I sometimes have to remind myself that this level of leisure is basically what "traditional retirement" looks like (but with like a quarter-mil/year income + benefits) and that gives me get a sense of perspective when I'm feeling stressed.
[1] A key thing that makes this true is that commute + forced office time is like 3-4x the active working time I average working from home. So it's not hard to beat the Amazon 400k total comp quote when weighted against hours - I honestly beat that at my first remote gig years ago as a relatively junior dev! And I have the same engineering output more or less.
I feel sorry for people in the service industry who have hour-long commutes because they can't afford to live closer. But that is not the case for tech workers.
I think this is an exaggeration. Not everyone who works at FAANG companies is making $300K+/yr or whatever the current figure being quoted is, although senior people probably are. For rank-and-file employees, even engineers, your choices "within walking distance" of a FAANG office typically are: 1. A tiny apartment or townhome, 2. A larger townhome with roommates, or 3. Unaffordable. Numbers 1 and 2 are fine I guess if you're young and don't have kids, but I'm not willing to move my family into a sardine can in Mountain View or Cupertino.
So yea, you can afford to live almost anywhere, but only if you adjust your lifestyle drastically.
Not necessarily. If you're an E4 with kids, good luck paying $150k a year for a 3br apartment in walking distance of Facebook's NYC office.
Also, you can start bean counting and consider the costs of housing with a short commute vs the longer commute and realize that the market knows what it's doing and it becomes a wash comp-wise.
Sounds like a win-win to me. Especially considering that the decrease in cost of living probably far surpasses de decrease in salary.
The main thing that is cheaper in cheaper cities is housing. Most of the other stuff people buy costs the same everywhere. If you move to a cheaper place and have a lower income, your non-housing expenses will become a larger portion of your spending.
Once you've worked in tech for several years in the Bay Area or Seattle you will generally be well off enough to buy a home in a nice area and still be able to save or invest a large amount every year. Housing will feel expensive but everything else will feel cheap -- even new luxury cars will cost a fraction of your income. Early retirement will be a definite possibility if you have a basic amount of self control over your spending. And if you have children, they will have access to all the opportunities that some of the country's largest metropolitan areas offer.
I disagree. But it depends on how less the remote companies pay. Are we talking about 80% of the salary of a RTO company? 60%? 30%?
The close it gets, the better the math works out for remote companies. Moving away from metropolitan areas incurs in a huge decrease of expenses, and a huge increase in quality of life. But of course, it depends on the salary you'd make working remote.
Frankly most contractors do not make as much as FAANG employees, and even if they did, they would end up keeping less of it because of the taxes and paying for their own health care etc. Even contractors contracted by FAANG companies make less money than full-time employees at those companies.
