Who the hell says "nah, $100,000 to $150,000 isn't nearly enough money, but I'd get into software development for $200,000"? Once you reach 200k you might run into a backwards-bending supply curve: you pay engineers so much they just retire early and you have fewer engineers in the long run. So while I would never complain about a pay raise, I also don't think it has much to do with the shortage of engineers.
And don't even talk to me about "$100,000 isn't that much in the Bay Area". Even in the Bay Area software engineers easily make double the median household income.
>And don't even talk to me about "$100,000 isn't that much in the Bay Area". Even in the Bay Area software engineers easily make double the median household income.
I've never earned $100k in the Bay Area, but I can tell you that I had to pay $1100 to rent a single room in a shared house for a month, and that was getting a good deal compared to what I saw on Craigslist and Padmapper.
Yes, that level of real-estate cost does discourage my taking a job in the Bay Area.
At $100k you can spend 30% of your monthly gross income to pay a rent of $2500/month, which will just about get you a one or two bedroom apartment depending on how fashionable a neighborhood you want to live in or what distance to work you're willing to commute. That is lunacy. Consider that most people don't even make that much, not even in the Bay Area, and that the people who are capable of making $100k could get a much nicer life for it elsewhere.
For instance, if I could live in a decently cheap area while earning $100k/year, I would be able to save up enough to retire early after a while.
This is quite true, which is why we now have to optimize the rather obnoxious measure of ratio between average salary and average house cost. That is, the tradeoff isn't perfectly linear, but going towards either the cheapest land or the highest salaries doesn't reach the optimal point on the map. It ends up being counterintuitive, data-intensive, and bizarre to figure out what really works.
