| > Most people do not live in the bay area for various reasons and salaries like that are extremely uncommon outside of there and the upper echelons of the NY finance market. As someone who has actual experience with this, it's easier to get a high paying job in those areas because that's where the hard problems are being solved. Hard problems are usually solved in high cost of living areas because you need to pay your employees a lot of money and those employees usually prefer to live in high cost of living areas. I actually have personal experience with this. Yes, the cost of living argument applies if your salary is at the low end of the scale. If you're solving hard problems at a company that values that kind of stuff, then you can makes just as much anywhere else. I actually have personal experience with this too. No, the cost of living argument does not apply at the high end of the scale. Cost of living starts to become irrelevant as you make more money. Sure, rent in NY is $60k per year vs $24k per year in Oklahoma, but it's just not that important if you're making $1m+ year. |
Second off a lot of the high cost of living has nothing to do with solving hard problems, if it did the civil engineers would have solved the hard problem of fixing the housing market in SF. What you are essentially arguing is Tom Cruise 2.0 makes 6 million a film after a few years in the industry so therefor everyone else sucks which you can tell because they don't make 6 million. Being generous I would claim it's a survivorship bias.