes here has gone up tremendously since then. I was shopping for a house a few months ago, and was simply unable to buy one; those in my price range wouldn't accept my offer because it wasn't an all-cash offer (despite being $5000 or more over the asking price). Investors paying cash are buying aggressively here, driving up prices. Rental rates have risen at an even faster pace.
Certainly, it's cheaper here than in Silicon Valley. Five years ago, I was paying $2145 a month in rent for a house a couple of blocks from downtown Mountain View. Today I'm paying $1690 a month for a house quite far outside of downtown Austin and on the east side; renting in downtown is not an option, even at $2000+ a month. Apartments are somewhat cheaper, and buying a house is still notably cheaper than Silicon Valley, but the gap has been closing rapidly.
In short, Austin has grown incredibly fast in recent years, and the real estate market hasn't been able to absorb that growth in anything like a reasonable manner. So much so that I'd be shocked if the graphs in this article still reflect reality for Austin.
While Yes, housing costs have moved up, others have remained flat (so relatively compared to other cities, have moved down).
As silly as it sounds, my favorite metric is "Cost of Drinking". Find the fancy cocktail bars in any city's downtown. In Austin, nothing on the menu is above $12 at Midnight Cowboy or The Garage. Now compare that to the other cities on this list.
There is absolutely not way that the data is accurate, just alone the velocity of the Austin market guarantees that the data is inaccurate.
I dunno if that's a great metric - or maybe it is and Austin's more expensive than you and I think. Cocktails at Gramercy Tavern are $14.
By any metric I can think of, Austin costs more than it did even three years ago. All of my favorite restaurants are $2-$3 more for an entree than they were when I lived here in the past. And some have been priced out of downtown. Thai Passion (my favorite Thai restaurant anywhere which used the have a $5.75 lunch special) closed recently, and they aren't alone.
Again, it isn't California expensive but it's no longer Texas cheap either.
That said, you can't get a $2 Shiner Bock here.
If you consider sqft of home/land, amenities and distance to highly rated schools, Austin can be 10x less expensive, and it's easy to show examples of this.
Unlike SV though, if you go a few miles outside south Austin there are plenty of affordable homes in good neighborhoods. They may not be as hip or convenient, but at least they exist.
If you define the "cool" part of NYC as being in Manhattan, once you have a family it's irrelevant, because you can't live there... like 98% of everyone else, you end up in Jersey, the boroughs, or Long Island. Three hours north of NYC, a house costs 60-80% less, and you have the essentially the same access to NYC cool stuff without the hassle of NYC.
In my case, paying 7% of income for a mortgage on a nice big house that I will own in 15-20 years and banking savings is more appealing than some interest only loan on a $750k raised ranch in a big metro area. Barring building a successful business, a lottery-style liquidity event or selling your soul to some hedge fund, I don't see a reliable way to live in NYC, SFO, etc and coming out with any wealth.
I have a few friends at Google who, after working there for close to 10 years, now are thinking about retiring to Portland, or Vermont, or North Carolina. The idea has certainly crossed my mind, that if I wanted to live in a rural area I could buy a house free & clear and be set for the rest of my life. I met an innkeeper in Alaska once that had worked in tech for 20 years, lived like a grad student, and when his kid was a teenager, bought a sailboat, sailed around the world, and came to settle in Seward, Alaska because they'd fallen in love with the town. I've heard it's pretty common in investment banking to have "your number", work for ~10 years until you hit it, and then retire to Fiji.
Don't try to settle in the NY metro w/ a family unless you are in finance, your quality of life will suck. If you aren't living in the city there's no point to being here, I would much rather be somewhere like Utah, California, Wash state.
You really don't need to go that far. In fact, you shouldn't. You'll hit Lake George and the prices will start to go back up.
An hour or two out and you'll be closer and the houses are just as cheap. You can also go West into NJ and you'll experience the same price drop.
The problem is that you'll be 30 min away driving from a decent grocery store. In fact, you'll be 30 min away driving from pretty much everything.
I don't understand this. If you're pre-qualified for a $500,000 dollar loan how is your offer worse than someone willing to pay $495,000 cash?
I'm scare quoting "cash" because what is really happening most of the time is the cash represents investor pools of already-fronted, already-loaned-out sums; it's only the minority of "all cash" offers that are actually an individual investor writing out unencumbered checks (and even then, that check is still somewhat encumbered by future flip profit expectations). Really what is happening is you are seeing competition between de facto loans already-made and turned into ready cash, and loan promises.
