The girl who went to grad school in Ireland had the right idea, partly. She says the work-life balance is better there, and she had an easy time finding a job. But then she says she'd like to come back "home" to California. The Bay Area isn't going to magically become affordable anytime soon, so her best course of action is to stay in Ireland, a place that has apparently welcomed her and given her an opportunity for a better life than what California offers. Ironic that 100 or so years ago, the roles were reversed.
I have to admit I moved from California to Ireland in 2013 and... I regret it. Irish salaries are a fraction of those in the US (even moreso as the Euro weakens), mortgages harder to obtain (and the houses are generally low quality), and it's not exactly a place that embraces risk taking. Though maybe if California continues to shoot itself in the foot w.r.t. housing more emigrants will bring new ideas to these places.
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.
Strange, I feel like that it doesn’t matter anymore where you live because there are many more remote jobs than 10 or 20 years ago. And tech salaries give much more purchasing power outside SV.
Right, but I wasn't making bay area salaries, I was making Irish salaries at first, then a split between Irish and US when I was working remote. This means €65k instead of $165k. On top of that, I had one lucky break (Okta bought Auth0) and while the stock was nice, it was all taxed at 52%. The upshot of all this is that over the course of ten years I would almost certainly have made a couple million more (especially if I had invested decently or bought a house) than I did in Ireland, and while I like living in Europe (though not Ireland, I couldn't wait to leave by the end), being able to FIRE by 40 would have been better.
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.
I'm always surprised at someone born with a foot up advantage, voluntarily moving from California to somewhere like Ireland. The weather is atrocious, salaries low, cost of living very high, etc.
Sure, it's a fun adventure, but maybe just for 6 moths to a year.
People in America talk so much about how certain people have "privileges" over others, when one of the biggest privileges in the world - and one of the most sought after - is being American. I can see this clearly having grown up outside the US, but I'm often stunned when people here don't realize that. Even a poor person in the US is fairly rich by world standards, even if compared to big chunks of Europe.
A close friend of mine did this about 25 years ago, and he considers it one of the best things he's ever done. His description of Ireland is "if you ignore the weather, this place is as close to a paradise as I'm likely to see".
It may not be for everybody (nothing is), but it is for some.
The weather is nice. Economic opportunity is crazy good, network effects are weirdly magical.
Housing crisis is fucked.
Traffic is fucked.
Government is excessively bossy.
SF planning department is corrupt and pathological.
I left and don’t regret it one bit.
Different strokes for different folks.
I just came across a comment of yours (1 yr ago) on setting up an LLC in California as I'm about to pull the trigger/looking for recommendations on who to choose for formation/setting up etc
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?
Agreed with the first half of your comment. However
> 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.
Unless you're grinding in a startup the worklife balance is way better in the USA for tech. Income is so low in Ireland especially in terms of housing cost, yes it's even worse then the bay, that she's probably just making a mistake in the math somewhere.
I say this as an Irish citizen. I've done the math dozen of times.
>Unless you're grinding in a startup the worklife balance is way better in the USA for tech
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.
OP said "for tech". Tech jobs have long had much better vacation time and other benefits than "regular" jobs in the US. However, with the way things are going, this may not last and I wouldn't count on it. Also, it seems to depend a lot on employer: working at a big place like Apple or Google will of course get you lots of vacation time, but working at some shitty little 30-person company will probably get you the regular 2 weeks, and these days, the good jobs are probably a lot more scarce, forcing more tech employees to work at those shitty companies.
There are also quite a few companies that offer “unlimited” vacation, but in practice they pressure/shame their employees not to take “too much” time off.
When Cadence switched to "unlimited" vacations, my manager straight up told me that he expects it to be three weeks unless I exceed his expectations, or it will adversely affect my performance reviews.
Which is how it effectively works, except usually managers are less direct.
With all the stuff about chips and fabs and Taiwan in the news in the past year, you'd have to be living under a rock to not know who TSMC and ASML are.
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?
Ireland has such a horrendous housing situation that I left for another country with a housing crisis (the Netherlands) and it felt like easy mode by comparison. €2450 for a nice 5 bed house a 20 minute train ride from Amsterdam Centraal vs some mouldy dump in Kildare that you need to fight off 100 people to get.
More like there will be a bifurcation. Newer and smaller companies will embrace remote jobs. Older companies with an established in-office culture? They have already ditched remote in favor of RTO.
> 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.
Rents are falling as well. It would probably be better for the Bay Area in the long term if both salaries and cost of living cooled down to be a little more sane and at least a little bit comparable to the rest of the country.
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.
The salaries in the city table seem like a fantasy to me, with $180k at the low end of the scale.
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.
I did a quick sampling of a few different levels at the largest employers on levels.fyi and didn't notice any significant drop at a given level. It could be that there's less senior level openings/hirings, which could lead to the drop in average. I am also not sure how objective / comprehensive the data from "woman impact tech" is, since they seem to be more of an advocacy group (with a mission that includes "We’re here to achieve equity in tech"), even though I can't imagine why they would bias their data one way or another.
True. I'm getting offers I was getting back in ~2018. I will stay here anyways. There are some ways to mitigate that shrinking, which are pretty well known...
Industries/sectors are not occupational groups, though they sometimes share names, and particular industries will have specific occupational groups in which are more common to the industry than in the market as a whole.
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.
Compensation for programming and engineering jobs is not connected to compensation for PR jobs. Compensation is based on what kind of job it is, not what sector it is in.
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.
> Compensation is based on what kind of job it is, not what sector it is in.
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.
I feel for anyone living in the Bay Area without a very high-paying job, but I'm not sure I'm all that worried about the nation's marketing professionals' salaries, as problems go.
TBH I doubt the median eng salary, all levels combined, is $250k to begin with, it's got to be lower than the average, right? But I maybe I'm just not informed.
It's funny they mentioned police officers, because $250k is right about the median TC for a police officer in San Jose (just a regular officer, not including captains or detectives or deputy Chiefs)
