By the Numbers: The Highest-Paying States For Tech Professionals 136
Nerval's Lobster writes The average technology professional made $89,450 in 2014, according to Dice's latest salary survey. When it comes to salaries, however, not all states and cities are created equal. Those tech pros living and working in Silicon Valley are the highest-paid in the country, with an average annual salary of $112,610—but that salary grew only 4 percent year-over-year, lagging behind cities such as Portland and Seattle. Dice has built an interactive map that shows where people are making the most (and least). As you click around, note how salary growth is particularly strong in parts of the West, the Northeast, and the South, while remaining stagnant (and even regressing) in some middle states. If anything, the map reinforces what many tech pros have known for years: that more cities and regions are becoming hubs of innovation.
Flash Map? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm sad that I used up all my mod points yesterday.
Salary versus cost of living in each city (Score:5, Insightful)
Salary means nothing unless you can compare it to the cost of living in each city. I would suggest a high wage in Silicon Valley is actually lower than many other areas due the the high cost of rent and real estate.
Re:Salary versus cost of living in each city (Score:5, Informative)
Salary means nothing unless you can compare it to the cost of living in each city. I would suggest a high wage in Silicon Valley is actually lower than many other areas due the the high cost of rent and real estate.
If I participated in the Mod system you would get an +1 insightful.
I would say the real metric is salary/cost of living * some base number like national average cost of living.
So Dallas TX has an average Salary of 91,674 compared to Los Angeles 95,345, however the cost of living for Dallas TX is 73.2% that of Los Angeles (according to http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/ ) so that is the equivalent of 125,268 in LA. Taking what would prima facia be a 3.5k raise is really a 24% (21k) pay decrease.
Plus, I would rather live in Dallas than on the Left Coast.
Re: Salary versus cost of living in each city (Score:1)
Telecommute from another area. If you can land such a job (and if you don't mind the lack of face-to-face time), you can get a large-city salary with a small town cost of living.
Nope (Score:2)
Most companies in SV are hip to the remote worker, and your pay will be granted or reduced appropriately to your geographic location.
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If you live in LA you can surf and ski on the same day. You enjoy a mild-dry climate instead of a hot and humid Texas climate (at least in the summer). Authentic ethnic food is far easier and cheaper to find in LA than in Dallas. The same "LA" arguments apply to the Silicon Valley. California cities are a great place for bicyclists, but in Texas bicyclists are being moved down with big ass trucks like they're some sort of terrorists. I can tell you from my personal observations that a small Bay Area city li
Got a car, since the cost of living is lower here (Score:5, Insightful)
Got a car, since the cost of living is lower here. Actually, a few vehicles (car, truck, boat). Don't need a bike anymore. I've bicycled for recreation all around the USA. Road across Nebraska a few times - have done many MS-150s in Texas, Georgia, NC. Cost of living matters.
Also have a 3600 sqft McMansion on a small 1 acre estate - thanks to a lower cost of living here.
Don't have many crazies living nearby either.
I can surf and ski in the same day too. That is hardly a reason to live somewhere with 30% higher cost of living for the same salary.
My $130K/yr in Atlanta goes a long way.
Fortunately, I can visit Cali for a day or so to help me remember why I never want to live there. Don't get me wrong, it is a nice place to visit, sorta like Omaha, but I don't want to live there anymore.
I have friends who lived/worked in SF for a few years. They didn't like it and moved back to Houston, Tx. I lived in Houston for 8 yrs and thought it was an armpit. To me, it was. I didn't enjoy the weather, but many folks do. I did like the people in Houston. I like most people around the world, provided they aren't small-minded.
Happy that you like it in Cali. Finding happines in our lives is important. Just because it isn't right for me, doesn't mean it isn't right for everyone. Plus if everyone moved to where I lived, traffic would get worse. Don't need that.
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You can surf and (snow) ski on the same day where near Atlanta?