With a cash offer, once a title search is performed (a few days assuming no liens), the owners and buyers can swap keys and a check. If the seller wants cash sooner than later, this can be very attractive; for example, he or she may well be bidding on another house and need to make a deposit or down payment.
And not to point out the obvious, but five years ago was rock bottom for this nation's economy (and housing market). I don't think that's a fair comparison, even if it is Mountain View v. Austin.
Want a 700 sq ft studio in Manhattan for $3k/month? Great. Want a 2000 sq ft ranch home next to a river out in the country with your own garden? Done. Want to just save as much as you can, with a cheap apartment in a cheap town outside a cheap city? You got it. Maybe you even want that $600k suburban McMansion to raise your family in. That's not a problem either.
Most readers are probably going to prefer urban environments, but that's because the demographic of software developers is somewhat self-selecting. When it's nearly impossible to get a job as a developer not in an urban environment, people who don't like urban cities are going to self-select out of the profession. The high achievers among them will instead choose to become doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. -- careers that aren't so location restricted, despite ironically being far less amenable to remote work. I had some really smart and hard-working friends growing up, and all chose to go into careers of that nature simply because they didn't want to be forced to move to a big city.
If something like this seems obvious to you, and obviously a lot of smart people are acting in the opposite way, maybe you should re-consider your assumptions.
In reality, online communication tools currently are a poor proxy for in-person communication in many situations. Online tools do not pick up the array of non-verbal cues humans make when talking to one another, are not stereoscopic, do not allow freedom of motion, do not permit the collaborative use of 3d space, etc. They are a piss poor real time communication medium compared to an in-person conversation in a room with whiteboards. If you can never actually have a face to face conversation with someone on your team, there's an entire dimension to communication you are completely prevented from ever experiencing with that person.
However I find that the amount of "heads down" work I get done is greatly diminished when I'm in an office. And, much worse, there's a lot of noise in that added communication of being in the office. Remote teams, in my experience, have dramatically less "office politics".
Office space is great for communicating "big ideas" but these aren't anywhere near the bulk of communications being had. For most of the communications needs of software remote works fine (in my experience better).
I work on a quite a few "big idea" projects and I've found the best solution is to visit the office quarterly, get all the big idea brainstorming done, then scurry off to my remote office where I'm not distracted by office politics and can just get things done. A little face time goes a long way, and annual, or semi-annual all hands meetups can do wonders at filling in the gaps created on remote teams.
In particular, I think distributed teams work best when a) people already have strong relationships built via plenty of in-person interaction, b) they meet regularly in person, and c) the nature of the work is relatively predictable.
There's definitely some work like that, but early-stage startups benefit a great deal from in person communication, which is high bandwidth, low latency, and very high quality.
I'd prefer private offices to remote distributed work. But I find it's actually easier to find remote jobs than software companies that make an effort to provide private offices.
I have my suspicions that it actually has to do with tax code and incentives to have corporate offices in expensive locations, but that's just an untested theory I have at the moment.
We do, sometimes hear from them:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134592
I currently work at bootstrapped, distributed and profitable startup.
This year we did appx $15mm in rev.
http://www.inc.com/profile/buysellads (member of the Inc. 500)
Maybe it's the term I'm looking, but look through this: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=distributed%20bootstrapped&sor...
As you scroll down try to piece together the story you're seeing. Click through to the companies. As I read it, hiring seems to be one of their biggest challenges. They're just not growing as much as they would like.
18 people in an office can build a $1 billion company with 10 million+ users in 18 months. (instagram.)
What's the closest a distributed team has come to that?
IME, not everyone has equal experience using those tools. It's WAY easier to do a cubicle fly-by than to train your non-technical workforce how Skype works (if that sounds crazy, trust me - it's not).
I work mostly remotely, but I care deeply about communication. I've invested in a great headset so calls aren't plagued by WFH artifacts. I have a cough button. I have a dedicated office in my house. I get up, showered, and dressed every day so I'm online and ready for an ad-hoc video call at all business hours. My internet is fast and stable, and I have two backups in the very rare case it goes down (iPhone tether, Verizon hotspot).
In sum, I don't want my convenience (wfh) to inconvenience anyone else, so I do everything I can to make that the case. It's worked out really well so far. But I can tell you, most developers don't go through the hassle.
