But these US wages aren't actually all that great anymore. The vast majority of people will have nothing to show for their decade of working in tech other than a bad back, carpal tunnel, and a neurosis.

The cost of living in the Bay Area creeps ever upward and absorbs just enough salary to keep the worker bees coming back to the office the next day. It's really not that different of a life than elsewhere in materialistic terms. Except there is also nothing to do other than work or go hiking. More and more people are cluing in.

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yurishimo 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you can’t afford to live on 150k/year even in SF, that’s just poor financial planning…

It’s not like McDonald’s or Target don’t exist in SF. Those workers get paid way less than big tech and somehow they make rent every month. Yea, you might have to commute instead living within walking distance of the campus where you work, but that’s just being a responsible adult imo.

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khuey 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The vast majority of people will have nothing to show for their decade of working in tech other than a bad back, carpal tunnel, and a neurosis.

If you're terrible with money, perhaps. Anyone making SWE wages in the bay area should be able to save a decent amount of money.

	▲	alephnerd 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think (or I hope) what they mean is long-term. For a number of nationalities like Indians and Chinese, it takes 15-25 years to naturalize as a permanent resident/green card holder because of the backlogs and processing issues at USCIS. That is a lot of instability, with various pitfalls at each step (eg. potentially getting deported if you cannot find a new job in 60 days after being terminated, increasingly needing to pay out of pocket to do visa processing instead of the company doing it). More critically, if you have a kid and you as the parent do not get a green card by 21, they will be treated as a new applicant and will have to start the entire process from scratch. If you are able to demand EU or Canada level salaries in India or China, you have no reason to deal with the kind of headaches I mentioned above. You could have put a similar amount of money purchasing real estate in Hyderabad or Hangzhou, or investing in the Chinese or Indian equities market which are both seeing an IPO boom, or founded your own startup without being scared of being the reason you and your dependents got booted out. You can't even justify buying a house or a condo because you won't even know if you'd be able to live there long term. As a result, what you end up seeing is people from both countries increasingly viewing their stay in the US as temporary - so the American strategy of leveraging a brain drain to make more Americans is failing, becuase it is now becoming a reverse brain drain right when they are mid-career (so at their most valuable point from a human capital perspective). This has been impacting everyone from line level IC engineers all the way up to even VPs at major companies and even a couple well know VCs I am acquaintances with.

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strken 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Levels.fyi puts the median software engineering salary in San Francisco at USD$238000, while the median where I currently live is USD$90000. That's 2.6x higher.

Yeah, I get it. The multiplier on the salary has gone down from 3.6x to 2.6x. A studio is ridiculously expensive, I once paid $2300/month to live in one room in the piss-soaked Tenderloin, I understand your pain. It's not as good as it sounds. Still ... if you were sitting in Germany or Dubai and had to decide which area to try to recruit from, do you think you'd choose the more expensive one unless you had no choice?