Startup talent in San Francisco gets paid top dollar - but how far does that dollar actually go?
Fantastic piece from my colleague Kevin Dowd on the true impact of startup salaries. The analysis compares the salary itself (expressed as a percentage of SF rates) to the cost of living for a given city (again as a percentage of SF).
Results are pretty stark! SF startup talent makes the most top line salary, but their dollars get eaten up quickly by housing, food, transportation, and a hundred other things.
Take SF vs Chicago, for instance.
Chicago startup talent earns 92% of the median salary of a San Francisco worker. But their overall cost of living is only 56% of SF. So on a relative basis, talent in Chicago has more purchasing power than their ostensibly higher-paid counterparts in the Bay Area.
Worth your time to read the full piece (link in first comment below) and walk through Kevin's methodology. He combined multiple measures of living costs, including data from the Census and the Economic Policy Institute, with our recent salary deep dive in the State of Startup Compensation report.
Another feather in the remote or distributed work cap. Hiring in less traditional tech towns can be a win-win for the company and employee (company saves on headline salary, employee gains on actual purchasing power).
(Personally happy right now as a San Francisco resident, but makes ya think!)
#cartadata #salary #startups #compensation #costofliving #remotework
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