The irony about tech being so adverse to remote work is pretty thick, at least that's what my friends in other sectors who work remote with no problem tell me. Even companies who build tools to enable remote work often don't embrace it themselves.
I would say I'm pretty against distributed teams at the moment. Would you mind elaborating on the value of them?
Or to put it another way, almost every recruiter e-mail I respond to states that I am not interested in relocating (usually to the bay area). Requiring all of your employees to sit in the same building is not just old fashioned, it misses out on talent that chooses to live elsewhere.
Until that awesome employer has layoffs and your options get really limited out in Nowhere, UT.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
This is laughable, have you ever lived in NYC?
GA tech is releasing very high quality engineers and the startup scene here is great (Mailchimp and many others), and you live in a frikin mansion 10 minutes commute to work (if you live in Alpharetta). Tons of technical meetups and both thriving startup scene and established enterprise presence.
West coast based companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon et al keep trying to offer me jobs in SF like it's obvious that this is where I would want to move, I really don't understand why they don't open offices in Alpharetta. Dead cheap office space, great talent pool, and if you ask me - awesome weather. and they will have to pay me 50% less than what they would in SF, and I won't have to switch my 3,500 square feet house (which is 10-20 minute drive to a myriad of tech companies) with a 2 bedroom and an hour commute to work
Yeah, but then you have to live in Alpharetta. Would be nice to see more jobs ITP. I currently work for a large enterprise company, at an office in Roswell (our office was moved here from Alpharetta a few months before I started) and I see lots of people (including me) commuting up. I'm coming up 400 the whole way so it's not too horrible. But I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who have to use the east side of 285 (we have lots of people who live in or near Decatur) work from home a lot. Still, it beats living in San Francisco... I actually moved here from SF when my wife and I realized there was no way we could afford to settle down there.
Not so great if you are a young couple before having kids and want to have some city action, I agree... I think that most ITP jobs are more tending toward younger startups, Rails, Python etc. Alpharetta is much more enterprise / Java / .NET, funny how your tech stack needs to change dramatically based on where you choose to live...
I actually think the cooler jobs are midtown ;)
The other data I'd like to see is distribution of non-salaried incomes -- bonuses and equity. I have the feeling that SF and SV are the only places where you have a realistic shot of working for a company for 4-6 years and coming away a millionaire.
In other places, it'd be base salary, maybe a bonus, and that's it. For life. And if you ever have ambitions to start your own startup, would you want to be in Atlanta?
The keyword is "if". Employers in places that say they're lower cost of living are more reluctant to pay the high developer salaries that one gets elsewhere.
If you can put up with the car culture - which you have to if you want to live outside of NYC or Chicago - Raleigh is a great city. Very low cost of living, a burgeoning downtown night-life and cultural scene, and very warm, likable people. Austin has a much better downtown, but I'd be concerned about traffic moving there, which is not a problem (yet) for Raleigh.
As someone who went from 100% car culture to 100% no car culture, the best is having some walkability, a train to take you to work and back, and a car for weekend errands and road trips. When we all have kids we're going to want cars, too. Both extremes suck.
I've been carless in Boston (technically cambridge and somerville) for 15 years now and it's not at all been an issue.
I'm not some wackadoo outlier either, I know tons of people like myself.
Having to own a car is a deal-breaker.
On a software developer's salary, you'll get by regardless of what city you live in, so you should be choosing the city which suits your personality and your stage of life.
Related -- I believe the distinction between "engineer" vs "developer" being discussed here lately is less relevant than people think. Many people choose their own title when reporting information on sites used as sources in the article and companies may choose to post job listings using a completely different title. Even if the data could be traced back to an actual official title at each company, a large well-paying (or low-paying) company in a particular city could skew the entire number based upon whether they randomly refer to their employees as developers, programmers, or engineers internally. Similarly, a social trend to prefer "engineer" could skew all the anonymous reporting on these sites but actually had no bearing whatsoever in how salaries are determined. Given the noise in the data, I don't see how distinctions can be drawn from the outside.
Let's take me as an example: I manage to live modestly but well on around 1000 CHF (1050 USD) in Zurich while making around 6400 CHF (6700 USD) in net-salary. I am a junior software engineer hacking on Python in a SMB.
(Full disclosure: My company is hiring; feel free to reach out to me at iwang{at}fastmail.net. Also, my experiences working in Switzerland can be found here: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" http://goo.gl/EIX4UX)
Well it's a base to work from. If it costs, on average X for Y things, and you know you are happy with about half of Y, then it'll still be cheaper to live in Cyanide Springs, Oklahoma, than in central London.
