Unless you dog. Dog is the main thing I really miss about my current life.
Only the fresh fruits and vegetables suck, everything else is just fine.
I could get them delivered also, if I so chose.
Plenty of city people have dog. You can also dog.
That is 90% of everything I buy!
Anything that doesn’t need to be fresh I could just order on Amazon for all I care.
Man, you want to talk inflation, I remember (quite a few) years back, you were making slightly less than I was as Cabin crew? It’d be surprising to find a tech job in NY nowadays that paid that, and wasn’t a bit rubbish. And the way you put it, you were relatively well paid for the position. (Though to be fair, we were both pushing past six figures.)
I was underpaid for my position, moreso than I even realized at the time. The rest of the “pay” was basically lottery tickets. =P
Fair enough, though part of that is due to the high cost of living in NYC. You need to pay that much to make it worth while for people who have no particular love affair with NYC to make it worth their while to live and work there.
I mean, I could get a tech job in South Dakota as well, which has a ridiculously small cost of living compared to both NYC and Boston (or Massachusetts “MetroWest,” which is more accurately describing where my home and office are and is cheaper still than Boston proper) and live like a king on a salary less than what I’m making here, but I wouldn’t want to live there because it’s South Dakota.
NYC has fairly little attraction to me as a place I’d want to live on a daily basis. Definitely a “nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there,” but that’s just my personal tastes. Different people may feel otherwise, and that’s cool.
Well, it depends on where you live. If you happen to live in the middle of Boston itself, you’d get most, if not all, of that, and at a cost of living 14-35% less than NYC.
Now I live outside the city, so it’s not exactly apples-to-apples here (though the cost of living is even less than inside the city). However, I can walk to a lake with a small beach from my house. I can bike to a couple of different parks as well as a full-blown Audubon nature sanctuary. I rarely order food delivery, so that doesn’t matter much to me at all.
You may have me beat on the limited run movie thing, I’ll give you that, though I do know of some limited run art theaters that aren’t too far from me (admittedly they do require driving), I probably don’t have the number and variety of them you do. Same for the fireworks – I’ll need to go into Boston to see them. But it’s a trade-off I decided was worth it.
That’s your opinion. However, those things you mentioned that I may not have easy access to myself, while admittedly cool, don’t cross over into the “need everyday access to them” status for me personally.
See, I get a lot of what you like, or at least the aspects of that that I care about where I am. But that’s just a “different strokes for different folks” thing.
I’ll agree with you somewhat on the yard thing. It’s nice to have a little place to play with your kids in (and parks don’t always cut it, depending on what you’re doing). But I purchased this house back when I was still married, we wanted a yard to have a place to play with our kids, and I’m holding on to it so my kid has a familiar place to come home to when he visits.
Walking to get groceries is nice, I admit. Is it worth double my cost of living to me? Nope, but if it’s worth it to you, more power to you.
But would that apply to any random person in NYC?
True. And a fair whack of mine was bonuses, which ain’t lottery tickets, but they’re damned close, and that job basically made sure your social life was basically either an everywhere-and-where-possible gig, or nothing at all. Missed a lot of parties and birthdays.
Then again, with what I’d make now, I’d fucking kill someone to have a steady, well-paid job like that again. Not to mention the benefits package. But some idiot had to go and get a job instead of a degree, like a fucking schmuck.
Six figures… I wish I actually liked tech beyond tinkering with gaming PCs and the occasional bit of coding for amusement. I took two semesters of programming in high school to get out of math class and all it taught me was that I would be miserable in the tech industry.
You think I like sitting at a desk all day? I work as little as possible and just want to never have to work again.
Yeah, I get that. My job is kind of the same way, though at least the salary is high enough I don’t mind having some of it being “lottery tickets.” 
It helps that the company is profitable, so it’s not like it’s burning cash like drunken sailors on shore leave.
I think the big factor is that while cost of living is super high, so even super high salaries are a “wash” in day-to-day life… there’s a specific benefit.
The cost of everything else outside of the city isn’t high. So while I pay a crazy ton of money in rent… flying to Europe or Asia, traveling for weeks at a time, buying things online, etc… are ridiculously cheap in proportion to my total burn rate.
New York money gets you a lot further any time you’re outside the city. Saving the same percentage of income against that burn rate builds up a nest egg in a hurry.
