I met a combination of old friends and readers during a recent trip to Silicon Valley. Software engineers here in Boston never have trouble earning enough to put food on the table, but they seem to struggle with finding a meaningful job. In Silicon Valley, however, it seems that there are a lot of opportunities to work on flagship products for companies that are household names. A former student showed me what he had accomplished by taking my iPhone 6 Plus (now partially disabled due to iOS 10 freezes; e.g., I had to power it down and restart to get the camera to display something other than a blank black screen) and showing me the “People” album in which on-phone software (i.e., not in-cloud software) had sorted my images according to facial similarity. Another friend explained his role in facilitating the use of GPUs by machine learning software. A reader talked about the features of Adobe Photoshop that he had built.
Despite the higher value of what they are creating, the material lifestyle of Silicon Valley engineers is not better than what a Bostonian counterpart would enjoy. Two-career couples might live in a one-bedroom apartment in Redwood City, for example, and commute down to Menlo Park or Palo Alto. Higher salaries are consumed by the higher California tax rates (13.3 percent is the maximum state income tax rate; a Silicon Valley engineer might see a marginal rate of 11.3 percent) and the higher cost of living. Leisure time is constrained and/or consumed by epic traffic jams (weeknight extended family dinner in Oakland? Could be a 1.5-hour trip for someone starting in Palo Alto).
My conclusion: a software engineers who want to consume more can save themselves the move from Boston to Silicon Valley; software engineers who want to do something that others might notice should probably move out there.
Out here in Indianapolis, we have a surprisingly large and growing group of places to build software. But it’s mostly business software such as marketing automation, ERP, helping manage various aspects of healthcare. We have a bunch of startups suddenly serving itty bitty business niches too, like one that is all about email signature marketing. Your work is almost certainly never going to be something the wide world knows about. And we lack amenities on the scale of the valley or Boston. But if you want a quiet life, a decent place to raise your family, and sane costs of living, this is the place. When I tell my software-dev friends on the coasts how little my house cost, they cry.
I think more and more cities of Indy’s size and scale have growing software communities.
If your two-career couple in Redwood City is earning a combined income $320K or so (not unrealistic if, say one is a med professional and the other a software developer) than it’s realistic they could afford a house there (a number are selling for $1.5M). They’ll both have to likely keep working when the kids come along, unless the stock-option fairy shows up.
Traffic in Silicon Valley has become noticeably worse very recently. I-280 between SF & SJ use to be pretty clear except at peak rush hours, but it now becomes a parking lot as early as 3pm. I’m not looking forward to an additional 12K commuters piling on it when Apple’s donut is completed.
Never seen this “two-career couple” you speak of. Mountain View seems dominated by middle age, single male Google employees who are vesting in peace. The most rewarding job is a project which has never been done before, which you conceive & do on your own, then use for the rest of your life. I use plenty of former projects every day, but never anything created by a former employer. From this standpoint, a staid job on the east coast with much more disposable income & time would have been a better match. Helas, most people can’t finish a project without a boss telling them what to do.
In the mid-to-late ’80s, I worked as a software engineer for a large defense contractor with offices along and around Rt. 128 outside of Boston. Back then, my 30-mile commute from the north shore was a not-unbearable 45 mins. Until the winter of 1988, when the drive home during one blizzard took harrowing five hours. That was my last winter in MA and have been in FL ever since where salaries are much lower, but so is the cost of housing, and we “get paid in sunshine.”
Two-career couples would not have to drive to extended family dinner in Oakland from Palo Alto. The trip to the closest relative for typical Silicon Valley engineer would require at least 12 hours flight to the other country.
@jack crossfire: Mountain View seems dominated by middle age, single male Google employees
Yes, that’s pretty much true. Census.gov lists Mountain View at 51% male; while Boston, for instance, is 48% male.
But then you have to winter in Boston. I like snow on my schedule (trips to Tahoe). I left New England 38 years ago and have never looked back.