The idea of the average adjustments is to get a general idea of the cost of living.
If you insist on renting a nice 2bd aparment, you can do so for 2500 CHF in Zurich-city. If you move just slightly out of town, prices drop. I live on the southern end of town and my company is in the north. It takes me only 35 min to go through the whole city (Zurich is rather small).
In my opinion, cost-of-living averages give a misleading idea because people mentally give "cost of living" equal weight as to net-salary.
Although my life in Zurich costs more than my life in Munich, the ridiculous-high salaries and excellent working-conditions (I pay only 16% as taxes) make me feel that I win the lottery each and every month on pay-day. However, in case of sickness I would probably take a day off work and go to Germany (45 min trip) to go to the doctor there as doctors in Zurich also earn double as much.
Moved away from crowded Berlin, no regrets.
I suspect Berlin would compare quite favorably, despite the relatively high German tax rate. I moved there 18 months ago and currently pay €500 ($565) for a one-bedroom apartment in a nice part of town (Prenzlauer Berg). In San Francisco, I paid 5X that for a studio apartment in Hayes Valley.
From my experience, this is what makes Berlin less attractive than people think (at the financial level):
- low engineer / developer salaries compared to other German cities. - rent prices are growing a LOT faster than salaries, my last appartment outside of the city center (the "Ring") cost almost 900€ a month, plus electricity. - public transportation is not that good (especially in winter) and quite expensive relative to the avg. salary (about 80€ if you live in the AB zones, 100€ for ABC). - high taxes, though this is a common problem in Germany. - food is cheap, but not cheaper than in other German cities with better avg. salaries. - if you own a car, prepare for extremely high insurance and taxes
Obviously, Berlin has its own perks, besides the known ones like night-life and openness of the people, it has a really huge demand for engineers and a vibrant startup scene.
Anecdotally, salaries are lower and rent higher as compared with both NY and San Francisco. Taxes are obviously higher as well.
edit the software market is pretty hot up in DC/North Virginia too
Salary/COL is typically high in the bigger SE metros from what I've observed growing up in the region.
But overall, you're really paying for the job security of people in very different fields than you, and you will spend your off-hours surrounded by lawyers and gov't employees. I don't recommend it, but YMMV of course.
Also in NOVA you're paying for some of the best public middle/high schools in the country, which I don't care about yet but if I had kids would be something to factor.
The cost of living here is basically impossible to beat.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend the city of Memphis, but I wouldn't dissuade anyone from living here either.
The 'burbs here are indistinguishable from the 'burbs anywhere else. Within the city there are certain neighborhoods that are very bike/walker friendly. We have Shelby Farms, which is an urban park 5 times larger than Central Park.
Memphis also has a lot of crime. In the poorest neighborhoods that manifests as gang-related violent crime. In the rest of the city we deal with a higher than average rate of property theft. Get a big dog (or a small dog with a big bark) and lock your doors and you'll be fine.
Overall I love the city and I want to be here as it begins to recover from decades of mismanagement and overt racism.
Me: Where are the charts themselves?
Me: Oh, I'm using noscript.
Me: Displaying PNGs now requires javascript.
- glassdoor.com ( avg $74,426 ) [3]
- salary.com ( median $62,257 ) [4]
- indeed.com ( avg $114,000 ) [5]
Even when verified by converting the par salaries from 2 different locations using bankrate or wolframalpha the indeed estimates were quite high. Since, the author used data from glassdoor and indeed, I wonder how accurate the analysis is considering the underlying data from indeed isn't necessarily accurate.
[1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+seattle...
[3] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/chicago-software-engineer-...
[4] http://www1.salary.com/IL/Chicago/Software-Developer-I-salar...
[5] http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Software-Engineer-l-Chicago,-...
Personally, with 10 years of experience, if I was to move to Chicago right now, I would expect to make more than $114k due to the highish cost of living. There's no way in hell I'd move anywhere to make $74k, let alone $62k per year.
Also, the chart that takes taxes into account is really cool. Super useful. People who move from Seattle to California know that cost of living is a big difference, but they don't properly account for state income tax! They often try to, but get the math wrong.
It's hardly a technical wasteland either, historically or economically. Utah was the 3rd or 4th node on what became the internet. Alan Kay began research on what he would later call "object oriented programming" at the University of Utah.