Granted, it also skews perspective. Seeing beer on a menu at a bar for $5 seems like crazy talk.
And to be fair, if I got enough pay at the right time in my life (which isn’t now for various personal reasons I’d rather not get into), I’d be willing to move to NYC or Silicon Valley or Seattle or whatever (though out of the 3, and without looking at more detailed stuff, I’d say NYC is probably at the top of the list due to it being the closest to my roots in Massachusetts and on the east coast and Silicon Valley is the lowest due to it being, well, Silicon Valley).
$5 beer, is that crazy talk “expensive” or crazy talk, “man, that’s cheap”? 
My gut tells me the latter, but I could be wrong.
Of course, bottom line no one wants to work, but you should at least be able to stand your job since you have to do it. I’m one of those people who could be paid ludicrous amounts of money to work an assembly line job and I’d quit because I’d be miserably bored. I just have the problem of not knowing what I wanted to do until I was thirty so now I’m a decade behind in the field I’m finally interested in.
See, I’m weird in that I actually do enjoy sitting at my desk and coding. Granted, I enjoy other things too and sitting at the desk is what pays for those other things, but I generally don’t mind the time I spend working at my job.
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When you guys talk tech position what does that even entail? Are these even coding jobs anymore? Are you sitting there creating lines? Or if it higher level concepts: making sure a project or thing is setup and working and being optimized, so you just mostly have to remember how coding works so you can talk with the person explaining why their shit isn’t right.
Put another way, if I want to encourage someone to get into a field like this, am I just hooking them up to be a coder?
And by the same token if I’m a designer in the physical space with a desire to get into more trxh and electronics and how things work on the software side is there a major hurdle to overcome in being good at writing code? Or is it more about having knowledge of how orhers generate code, in order to speak the language and push ideas and strategies?
I have zero interest in a career writing code. But I do have strong interest in expanding my abilities of design to include designing solutions in digital space. I’m wondering if it’s time to see the changing tides and escape the tyranny of consumerism industry. Certainly don’t see physical product designers making much the better of $85k, even in NYC. Then when you want to move up you become a manager and essentially stop designing. Maybe that reaches into the $100-150k range at a good agency.
So while no amount of salary will compel me to transition from CAD monkey to code monkey, I’ve seen many people moving from doing CAD and 3D printing into better paying UI/UX roles from the physical world. And I’m wondering if, by knowing more of the core science and systems there are deeper levels to it.
Coders make this money.
Product managers/project managers who are technical and have domain knowledge also make this money.
System architects who coded enough to understand things make this money.
Team Leads and managers who did IT/coding enough to understand things make this money.
The real money is in either being an excellent coder, or being a manager/designer who used to be an excellent coder/IT person.
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So it still comes from a sensible progression then. But at least one isn’t doomed to be a coder for life.
I still think my best prospects are developing and launching products of my own design. But I’ve been considering what direction to push younger folks (aka relatives) into. I’m driven, so I’m not worried about making it work whatever I do. But without that drive, as Awkwafina once said: “your shit art don’t pay bills it eats ramen.”
As for NYC (or other city) debate… I think I can live anywhere. Spending time in NYC I think living there is a great idea. But for someone who has grown up in a city or gotten used to it long enough to not get sticker shock over the rent, there’s probably no convincing them to go buy a house.
If i was paying rent regardless, I’d rather figure how to earn enough to live in an apt in NYC. Ive done the msth over and over. It’s not that much signficantly more than rent in the rest of New England if one discounts the cost of a car. And so if the small difference remaining isn’t covered by increased wages then at least you can justify the cost with Scott’s argument of paying for all kinds of opportunities that you won’t get anywhere outside town.
I would go to NYC strictly because the improved music scene, food, and other events.
The part that I get squeamish about is DevOps is a loaded term, some people mean tools developer, some people mean development infrastructure IT.
I know sometimes it can be helpful to be more explicit in a headline, but I sort of just like when companies are like “we’re looking for a software engineer” then seeing if there is a good fit. But it might be misleading. I’ve been looking around a bit the last couple days and there are engineering jobs that are like “you’ll be working on experimental technologies” then in the description it just sounds like a tooling role.
The worst is seeing product designer and then finding out its a software or money product.