These are in Fort Collins, CO. It's the 151st largest metro area in the US, so it's not really a tech jobs hub. Getting up to $150K plus equity and benefits wouldn't be a great salary in San Jose or Seattle, but it's not out of line with a lot of tech jobs in less populated metro areas.
Even in New York and Boston there are a lot of programmers and other midlevel ICs making making ~$150k. Not everyone is lucky enough to work at Google.
I work in New York at a tech company with more than 200 employees that's a household name among below 50s and considered a hot brand and I only get paid 150.
Last I checked, $150k/year was enough to afford a decent house in a place like Penfield. It's a completely different world. I'm talking about NYC metro. Interestingly it seems like just about all of New England is more expensive than comparable areas in Western NY.
Basically all places in the US with anything resembling urban density and don’t have a reputation for decline have been on this housing cost trajectory for several years now.
Most people seem to, which is a thorn in the side of anyone who has lived outside of NYC in the big beautiful state of NY. It's annoying having to regularly clarify "the state, not the city".
California outside of LA/SD/SF is dramatically different (with the exception of some coastal areas). Even then housing and rental competition can be pretty bad. My brother in law has done 4 hour round trip commutes to the Bay Area for contracting work while managing to find an area with affordable housing.
Yup — they’re out that way and it’s still pricey. It’s unreal — the last time I heard the subject of renting here come up there were only 3-4 houses available in the whole town.
ASIC design is a much more ratified skill set than you'd need for a normal programming job. I always found it sad that salaries in the hardware industry are so comparatively low.
It's even crazier when you consider that readily available knowledge for cutting edge hardware is much more scarce compared to software. There are no massive communities of knowledgeable people all trying to show you what you are doing wrong.
Especially for something like silicon design, there is virtually zero knowledge available outside of institutions.
I think in some ways this actually is better though.
I find that when I want technical info about hardware-specific topics, I do not find the same kind of dumpster-fire articles like I would about say, ReactJS, or something similarly trendy.
Its always some basic html/css website with extremely well written technical information from an old-head that is a master of whatever he is talking about.
I understand what you mean by better but you have to admit the much lower compensation is weird given how much higher the bar is to be an SME and how many fewer the engineers are.
There is nothing "sad" about it. It is simple economics. The return on investment (ROI) is so much higher in software, compared to hardware. Correspondingly, the profits margins are way higher in software, compared to hardware.
Related: When you look at salaries for robotics engineers who work in a factory, the salaries are so much lower than you would expect. Plus, your factory is probably in a rural area due to very cheap land prices.
One more: Anything "embedded" usually pays surprisingly low salaries considering their skill-level (much higher than mine!).
> There is nothing "sad" about it. It is simple economics. The return on investment (ROI) is so much higher in software, compared to hardware. Correspondingly, the profits margins are way higher in software, compared to hardware.
I've seldom seen a more classic example of econ bro arrogance than this comment. Apparently economics doesn't just tell us which neoliberal policies to support, it also tells us when we can be happy and sad too?
There are relatively fewer employers seeking hardware skillsets compared to employers seeking software skillsets. People may say, "there are way more software engineers though! hardware is SO hard!!" as a counter, but they don't realize there is a proportionally crazy amount of software employers out there trying to hire engineers.
Your pay is capped by what you make your employer (the ROI you mention), but actually determined by how hard it is to replace you. Hard being defined as the difference between "# of Positions" and "# of Employable People". You could make your employer 10 million a year but you won't see a dime of that if anyone on earth can replace you within 5 minutes.
The fact that rural areas pay less has more to do with lower bargaining power of the employees than it does the cost of living. If one quits, the literal million dollar question is where are they going to go work instead? Is there another major manufacturer out here in the middle of nowhere? "Shut up, take what you get." Many build out in these areas for precisely this reason.
If the rate hikes cause a mass startup extinction we'd see an equalization of pay.
Housing in the NE isn't amazing, but it's dramatically better than the bay area. You need to make 225+ (300 realistically) in the bay area to be a home owner, and even then you're living in a marginal area with a lot of compromises
I don’t think 225 or even 300 would be enough. Especially if you have kids. I don’t think people truly realize how home ownership has become completely out of reach for most, even for tech workers.
My wife and I live in a suburb of the Sacramento, CA area and have a combined household income of $400k and we have 20% saved for a $700k house (avg price in this area). But the mortgage costs would still be insane. We could either pay $2500/to rent a nice house (3-4bed 2b 2000sqft,we have no kids) or $4000-5000/mo for pretty much the same.
At this point in the housing market, buying makes no sense. I wish people would stop pushing the "American dream" of NEEDING to own a home. Homeownership is not a necessity, it is a luxury.
This American dream philosophy has caused very unfair policies where people who make $60k qualify for housing assistance and can buy houses for 0 down because the govt pays for some of their down payment[0].
