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Comment by maxpert | Hacker News Reader

I have personally been in position of living with $70K a year in SanFrancisco startup. This is back in 2013. While I accepted the offer thinking it will suffice I was living hand to mouth. I was spending my energy fighting with budgeting and spending my energy trying to save up while other with settled backgrounds were fine. In the end I lost my motivation and ended up leaving for a higher paying offer in 9 months. I have no sympathy for any of these low paying companies. They should pay what an engineer deserves. It’s pure exploitation and I walked right into it.

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I got $65k in 2015. I know your pain well. I was trying to break into the area as a graduate from the PNW. No one but small startups would reply and they took advantage of my dwindling savings. My story is similar as yours as I had nowhere else to go since no other places in the country were responding but all these startups in the bay area. They were exploitative assholes and knew it completely. I never stopped interviewing and found a place eventually that paid the normal $110k/yr for entry-level positions but it took about a year after I started that first post-graduation job. Pretty terrible experience up until that moment.

Guess I should mention - I wasn't even on H1B. I'm a US citizen. I feel bad for people on H1B who have to live like that and can't escape that level of exploitation. I think it hurts everyone involved.

The San Francisco median household income in 2012 was $74,922 (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2013/cb13-r85...). If you were living "hand to mouth", you should give some serious consideration to just exactly how many others in San Francisco were living, often supporting many more family members than you were.

I moved from a much smaller city to Seattle for a job that paid more (even after a CoL adjustment) but ended up moving back because I felt poorer in Seattle than I did in my old city.

A big part of it is that most of my acquaintances were paid significantly more than me. When they go out to eat dropping $40 on lunch and drinks was no big deal. I would imagine OPs issue could be similar. An engineer at a startup making ~75k in SF is likely hanging out with engineers who make double that.

That is a completely bogus statistic. Not only does the "San Francisco Metro Area" include Oakland it also excludes Palo Alto.

I lived in SF and worked in tech and I know perfectly well what @maxpert speaks of. Some of the best years of my life, But the only way I could afford to live there was to live in a 1 bedroom apartment with two roommates.

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