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I live in Atlanta, and am well aware that the mountains exist. However, having mountains and beach 5 hours apart (making a 10-hour round trip) does not realistically count as "skiing and surfing on the same day."
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To be fair, TX is so large that the climate varies greatly, and I note that you omit fat meccas like Palmdale, Sacramento, and Barstow from your comparison.
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Spoken like somebody who's desperately trying to convince himself that living in a 200 sq ft, $3000 a month studio in Los Gatos and commuting 15 miles - an hour each way in traffic - is a great idea, because once, you had authentic Somalian grub when some girl you were desperately trying to fuck said she wanted to try something new, and since there are so few women in the Bay Area, you'll do pretty much anything if there's a possible hint that you'll get to sleep with a Bay Area "8" (which is, naturally, an
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If you live in LA you can surf and ski on the same day. You enjoy a mild-dry climate instead of a hot and humid Texas climate (at least in the summer).
Point of order, the annual average humidity is lower in Dallas [currentresults.com] than it is in LA [currentresults.com].
You do get something from high COL (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about SV, but I live in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and have a significantly higher cost of living than most of northern Illinois. For instance my parents live an hour southwest of Chicago and have a 50% larger house for 75% of the cost.
But I am not just paying the extra money to be closer to higher paying jobs. I get better schools, better restaurants, better entertainment options, and of course better career options. I also live next to more affluent neighbors, which means my daughter will have more affluent friends, have better internship opportunities, etc. That makes a big difference. My high school techie friends from the same small farm town my parents still live in mostly have jobs as satellite dish repair men or something similar. My wife's high school techie friends from the northwest suburbs build robots for Microsoft Research or other similar jobs. Part of my high cost of living is paying so my daughter has the same head start in the "who you know" category that my wife did.
When you look at "self-made" millionaires and other outstanding success stories, you will almost always notice they came from highly affluent upper middle class families in areas that would give them more opportunities than your average person. The creators of the next Microsoft, Facebook, etc. are mostly likely already born in a place like New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, etc, not the rural Midwest. And in a similar fashion, the next generation of C-level executives, big shot lawyers, etc. are probably also going to be mostly from these high COL areas.
Paying for that high COL in part helps increase the chance that your next generation has a chance of sitting at that table. And even if my children are not that ambitious, at least I enjoyed better food options and a better theater scene for my money.
Yep. (Score:3, Insightful)
$80K here in Metro Atlanta is like $250K out there - and that's not even including lifestyle.
Meaning, commute times, being able to own a house, health club member ship to swim and play tennis, free time (Those SV jobs seem to want you there 24/7.) and a bunch of other things.
After looking at rents and whatnot, for me to do a one to one move, I would demand no less than $400K/year, - NO stock options. And that's at an established company like Google.
Those flaky startups that will be out of business in 6 mon
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This. A billion times this.
I earn less now than what I did 5 years ago. But I have a MUCH bigger apartment and much more money left over after bills are paid. And for sure it ain't because I've been cutting back on expenses, quite the opposite.
It doesn't matter what you earn. What matters is how much is left after your bills are paid. To give you a drastic example, a lot of senior citizens from Europe spend their last years somewhere in the far east where their 800 bucks a month retirement money allow them
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That's assuming you want to live there at least for the amount of time you need to pay the house. You are also assuming that house prices can't go down.
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You do know when you get a loan that you owe the lender the price of the house + his profit right?
If you sell your house to buy some other house you will have to buy a cheaper house. Assuming you manage to sell it for the same price you bought it. If you sell it for a lower price. Well I don't need to spell it out for you.
What's likely. Nice joke. Do you think all those excess houses they build have been sold by now? They haven't. Neither are they going to crumble any time soon. Houses are usually designed
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buying is only better when it is. http://www.nytimes.com/interac... [nytimes.com]
buying a median priced house where I live would leave me with a lower net worth after 10-15 years than renting.