In the startup world Utah is number 7 when it comes to venture funding http://siliconslopes.com/blog/2015/01/19/utah-ranks-7th-nati.... Personally, I've spent time working for a google venture funded Utah based startup.
I've had multiple offers to relocate to areas like Sydney, Las Vegas, Seattle and they've never been able to beat Utah's salary to cost of living ratio.
Also, having the world's best snowboarding and mountain biking is a perk for some of us.
Of course the one thing that beats working for a Utah company and living in Utah is working remotely for Bay Area company and living in Utah. Win/Win.
Texas has no income tax but very high property taxes at ~3% per year of home value. So a 350k house will add ~$900/month on top of a mortgage.
SV has a much lower rate but you'll probably pay more than Texas in absolute terms because 350k houses do not exist there.
Colorado is a nice balance. Home prices in between SV and Texas, but one of the lowest property tax rates in the country.
I see averages of $100K/year for developers and then keep hearing of freelancers raking $150-$200/hour ($300K/year).
How can this be ?
Taxes/etc are a different issue on top of that, but a freelancer should expect to work many hours at a high rate, and many hours at the rate of $0/hour.
Freelancers have to charge higher rates because of lack of benefits and because they can charge $200 per hour and still be cheaper than me. Freelancers have cost that aren't directly passed on in an employee relationship. You're also assuming all freelancers have 40 hours of work each week, which is probably unlikely. Now you have me dreaming of working 20 hours a week and making what I make now. Hell, I'd like to get to 6 figures in my 50+ hour per week corporate job.
Naturally, the range for freelancers varies much more widely, with the most active freelancers making serious money, and the least just scraping by.
I live in a suburb of Portland, (Hillsboro) and I live a perfectly decent life making about $44,000 a year before taxes. I'm also young and don't have kids, but I would happily commute half an hour into Portland if I had a job in the city. It's not that bad of a drive as long as it isn't during rush hour.
I discount the CoL "bonus" because of the generally poorer environment with respect to culture, public institutions like libraries and parks, and educational opportunities. I grew up and lived in the south for most of my life. With precious few exceptions I found it to be mainly a canvas upon which the bigoted (race, gender, sex orientation) and extreme anti-government types painted most of the landscape. You could give me 100% of my current salary/year tax-free in a high-yield/low-risk investment account and I wouldn't move back to one of those places. I may have considered it before I had kids, but not now.
Things used to be a lot worse, just ten years ago. Winder was a crumbling, traffic-choked hole. It's less crumbly now, and the traffic situation is improving. And the editor of the local paper didn't get run out of town when he endorsed marriage equality, so there's that.
Also there are many people who are permanent and pay Thai taxes.
Main comments on that one were the difference between software developer and engineer's salary, but also requests for the real cost of living. This addresses the latter.
There seem to be a lot of cities that offer good talent with a great cost of living - sort of cities poised for a breakout. I wonder what kind of critical mass you have to have in other areas - i.e. concentration of tech talent, infrastructure, educational resources, etc... to really be a great tech community?
That's why you see municipalities failing at becoming "the next Silicon Valley" so often. It's not impossible for new tech hubs to form, but it's not as easy as you'd think by looking at CoL.
Really? Last I looked self-reported numbers tend to be _inflated_ compared to govt collected figures (from tax returns and payroll reports). My intuitive understanding of this is that people being underpaid tend to not want to brag about it, even anonymously.
Then I can't figure out what the incentive to inflate your salary would be when reporting it to glassdoor unless companies are doing it themselves.
You are probably underpaid.
For some reason i was expecting Denver to be a bit higher on that list in terms of salaries.
The difference is supposed to be that an engineer works more in the design of software than the developer, who works more on the implementation. In reality, the difference is rarely that concrete and generally the two are interchangeable for many people in the middle of the overall bell curve.
1.5 hrs/day * 5 days/week * 50 weeks/year * $80/hr = $30,000/year. Obviously those numbers are fudged in a bunch of places, but maybe it's not so crazy to spend $300k extra to avoid the commute?
That said there are a lot of amenities (museums, shows, groups, &c) and things-to-do, so we're not as isolated and dull as a lot of people I've met feel we are.
And parts of Texas are very nice.
So, I'd guess that there are a lot of high-paying full-time software jobs in New York (and Chicago) where the title is something like "Vice President, Technology" or "Quant Trader".