I like this article but there are a few things worth mentioning:
Total job postings can be wildly inaccurate. I know for example, Google will post a job opening, but you have no idea how many teams are actually hiring. It's much more likely you'll see one or two job openings in LA and the Bay Area, but the latter will have five times as many teams that are actually hiring.
Second is the fact that office flexibility matters a lot. Having to be in an office in Santa Monica 5 days a week is going to drastically impact your lifestyle compared to say, 2 days a week, in which you could live in a much less expensive place.
I live in Orange County and while housing is not cheap, what you can get for 2 million bucks would likely cost 4 million in the bay area.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm curious about the job data as well. I mentioned this further up in the thread, but when I moved from the Bay to Austin back in 2020, I did some searches for software engineering, UX, and PM roles and what I found was a lot more skewed. IE, Austin had massively fewer roles (if I recall, 5%) compared to the Bay.
But, when I ran this analysis, the differences were much less pronounced. Do you know of any way to correct for this bias? Clearly searching on public job boards doesn't appear to be getting at the reality.
Comments
I like this article but there are a few things worth mentioning:
Total job postings can be wildly inaccurate. I know for example, Google will post a job opening, but you have no idea how many teams are actually hiring. It's much more likely you'll see one or two job openings in LA and the Bay Area, but the latter will have five times as many teams that are actually hiring.
Second is the fact that office flexibility matters a lot. Having to be in an office in Santa Monica 5 days a week is going to drastically impact your lifestyle compared to say, 2 days a week, in which you could live in a much less expensive place.
I live in Orange County and while housing is not cheap, what you can get for 2 million bucks would likely cost 4 million in the bay area.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm curious about the job data as well. I mentioned this further up in the thread, but when I moved from the Bay to Austin back in 2020, I did some searches for software engineering, UX, and PM roles and what I found was a lot more skewed. IE, Austin had massively fewer roles (if I recall, 5%) compared to the Bay.
But, when I ran this analysis, the differences were much less pronounced. Do you know of any way to correct for this bias? Clearly searching on public job boards doesn't appear to be getting at the reality.