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This can be beneficial, unless house prices are as inflated as they are now. We're at the point where you'd have to rent for over 30 years now to break even.
Re:Salary versus cost of living in each city (Score:4, Informative)
This can be beneficial, unless house prices are as inflated as they are now. We're at the point where you'd have to rent for over 30 years now to break even.
I'd really be interested in seeing where that's true. The average break-even point for renting vs. owning is probably 5-7 years in most areas. Some areas it may be as little as 2-3 (if rents are really high), other places it may be as much as 10 years or a little more (if rents are really low, but prices are high).
Rental markets generally adjust to housing prices over time, so it's unlikely that you could have a long-term sustainable market where you'd need to take a lot more than 10 years to break even unless it was somewhere where no one EVER sells real estate. (Such things do exist, such as in old Italian cities like Rome, where it's next to impossible to buy anything, since properties have been in the same family for centuries... but it's extremely rare in the U.S.)
And even if housing prices are inflated, interest rates are still quite low now (but may start rising). Which means that you may still be able to get an interest rate that roughly tracks inflation over the long term. Effectively, that means you're not really "paying interest" but getting a "zero interest" loan on a huge sum of money for 30 years (since you get to pay later in constant payments, which will be cheaper as inflation makes the dollars worth less). Rents, on the other hand, will rise with inflation.
Take this into account, and I sincerely doubt you'll find many places where renting makes sense for much more than 10 years.
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Well, not necessarily true. You are ignoring the costs to maintain the home, a myrid of utilities you have to pay every month that renters often don't, insurance, and property taxes. I'm a home owner but I don't think there is such a huge gap between owning and renting. A lot of older owners are faced with having to sell their homes after retirement and moving somewhere cheaper when they would rather stay where they are. It's more like a safety net and less like a nest-egg, frankly.
That said, I prefer t
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I'm a home owner but I don't think there is such a huge gap between owning and renting.
Short-term (less than 5 years or so)? Not a big gap. Long-term? Absolutely. Run the numbers. There may be a few markets in the U.S. where it makes sense to rent, or if you're a person who definitely plans to make big moves at least every 5 years or so. If you plan to stay in the same area for a decade or more, though, owning almost always wins out bigtime.
A lot of older owners are faced with having to sell their homes after retirement and moving somewhere cheaper when they would rather stay where they are. It's more like a safety net and less like a nest-egg, frankly.
Well, that's because many people own "too much home," and the vast majority of people are very poor about planning appropriately for retirement expe
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Time for a wee bit of Schadenfreude.
A married couple of tech professionals in Silicon Valley, both earning just slightly above average, $125,000 a year, . . . will qualify as "wealthy", greater than $250,000 a year, . . . and get hit by Obama's new tax policies.
The gag is that the seriously wealthy aren't worried about Obama's new tax policies, because they can afford a tax lawyer who can prove that they earn nothing.
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The gag is that the seriously wealthy aren't worried about Obama's new tax policies, because they can afford a tax lawyer who can prove that they earn nothing.
If you haven't been paying attention for the past few millennia, the purpose of government is to transfer resources from the masses to the few. I know, they don't tell that to the masses in their indoctrination centers, but if you look at all available evidence, it's pretty clear.
Sure, they throw a few bones to the dogs to make sure they don't turn o
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You should have qualified this as "today's Government". We had a revolt a couple hundred years ago which broke away from England for the same reason we need to do something today.
All Governments have gone corrupt over time, because the type of person who gravitates to this job is a sociopath or psychopath. Sophists sound a whole lot like Philosophers when you hear them talk and lack training in rhetoric and logic. The "fix" in Athens was to go to a lottery system for representation, which successfully go
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I think the lottery system worked fairly well actually.
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From the history I read, it worked very well. Hence, the "Noble uprising" where the Government was taken back over by them and the lottery removed.
