> A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid.
The average salary for a "software developer" job posting in my city (Charlotte, NC) is $101k. The average income in Charlotte is $53k. The median home value is $167k. 60% of the value of a home in a year is pretty good.
I've also lived in Sydney, Mannheim, San Francisco, and Seattle, and I noticed similar economics in each of these places (where the salary of software developers tended to be quite high relative to the average income). Do you perhaps live somewhere with a very different trend?
I don't know when you lived in those cities, but things have evidently changed. I've lived in Sydney and Seattle. Median home price in Sydney is currently ~AUD$1 million and median home price in the Seattle area has reached ~USD$0.5 million. Average developer salaries in those cities are certainly not 60% of the value of a home.
I didn't mean to imply that in each city, a software developer makes more than half of the price of a home in a year. What I am asserting is that, in contrast to the previous post, software developers can afford homes in these (very expensive) cities and they can do so at a much higher rate than the average resident.
An average software developer earns about $85,000 in Sydney, so you're right, they're priced out of the central city's market. Senior software engineers make $100-150k, so even they make only up to 15% of a median downtown home.
I lived in Macquarie Park, a suburb of Sydney (which is ~20 minutes by public transit from the center of the city). The median price for a house there is $619k. That's well within reach for a senior engineer, although admittedly more of a stretch for an average developer.
Software engineer salaries in Seattle average $111k. As you've said, the median home price there is about $500k, which is very much attainable for someone earning six figures. The average income in Seattle is $37k, showing that (just like in Charlotte) software developers make about 3x as much as the average resident, and are in fact one of the few groups not yet priced out of central housing.
I should also note that the $53k income is household income. Median personal income is $32k, meaning that a software developer makes over 3x the salary of a normal Charlotte resident.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/10/australias-m...
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/king-county...