> No amount of salary would have made me able to afford housing near work

Everyone who sells themselves short also sells everyone else short too by comparable TC.

I was hired IC5 $280k TC at Meta in 2020 with the help of a salary negotiator/coach and had an EDTX IP lawyer do due-diligence and walkthrough with me the hiring document terms. That would just barely qualify me for 50% D/I for the house I grew up in. It'd take a minimum of $470k to afford the house my grandparents bought in 1968 for $30k. And, unlike my parents and grandparents who pulled up the ladder behind them, I wouldn't get CA Prop. 13 like they did. But what's crazy is I could instead live in a car or on a boat for about 6-8 years and then buy an SV house with liquidated proceeds of investments outright.

> I cared much more that my employer fire the incompetent

This is magical thinking and not your problem. I don't understand why you think you're not worth being paid a livable salary.

As an alternative, move somewhere cheaper rather than futility compete with a surplus of rich people and NIMBYs whom prevent development.

> I don't understand why you think you're not worth being paid a livable salary.

I haven’t said that at all. I think I’m worth a two-digit percentage of gross revenue in the executive market and have a track record of strategic prediction, untapped market identification, proven competence at leadership, and the tech chops to working-prototype my own ideas to faster than I can explain and delegate them and to assess and address top-tier engineers trying to slack off under the hood on a formal implementation of same.

But this isn’t a conversation about how I value myself as an executive. This is a conversation about how I value being paid as a worker. Workers don’t get paid enough to be strategic visionaries. Workers can sleep at night and don’t usually have to submit to court interviews under oath. I like being a worker, I’m an excellent worker, and I stand by my above comments on the topic of peanut butter raises: so long as executives and strategists and workers all receive peanut butter raises without unfair bias towards the formers, they seem perfectly fine to me. When executives get double-digit raises and strategists get paid worker wages, I get offended and angry and find alternate employment or outright change careers.

(Yes, if you’re being paid less than seven or eight figures a year to provide long-term strategic vision and development to your company, you’re probably being cheated out of the wage they’d pay you as strategic consultant to do that same work. Study your written job definition more closely and stop donating unpaid-volunteer work to your employers. If they object, ask them to revise your job description and increase your pay accordingly. This is all bog standard corporate worker stuff that everyone here already knows.)

Well, after all most people would rather live in SF in 2026 than 1968.

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