[attah_]

What is it with people and not understanding percentages? "How Much Less Do Techies Get Paid Outside the Bay?" "SF Bay Area 100%" "Miami -88%" So people in Miami are paying to work? And even if it was meant to be relative to a baseline (which is not what it says!); i have a very hard time believing that they get only 12% the pay in Miami compared to SF.

[gsaines]

Yeah, this was completely my bad. Any chance you'd like to proof future posts for stupid mistakes like this? :P I joke, but I'm writing 2-4k words per week, and the sheer number of simple arithmetic calculations makes it tough to catch even big mistakes.

Seriously, though, if you know of a way to proof posts (services, forums, etc), I'd be interested. What I need is an editor as a service. The blog is just a hobby, so I can't afford a real professional editor.

[attah_]

1-(300/160) comes out correct if rounded. I.e. 300 is 188% of 160, therefore you are making 88% less. That's not how percentages work!

Wow. Just wow. Is there really a mistake this big here?

[TacticalCoder]

> Wow. Just wow. Is there really a mistake this big here?

Yup TFA is misleading and arguably plain incorrect.

If you make $200K in L.A. and $300K in SV, you need to use seriously creative math to deduce that: "How Much Less Do Techies Get Paid Outside the Bay? -50%".

Literally TFA says you're paid "minus 50% less".

Negatives (in both sentences and numbers) are a bitch, especially when there are two negatives or more.

TFA should say "How much more would you get paid by moving to The Bay?" and not use negative percentage.

(raw median)

"How much more would a L.A. dev ($200K) make by moving to The Bay ($300K)? 50% more"

That'd be clearer.

[attah_]

The fault goes deeper; they say X percent less counted in percentage points of the compared thing and not the baseline. If you then have multiple rows, the uselessness becomes evident.

Is it some cultural or linguistical thing where it always has to be X amount more or less and never "Y% of"?