At Google, HR has dictated to our team "no Bay-area hiring" for over a year now. It seems at least one company agrees with "There’s no surplus value in hiring in the Bay Area".
The engineering pool is broad enough (or the Bay Area shallow enough) that they can hire everywhere and get the same quality of engineer.
Since the wages paid are based on _local_ prevailing wage, and the Bay Area has the highest prevailing wage, Google will get cheaper engineers.
This also avoids the US immigration system, which is a terrible, expensive, stress inducing (performance sapping) thing for staff (and businesses) to interact with.
Finally, by distributing engineers to other countries, they counter some of the political "They're not _local_" arguments being made in various countries.
Pretty much if you ever double your salary you will come out ahead as everything else doesn't double. (And even if it does, your savings also doubled so you can retire to a lower cost of living and come out ahead).
If you go from say 120k to 240k in salary your housing may go from say 1k (12k/year) to 3k (36k/year) but at the end of the year 120k-12k is 108k while 240k-36k is 204 which is a net gain of 96k!
Of course you still need to eat and stuff but when you check out the "Regional Price Parity" [1] you'll see that nowhere do things actually become twice as expensive. So you're really getting a 2x boost in salary in exchange for a 1.3x increase in expenses.
I would wager that you still end up with more disposable income in the end if you're single. I only decided SF or the rest of Bay Area wasn't financially worthwhile when I wanted to start a family.
Take-home pay is indeed higher in the bay but unless already had a family, that take-home pay is worthless in what is without a doubt the most socially dull major metro in the US.
>Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities.
Salary or takehome? Sure, your net in SF will be higher than Orlando or London, but looking at resources such as levels.fyi, internal salary sharing sites at large companies, etc. the math for Seattle comp with no state income tax is pretty close to bay area minus tax.
This article conflates the notion of being "in tech" with being a CEO for some reason. The vast majority of people "in tech" will be workers, not CEOs. For those people, a statement like "There’s no surplus value in hiring in the Bay Area" should sound like a good thing.
The TV show Silicon Valley lampooned all these ideas a decade ago. The weird thing I’ve noticed is that when Bay Area tech people watch that show, they don’t seem to understand that they’re being made fun of. They think they’re being celebrated. That’s how thick the bubble is.
I've never met a person who didn't understand that this show is satire. Every single tech person I've talked to about Silicon Valley thinks it's funny because of how plausible and yet ridiculous it all is, and because of all the totally accurate details scattered throughout—from golden handcuffs / resting & vesting, down to minor things like which drinks were stocked in the show's office fridges. And I lived in the Bay Area during its entire run, so most of my network is current/former Bay Area tech people.
Everyone I knew who watched the old Office Space movie thought it was funny; I never liked it because it was too much like real life (at the time). Same with the TV show The Office.
About the "tautological" part: Economic feedback loops are natural and don't diminish from the value of being in the area. At one point I went there to open doors that probably wouldn't have been reachable otherwise. Silicon Valley isn't a perfect circle either, because it wasn't just created from nowhere decades ago.
The only reason I don't live there anymore is because I already got the "in" I needed, I think remoteness actually works best if you're ambitious (provided you visit occasionally), and because I really didn't like living there. Idc if someone takes the last part as an excuse, my work speaks for itself.
reply