> district makes $168,000 a year (he’s the CIO). There’s a “L4” software developer making $131,000 a year.
I think that really says more about the absolutely absurd cost of living and non-rational real estate costs in the SF bay area than it does about the school district. In many places with normal cost of living, if your US W2 take home is $129k a year, you can live a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. Whether or not you have a spouse or partner with their own career and your combined W2 gross income might be $210k a year.
Same as what I said above also applies to absurd real estate and cost of living in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, etc.
> You have to compare the salary to local living costs to be comparable.
This is not accurate in a globalized economy, where purchasing power parity (PPP) becomes a bit of a lie. No one is going to ask you if you're from Cambodia or another country, when you'll want to rent a server from AWS, or buy an iPhone, or maybe even a car. Global corporations aren't running charities and are instead concerned with making their products profitable - if anything, they would only use your location to increase the prices of products further if you're capable of buying them, but that's not a widespread practice nowadays for a variety of reasons.
I actually wrote a bit more about it in my blog article, "On finances and savings": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
which showed how much money i've made over the years while working as a software developer in Latvia (currently around 18'000 euros a year), which means that my ability to make savings is ~5x lower than many of the software developers in the US or other well paid countries - which directly impacts my ability to create a startup and pay for external services/infrastructure, should i so choose.
Of course, on the flip side, one can also talk about how much you're disadvantaging yourself by catering to a clientele of local companies: i generate my company ~20x less profits than an average engineer in Google would for their company.
By local living costs, I do mean whatever costs are required to live in the area one lives. Whether or not those products or services are the same everywhere or not.
But the fact of the matter is, the costs that make up the largest portion of most people's lives are locally spent.
True, but tech is not the dominant industry in all areas, and industries needing IT are not strictly limited to tech companies -
blaming education administrators specifically for not having enough funds to pay competitively is drastically different than saying there is a structural problem with the local economy such that only industry X can competitively source IT talent.
in these conversations, comparing tech job X vs other job Y is relevant, because we are talking about 'jobs and wages within local economy as a whole'
What about the many costs that stay static? Flights, smart phones, and so much more don’t become a lot cheaper just because of location. Or for flights, Departing location.
I think that really says more about the absolutely absurd cost of living and non-rational real estate costs in the SF bay area than it does about the school district. In many places with normal cost of living, if your US W2 take home is $129k a year, you can live a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. Whether or not you have a spouse or partner with their own career and your combined W2 gross income might be $210k a year.
Same as what I said above also applies to absurd real estate and cost of living in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, etc.