Younger employees probably have less space. Apartment/house shares, etc.
I've known some who are working on their bed. This isn't healthy nor is it likely to be conducive to productivity.
I've known some who are working on their bed. This isn't healthy nor is it likely to be conducive to productivity.
As a "younger" (30 year old) tech employee, in addition to living in a cramped space with 3 roommates in SF with no privacy, I have to work in a dining room because my bedroom has very thin walls. I also have to do cook and clean way more often, when I previously used to get 3 meals a day at work. I also have to haul groceries a couple times a week, which is super painful without a car, and then I have to compete for very limited fridge space.
I also haven't met friends and family in over 6 months, and my dating life's been obliterated. It's been mentally taxing in a way that living with your loved ones in a McMansion isn't. I can't even handle Zoom calls with friends anymore. It's the last thing I want to do after the 3 hours of back to back Zoom meetings I get roped into because I'm "senior".
Again, I don't mean to minimize the struggles of parents, college kids, the many people unemployed, our essential workers keeping things running, or our elderly who are at risk of dying. I'm in a very privileged position. But it's clear that all the lifestyle changes I've been forced to make have been a huge drain on my productivity.
Listen this is a healthy perspective. Having such clarity about how shitty things are without the perks. Most people sit around years ruminating how crappy all this stuff is and you figured it out pretty quickly.
I don't have any visa issues thankfully, so I can pretty much relocate to anywhere in the country. I'm thinking of an AirBnb in a nice seaside town.
Most of my friends, including myself, have taken advantage of the current WFH situation to find much better accommodations for themselves outside of SF.
Obviously not an option for everyone, but for those that have it I would definitely pursue it.
Where did you move? A few months in a seaside town Airbnb would be nice. I could use the change of scenery.
I'm not sure there is a perfect place in the world Asheville, but Asheville and Durham NC are nice and affordable. Sacramento is nice too, especially if you soon want to commute in to SF 1-2 times a week.
Of course, times have changed, and I think I'll move soon.
But yeah, to your point, pre-Covid SF was absurd in terms of cost of living, and the current exodus just shows how unsustainable it was.
> About $450k all in
What.
And anyway, an apartment that's fairly spacious can turn into a congested mess when everyone's WFH. Previously, all of us had tech jobs where we had dinner at work, did a post-dinner workout, went to happy hour, and such. On weekends, some of us would be on day trips to Napa, or at a dinner party, or some such thing like that. Now that everyone's more or less inside during business hours, organizing the fridge is like playing Tetris, walking in the house requires a level of spatial awareness driving in Manhattan does, and storing all the household essentials takes up even more space. Kitchen contention issues also come up all the time.
The getting more space vs. staying tradeoff is worth it now: I'd personally value each sq ft I have to myself more, and the rent differential is much lower too (rents in SF are crashing, and I'm not restricted to living in SF anyway). IMO, that wasn't a reasonable tradeoff to make pre-Covid.
My first promo put me in the $275k-ish range, and my second promo put it in the $350k-ish range. My base salary is $220k now, and the remaining $230k is stock and bonuses. IME, getting the first promo is not too difficult, but I had to put in a substantial effort for my second one, and hit some rough patches along the way. Any promos after that are a bit of a crapshoot, and more political than anything. The politics favored me in this case.
This tends to be the usual career trajectory at Facebook or Google, or some of the smaller public companies (Uber, Lyft, Square, etc.). It can be more volatile at smaller companies, given that stock based compensation is a significant portion of your total compensation, and you're taking on more risk.
I stayed more or less in the same engineering role throughout my career. I think skyrocketing senior engineer compensation is a relatively recent (i.e. ~4 years ago) trend, while new grad salaries were pretty high even 10 years ago.
It's generally not productive to play "who has it worse".
Of course every personality type deals with this differently, as we all need different things in life. And if I didn't have such a luckily great family life I could easily be miserable. I seem to notice more breakups and divorces recently, but that's hard to quantify beyond my acquaintances. Maybe a social scientist will measure this.
My scientific wild-ass guess would be that younger employees naturally require more coaching, while the older, more experienced folks know the stuff and just keep doing what they've been doing for the past ten years.