Another 2x? 3x? 4x? Why make us guess? It's valuable info that helps inform people's decisions for the future.
Thank you for the datapoints.
The fact of the matter is that other industries are starved for talent. If you can keep up in silicon valley, where all anyone talks about is technology, you will be godly in a different marketplace with more capital flow.
Finance in particular has way too many people who think things like this are a good idea and The Right Thing To Do: https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-collections
I think that's a pretty unfair criticism.
Firstly, it isn't clear exactly what you don't like about it. That it is Java? That it exists?
You need to put its existence into historical context. When it came out, it was before Google's Guava collections libraries were open source, so there were no decent collections libraries that did more than what the JDK libraries did.
That's the context GS Collections were built for.
(Disclaimer: I've never used them, but I do remember when they were released)
- Seattle salaries were ~70% higher than what I would've gotten in Canada at the time (mostly looking at Toronto area market, though it's all fairly similar)
- SF salaries were ~30% higher than Seattle. I didn't know it at the time but that meant I took an effective pay cut. My total comp was about 1.8x what I would receive in Canada at the time.
- NYC salaries were another ~30% higher than SF (64% higher than Seattle). Cost of living here is lower than SF (weirdly enough), so I effectively got a large raise moving. I've been here for a while, and looking at the Canadian market now I'd reckon I'm about 2.2x higher than a similar position in Canada.
All of the above were done while staying in the same "field" - i.e., did not go into finance. And all of the above assumes I'd be fetching top-10th-percentile salaries for my position in Canada (itself far from a guarantee). If I do "just average" for compensation in Canada my NYC salary would be about 2.6x.
The one overarching trend is that the gap widens as you gain experience and seniority. Canadian salaries never catches up, and in fact continues to fall further and further behind as you go up the ladder.
Even significant health costs per month are ignored in a corporate environment in the US, though small startups may be different. For entrepreneurs, health care costs would matter before the company was large enough to have figured out benefits.
Any startup employees\founders willing to comment on how health insurance is generally handled at US startups?
I have a chronic health condition that needs some fairly expensive drugs and relatively frequent doctor visits and procedures. My total out of pocket healthcare expenses are less than $500 per year.
I'm up-to-date as of 2011, I'm sure things have (and still are) radically changing - but the health insurance situation in the US was a horrible mess until recently - Everything worked fine until the day it didn't, and then you were possibly shut out of healthcare.
I found it obnoxious and annoying, and it's one of the reasons I'll probably never move to that cesspool. The idea that I should have 5 years knocked off my career because I came up in New York (which is a far better city than San Francisco, and far less expensive relative to opportunity and urban amenity) is one I just can't accept.