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Uhhh yeh, and you don't think a couple earning $250,000 can afford a tax lawyer too? Yeh right. Get off your high horse.
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In L.A., with two kids at UC? No.
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I'm in that 'wealthy' category and being single I probably pay more taxes than a married couple with children. All of the taxes apply gradually, so there's no difference whether you earn $249999.99 or $250000.01. And my tax lawyer ($5000 for all the consultations and paperwork) helped me to optimize my tax by quite a bit. So in the end, my effective total tax rate (including state taxes) is a little bit less than 30%, this year it'll be close to 28% because I moved much of my income into cap
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Home is where the heart is.
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Ahh yes, the debate reignites :-)
First off, you are absolutely right. Making 125K a year in Silicon Valley isn't worth a hill of beans if you have to pay 5K a month for a nice apartment. Or maybe even not so nice.
I did some work recently at Stanford University - right smack dab in the middle of all that. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn...all of them right there. I had a heck of a time finding a hotel that didn't cost a fortune. For a while I stayed in San Jose and did the commute. It was about a 15 mile commute.
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First off, you are absolutely right. Making 125K a year in Silicon Valley isn't worth a hill of beans if you have to pay 5K a month for a nice apartment. Or maybe even not so nice.
Just for reference - SV is expensive, but not that expensive. I pay less than $3k a month for a nice 3 bed house there. It's only the idiots who want to live in the city that end up paying $4k a month for a 1 bed apartment.
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In what city are you getting a 3 bed house for less than 3K? Freemont? East Palo Alto? Sure, some areas are a bit lower than others but unless you are in a pretty bad neighborhood 2bedroom apartments are 2.5-3K/month. Hell, I know people paying that much for rent in areas where they are afraid to go outside at dark in East Palo Alto, Freemont, and San Jose.
Housing in SV is absolutely horrid as far as price. Count how many 1 and 2 bedroom apartments have 4 or more adults living in them. I have a neighb
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OAKLAND
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Yeah, SV is pretty expensive compared with middle-of-nowhere states, but it's definitely worth it.
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Sunnyvale. It's not uncommon here at all.
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Yes, but also no. In general, even in areas with a high cost of living, you end up better off. No matter where you live, you typically end up spending somewhere around 30-40% of your income on housing, 20-30% on living, and 30-40% as disposable income of one form or another (savings, having fun, etc). 30-40% of a silicon valley wage is still substantially more than 30-40% of a mid-west wage, that means you gain substantially more savings by working there, and when you retire, and move to somewhere like t
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Cost of living (COL) is one thing... quality of life (QOL) is another. I moved from Colorado to Chicago. I did that because the pay was better and it seemed that the COL was about equivalent based on a number of online COL calculators. What one realizes when one gets here is that the COL for the same QOL is actually quite a bit higher. Now, I feel like I came out ahead, but not as far ahead as I had imagined.
Here's the deal: the COL is based on the average cost of housing, food, energy, transportation,
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I think that a QOL calculator might be pretty difficult. Something you find enhances the area, such as water skiing, might not be appealing at all to someone like me who doesn't much like the left or right coast (oceans) and water skiing in general. I grew up in California and lived in Virginia for 30+ years. I'm quite happy living in Colorado. The roads are much quieter, I ride a motorcycle so the mountains are great fun, I love to hike, snowshoe, and snow ski so being close to the Rockies and several ski
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Salary means nothing unless you can compare it to the cost of living in each city.
"Salary surveys" mean even less. The people taking these surveys have a vested interest in inflating their salaries, so the results show they are underpaid relative to their peers. When I have taken salary surveys, I report my salary about 50% more than than my real income.
Re:'Nothing' is an exaggeration (Score:2)
There are options to one's lifestyle that matter vis a vis cost of living. If you live frugally in a high cost of living area, you may still be spending more than if you live frugally in a low cost of living area, but you can probably save/invest more money from that high salary, so it may pay off as part of a long term plan to build up capital.
