[amyjess]

> Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small.

That's... aggravating. You'd think their system would treat all locations in the same Core Based Statistical Area as the same. Better yet, treat all locations in the same Combined Statistical Area as the same; in fact, the definition of a CSA is a set of adjacent CBSAs with interconnected commuting patterns.

And the data is all freely available in machine-readable form from the Census Bureau's website [0], so there's no excuse to not use it.

In fact, just this past week, as a personal project, I've written a bunch of code to parse a whole ton of census data, combining CBSA/NECTA data, data from Summary File 1 (i.e. population, sorted by a number of demographics), and Gazetteer data (for land area, so I can calculate population density). Over the weekend, I'm going to take a stab at including data from the American Community Survey too.

[0] http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html

[ernstvn]

amyjess, thanks for pointing out the CBSA; I'll admit I had not seen it before. When we set out to develop the calculator we wanted it to work globally, and focused on that. This will be a helpful way to improve it specifically in the US, so I'm adding it to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24