Silicon Valley salaries are shrinking, leaving workers in the lurch
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
It was fun (and I like having a second passport now that I'm naturalised) but the opportunity cost was easily $2 million+ and my career is forever stunted. It also is a one-way move. Once you're gone too long you'll never be able to compete with your peers for housing in the bay.
I moved in 2020 and it has been the best decision I could have made. Taking into account everything (savings rate, safety, working hours, job security, politics, closeness to my home country in Europe) it is the best place I could be by far.
All other places trade off too much in exchange of something else. For example, I would have better savings rate in California (maybe 60-100k instead of 30-50k a year), but it would be worse in every other metric, except perhaps weather, although I dislike hot weather.
Sure, it's a fun adventure, but maybe just for 6 moths to a year.
It may not be for everybody (nothing is), but it is for some.
In 2013 I had a flat across from Dublin castle for €800 a month and the craic was, indeed, mighty.
I left and don’t regret it one bit. Different strokes for different folks.
You mentioned not to do it in SF! This thread is kinda of connected - do you mind elaborating on why not to setup your LLC in SF?
> Traffic is fucked. Government is excessively bossy. SF planning department is corrupt and pathological.
Traffic is horrible everywhere, unless it's a few European cities with great public transport. But their governments make CA govt look tame by comparison.
> SF planning department is corrupt and pathological.
Couldn't agree more. Though it is easy to avoid SF and stay in the nicer parts of SFBA.
I say this as an Irish citizen. I've done the math dozen of times.
That doesn't really pass the sniff test without some supporting data, given the work culture norms and labor laws that I'm familiar with. Just quickly searching for one example, full time employees in Ireland get 4 weeks of vacation a year, and in the US you'll be lucky to take 2-3 weeks a year, and not legally mandated either. Depending on the state, you may not even be entitled to sick days.
Yeah, no.
Google is 3 weeks/year, and has been that way for as far as I have known it.
KLA+ (formerly, KLA-Tencor) has several (IIRC, 3) weeks of sick days and vacation COMBINED, so if you get sick, no vacation for you.
Those are representative examples.
Which is how it effectively works, except usually managers are less direct.
Just looked it up and the number of days increases with seniority at Google.
KLA, ASML, TSMC are companies that are huge globally in their fields.
The field being semiconductor design and fabrication.
Whatever device you're reading this on almost certainly has components made with machinery by one (or all) of those.
However, I too have never heard of KLA. Somehow it never gets mentioned alongside those other companies. Maybe it's similar to how everyone knows about Microsoft and Apple, and even my mother knows what Linux is, but almost no one has heard of Green Hills Software?
KLA makes wafer inspection and process control equipment and has very little (if any) competition in what they do. They're big.
As in, they have 10B revenue and 15,000 employees.
That's roughly 1/3 of what ASML is (ASML has 30B revenue and 45K employees).
It's more like your grandma knowing about Nintendo, but not Valve.
Not true. Google starts at 3 weeks/year but that increases quickly after a few years. I was getting 5 weeks/year when I left.
Companies are being rewarded for being efficient in the stock market and CEOs are taking heed.
> Companies are being rewarded for being efficient in the stock market
Eh really? NVDA, AAPL, GOOG, META, TSLA etc are the big winners and all of them have mandated RTO with jobs situated in SFBA. I don't seem them moving out anytime soon.
If I were to guess, a whole lot of the tech industry figured out that they don’t really need their employees to by physically located in the Bay Area and they can save a boatload on costs that way.
There used to be a benefit to having physical connection in an industry among professionals but I think that has been replaced by robust online chat software and comminities, dirt cheap flights for conferences and meetups, and other shifts away from the importance of physical presence.
https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/bay-area-rental-pr...
Albeit I'm a western expat in a supposedly impoverished developing nation (no shortage of very expensive cars here though!); local salaries for senior devs top out at 24k/pa, juniors as low as $5k/pa, and if I look on the freelancer sites, there are many job 'offers' as low as $5-10/hour; I don't think I've seen any ruby/rails type roles above about $50/hr recently, and any near that level get 10s or even 100s of applicants.
But if those big US salaries are being eaten by rent, there's the real problem.
I'd happily take one of those 200k+ roles, remote, for half the price.
1) Lower entry barrier to software engineering (no need to learn about memory management, multi-threading, networking, etc.)
2) More resources for self-taught engineers
3) Coding camps
4) More STEM professionals changing fields
5) Remote workers
6) Immigration
7) More people see software engineering as a viable career
8) Generative AI
9) Higher interest rates
Houston, TX seems a bit high.
While the article talks about tech jobs, the actual examples given are:
> an educated, experienced marketing professional
> she landed some interviews for jobs in tech and public relations jobs
which are not tech jobs.
They are explicitly talking about jobs in the tech industry/sector, not about jobs in tech-related occupational categories. Not skipping over key words avoids missing meaning.
Mushing the two together makes for a meaningless article.
If you want a tech salary, get a STEM education and apply for a tech job.
No, compensation is influenced by all three of sector, job type, and location (and a bunch of other things that aren't relevant to the discussion here), not job type alone.
It's funny that people here widely recognize that this is true of tech job types (that compensation is worse outside of tech hubs and outside of the tech industry), but you somehow don't realize that its true generally.
> Mushing the two together makes for a meaningless article
The article isn't mushing sector and job type together, its talking about sector and location (tech sector jobs in the Bay Area.) Bad reading comprehension confuses explicit reference to sector to some weird hybrid of sector and job type (or just the latter, as seen in your initial response before you migrated to the “mushing together” misreading), but the article is clear, explicit, and correct.
> If you want a tech salary, get a STEM education and apply for a tech job.
No one, and certainly not the article, is saying that non-tech jobs in the tech industry should expect similar pay to tech jobs in the industry (indeed, the article makes no normative argument at all); the article is reporting on a decline in pay affecting jobs in the tech industry in the Bay Area in a specified time period.