I also realize that inflation can wipe out savings. Any long term plan is something of a gamble. My point is, that one shouldn't be too simplistic about weighing
hint "Cost of Living" (Score:5, Interesting)
I went from $107K just outside Los Angeles to $124K in silicon valley and lost in the deal
Re:hint "Cost of Living" (Score:4, Insightful)
You got the fuck out of LA didn't you?
Wouldn't a sorted table have been more useful ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean really that thing doesn't present information so much as hide it.
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Presenting things as maps is the 21st century method of establishing credibility. It is much cheaper than actually creating an informative graphic with useful data, a la Edward Tufte.
As has been mentioned, this data is not all that useful. One still pretty much makes more money in places that are more expensive to live, but not nearly enough. For instance, in San Jose one might make 25% more than in Hous
now include unemployed tech professionals (Score:1)
The average salary is much much lower if you include tech professionals who earn exactly ZERO.
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You need to look up the definition of 'professional'.
How about disclosure? (Score:1)
Slashdot is owned by Dice Holdings, so a story about a survey by Dice without disclosing that fact is quite shady.
Missing? (Score:2)
Flash? (Score:5, Informative)
Minor rant aside, where I live in the mid-west we are rich with tech companies but the cost of living here is oh so very cozy that ~$70,000 here probably equates to ~$140,000 in Silicon Valley and other parts of the country where the cost of living is high.
Re:Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you spent one day in this town you would apologize for your ignorant comment.
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I grew up in midtown KC. Bullshit on you! Massive piles of bullshit.
Only KC residents think they are diverse. Because they have both Baptists and Methodists in the country club.
And Olatha? Where the tech jobs (such as they are) are. White bread 'burb from hell. Only good thing there was 'The Roundup' nudie bar.
N. KC? OMFG I'm in new Topeka from 'A Boy and His Dog'.
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Prior to 2000 I would have agreed with you.
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My folks and brother and sister still live there. I visit regularly enough. Nothing fundamental has changed. Olatha is still whitebread. N KC still rolls up the sidewalks at 7pm. Johnson county is still a massive cookie cutter burb. KCK is still whitetrash and black ghetto.
About the only thing I noted was they built a new Plaza further out. So the Johnson county people don't have to see a black person.
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Re:Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I just figured out what you mean. You think I live in the state of Kansas, don't you?
If you had any idea how many people I have met who ran like fuck to get out of Missouri, you wouldn't be making this assumption. Almost as many as Minnesota.
If you really think so much of this nation is a world of shit, perhaps you should stop hiding yourself away and get out there and fight for what you think is right.
Self-segregation is what makes this nation work.
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How many?
And yet you think so much of the nation is shit? Your desperate attempts to defend your arguments are devolving into self contradiction.
Re:Flash? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Bullshit.
You've got Sprint, some Aviation related work in Olatha, Black and Veech, the government tit suckers building medical database software and the usual assortment of small businesses building apps for local business.
You should visit N.Cal. We've got single zip codes with 10x the tech as the whole KC area.
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Look, I am not saying that by any stretch of
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Pecker park is not the whole KC area.
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Yeah, I mean, whoever heard of race riots in Boston or LA? Oh, wait. Holy crap you are a moron.
I want to live around people like you! (Score:2)
Based on this post, you sound like such a nice, friendly person. I want to live around people like you.
We've actually had conversations before, so I know you're not normally a complete jerk. Maybe your constipated this morning or something. If I didn't know you, though, your current post would be an example indicating that people from the coasts are ignorant, arrogant assholes.
The truth is, Ward Cleaver would fit in better in the Midwest, Marilyn Manson in California. If your lifestyle is more like Maril
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The "culture" you speak of many times are viewed as rural and backward in the land that they come from - hence the reason those people are leaving. But once it gets here it is "cultured" and "diverse."
