But a lot of the negative reviews for the linked seller seem to be about a locked or blacklisted phone, or one with the wrong amount of storage. Those customers would presumably have to send back their phones, so what's the buyer-side fraud there?
13 karma · joined July 31, 2014
The pattern is such that I don't think people are lying. In some settings, lying about offers could be a way to get leverage, but these people are not trying to negotiate--they know a small company can't offer those kinds of salaries, and do not ask for a counteroffer.
That said, note that I am not talking about salary, but "total compensation." Obviously prospective employers have an incentive to paint as rosy a picture as possible about that. So the base salaries might be even slightly under $200K, but with hefty guaranteed bonuses for the first year or two plus stock grants worth in the hundreds of thousands of dollars even if the stock stays flat.
Another way to look at this is that the housing market is a function of three things: income, interest rates, and the fraction of people's income they are willing/able to spend on housing. So obviously interest rates have been super low recently, and maybe people have increased the fraction of their pay they spend on housing--but that still can't go above 100%. The main driver of the San Francisco housing crisis is soaring income (and of course inequality) combined with inadequate supply.
Who do you think is making housing so unaffordable? It's the tens of thousands of software developers earning $200K-800K/year!
Of course, there is an above-average number of super-rich entrepreneurs in SF, but that's still only a tiny fraction of the population compared to developers. Moreover, the city makes it virtually impossible to combine apartments or houses into mega-mansions, so even the super rich don't consume that many housing units per-capita in SF.