If I can't enjoy the luxury of owning a home, why do my tax dollars pay for that luxury for those who earn less? I'm not anti socialism at all, either. I'm just stating that home ownership is a luxury in this day and age. Pay for people to live somewhere, yes. Provide them with mental health care, yes. I don't mind my tax dollars being used for those necessities. Helping with home ownership? In a market that already has fierce competition and low inventory? It's ridiculous.
I have often seen people on HN with mind boggling (to me) incomes to whom houses that seem relatively very inexpensive are inaccessible. Why is that? Naively I would think you could rent for 30k/y and save enough in just a few years to buy a house without a mortgage
At the same time people start earning those incomes, they are also paying $20k to $30k per year per kid for daycare. Couple that with $50k+ retirement savings (max 401k and HSA) and 2 $50k cars, and it can seem tight.
Also, the higher the pay, the rarer the source of income, and so lower probability of replacing your income if you lose your job. That means you might want to put down more than 20% to ensure your monthly mortgage payment is still possible even if your income drops by 30% to 50%. Such as if the wife has pregnancy complications and cannot work, etc.
People always crap on tech for being useless while ignoring that 95% of fintech companies exist solely and completely as a vehicle to generate money for a very small group of people.
>> "Many high-tech companies have relocated to Fort Collins because of the resources of Colorado State University and its research facilities. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, Broadcom, Beckman Coulter, Microsoft, Rubicon Water and Pelco all have offices in Fort Collins. Other industries include clean energy, bioscience, and agri-tech businesses."
Maybe not a hub yet, but it's headed that way. It's also only an hour away from Denver.
Most of these companies are there because of the HP campus set up there in the 70s/80s. HP liked setting up offices in small towns near colleges where they were the essentially the only tech employer. Broadcom bought HP's fab facilities after they divested. Microsoft started an office there because they wanted to hire optical mice engineers who were working for HP.
Source: Used to work at the Microsoft office in Fort Collins (HoloLens group). Some of the folks I worked with were the original folks that set up the office.
It's sadly been moving a bit the other way. HP/HPE have significantly downsized and Microsoft's office is pretty tiny. I"m not sure AMD even has an office here anymore, if so, they took down the sign on the building it used to be on.
HP, Broadcom, Intel, and AMD used to all be on the same intersection.
People who have been to Fort Collins know that that city needs a _lot_ of infrastructure work to become anything more than it is now. FC already bulges under the pressure of college move-in/out and tourism there is fairly big for Coloradans. I also don't think residents are the kinds that would go for large expansion. Denver still has more than enough room to grow before they push out into the smaller towns, and if they did Boulder would go first since it already has a startup ecosystem IMO.
Fort Collins is not near a San Jose or Seattle level of tech employment but then, neither is anywhere else in the USA. Any tech worker who ends up there won't be hurting for employment opportunities, especially if they are willing to commute to Denver or Boulder.
Just don't be surprised when the cost-of-living ends up higher then one might expect. Housing is still a good deal by Bay Area or NYC standards, though.
There's a lot of housing in the $500K range in Fort Collins. I can speak with some authority on this situation; I run the MLS for Northern Colorado. :-)
edit: MLS = Multiple Listing Service, that thing you do when you "list" a house.
Keep in mind the posted salary is negotiable. It's a rookie mistake to assume that if you are offered the job, your only option is to take the offer at the amount listed in the public job offer.
Negotiating salary well is an important career skill.
That has worked for me precisely never; in fact I gave up negotiating over job offers at all because what I always wanted was more time off, and all I got was "sorry, we only distribute vacation time based on seniority".
Median house price is still $590k there, which is $4200 a month plus taxes and PMI. $150k is $8800 a month take home pay after taxes (including CO state). Making $150k and still spending more than half your post-tax income (after taxes/PMI/repairs/HOA) on housing is wild.
It's not unfair to say Fort Collins isn't a tech hub, but it's also not too bad. Trivia: One of the first non-CA Hewlett-Packard plants is down the road in Loveland. They also have a big campus in Fort Collins, which is where the Broadcom site is now.
I am from Colorado and went to school in Fort Collins. It maybe be small nationally, but it’s probably the 4th biggest tech area in CO after Denver, DTC, and Colorado Springs. Cost of living is surprisingly high unless you live in student housing.
For apples-to-apples, you’d look at Denver. We’re talking about the state’s 4th largest city which is 65 miles away from the capital and otherwise in the middle of nowhere. It’s extremely expensive for what it is
My daughter had grand plans of "renting a big house with a bunch of her friends" for her first year out of high school in Fort Collins. A couple of weeks ago she told me how all of her friends now plan on staying at home. Apparently she looked up rental prices. :-)