For the most part it isn't the affluent who are beating down the doors to get into this country (same goes for Europe - they just have a different group of third world hicks banging at their door).
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That's great if you're the kind of person who fits into the midwest, but what you're getting for your additional money out here is tolerance.
Since when does tolerance mean attacking things you obviously don't know the first thing about?
You get to live in a place where diversity isn't shit upon immediately.
Clearly.
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And when you order something on Amazon or New Egg, they charge you less because you live in the mid-west?
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And when you order something on Amazon or New Egg, they charge you less because you live in the mid-west?
If you buy all your food on Amazon, you are already paying too much.
Plus I don't think Amazon can deliver you a house, apartment, or cheap land yet, even with drones ...
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And when you order something on Amazon or New Egg, they charge you less because you live in the mid-west?
Of course not. The main cost of living difference is housing. By way of example, consider me (I live in the Mountain West; Utah) and one of my colleagues (in Sunnyvale, CA). He bought a house last year for $1.2M. If I bought a comparable house in my area, it would be maybe $150K, probably less. My $400K house would cost at least $7-8M in the bay area. His house cost so much that he can't make the mortgage payments on his (fairly nice, by most standards) Google salary, so he actually rents out his master
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The thing is, suppose your cost of living is indeed half that of SV. Lets assume for you, the cost of living is 40k a year - you are able to save or enjoy 30k a year. Lets assume it's 80k a year in SV. That guy earning 140k a year is still saving 60k a year, and will retire to the mid west much better off.
Also, the other thing that this isn't taking into account is the rate at which you get given shares in companies. Someone working for one of the big SV tech companies, and earning $140k a year is likel
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100k doesn't sound right at all for somebody making 140k a year in non-stock (base+bonus). I would have guessed more around the 30k-40k mark. Quick searches for some well-known Silicon Valley companies corroborate that. Can you support the claim that anybody making 140k should expect 100k of stock?
re: Midwest and tech jobs (Score:3)
As someone who was born and raised in St. Louis, MO -- I can tell you it really depends. In the last decade or so, my opinion is that it's time to get out of St. Louis if you're trying to make a living there doing I.T.
It has several "big players" who hire for tech positions and pay well, but the problem is what's available outside of those options. Enterprise Leasing, for example, has their corporate HQ in St. Louis and employs a lot of I.T. workers. (Some of my best friends worked for them for years.) You'
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The worth of a job is more than just the money.
I'm a junior sysadmin. I live in a nice 1200 sq.ft. plus a finished basement house, two-car garage, shop (that could function as a third garage if I wanted), and a large yard (large enough to take me 50 minutes to cut by hand, which I don't mind). I'm still in a city proper, technically in the suburbs, but very close to a major bus route. I do drive to work and that's 15-20 minutes, depending on the day. I'll be biking next summer along what's mostly bike p
Terrible Map (Score:2)
What an impossible to use clickie-map.
A test list would have been WAY easier to use.
Maybe I'm the only one (Score:2)
Yes, I get that this is a dice slashvertisement, but I appreciate it anyway.
The most useful dice.com site in a long time (Score:2)
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Maybe some of the programmers who worked on that page could fix this mess? Yeah it's far from the greatest page in the history of the interwebs but it is more functional than this one. I'll bet its administrators are more responsive to user feedback as well.
That's because this site is just designed to feed clicks to their real bread and butter. Now keep clicking over there peon.
This map requires Flash Player 8.0 or higher (Score:1)
Have fun with 'This map requires Flash Player 8.0 or higher'
How about including all the states? (Score:2)
The map leaves off Hawaii (and Alaska). Guess we don't count or don't exist.
Mississippi rising? There's a reason. (Score:2)
If you're surprised to see Mississippi taking a leap in salary, don't be. The reason is because tech salaries in Mississippi have been atrociously low.
It is changing. But not fast enough.
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Re. the Dice salary map:
An improved map will be entering beta test soon.
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What? You must be clueless.