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Thanks MM, awesome info! Do you the figures are fairly similar in Texas, Colorado and NY/NJ? I think we're down to these options. I've been doing research with platforms such as Numbeo but I don't know how accurate it is.
LA Metro - $150k per year gross for family of 4
SF/SV Metro - $200k per year gross for family of 4
SD Metro - $130k per year gross for family of 4
Other coastal parts of CA not within major metros - about $120k per year gross for family of 4
Central Valley - $90k per year gross for family of 4
Desert hot eastern part near Arizona - about $70k per year gross for family of 4. Gas is still stupid expensive even if you're in say, Needles.
Thanks MM, awesome info! Do you the figures are fairly similar in Texas, Colorado and NY/NJ? I think we're down to these options. I've been doing research with platforms such as Numbeo but I don't know how accurate it is.
Texas is about 30% cheaper. Colorado is expensive, if you're anywhere near Denver or in the mountains it's probably only about 10-15% cheaper. If you want to live in rural east Colorado out in the windy high plains where there's no one and nothing but dust bowl ghost towns every few hundred kilometers... it's very inexpensive there, but again it's rural and very boring flat brown land. NY is almost as expensive as LA and you can't have a car in NYC realistically. New Jersey is moderately more affordable but still expensive and there's a lot of problems there... high crime, water pollution, toxic waste dumps, pricey toll roads and very high taxes on EVERYTHING, even more so than CA or NY or IL. I wouldn't really recommend NJ (especially the northern part near NYC) except to maybe visit a couple places and skedaddle up on out of there.
One thing I would do if I were a non-American looking to relocate internationally to the USA would be to talk to a relocation expert who understands the United States. It might not be the wisest idea to choose where to live based upon feedback from a basketball forum, even if contributors sincerely are trying to help.
> 2023
> still wageslaving
^does wfh with little work to do qualify as NEET? I mean like making six figures not having to travel to an office pretty much living it up living the NEET lifestyle but still technically employed and paid very well.
also, caught you on that burner, Mark Celibate
yeah feel like I'm halfway there working from home... feel much more energized working from home 6-7 hours a day making well into six figures as opposed to driving to the office every day trying to work while Shaniqua is yelling on the phone and arguing with her boo-thang in the cubicle next to you for 8 hours a day.
Speaking of, some lunatic recruiter called me the other day (I'm always willing to listen in case there's something better out there). Call was going ok until I told her I was working remote, and she said "Oh how does it feel to only work a few hours a day"...assuming that all WFH'ers dont actually work. I could tell this was not going to go well
Yeah, that's one thing I definitely don't agree with Elon Musk and the Boomer GOPs like Sean Hannity about.yeah feel like I'm halfway there working from home... feel much more energized working from home 6-7 hours a day making well into six figures as opposed to driving to the office every day trying to work while Shaniqua is yelling on the phone and arguing with her boo-thang in the cubicle next to you for 8 hours a day.
Speaking of, some lunatic recruiter called me the other day (I'm always willing to listen in case there's something better out there). Call was going ok until I told her I was working remote, and she said "Oh how does it feel to only work a few hours a day"...assuming that all WFH'ers dont actually work. I could tell this was not going to go well
I'm very pro-WFH and my livelihood pretty much depends on it at this point. It's either that or government dole for me.
Yeah onsite is pretty much a no go for me at this point too. It's not even actually going onsite that's the problem, I don't mind making a reasonable commute and sitting in a cubicle if I like the work and the pay is good.
The problem, atleast in IT, is that the talent pool for working onsite seems to have dropped off a cliff post-COVID. All the good talent refuses to come onsite, so you will be guaranteed to be working with the dregs of society. The last place I worked onsite was a large, reputable company so I thought that I'd be working with good people. Nope. One of our main engineers was arrested for his third DUI the month before we hired him, and would randomly disappear for hours at a time. The only people we could interview were sh!tty people from India who sucked, or Lagos, Nigeria con artists. Everyday there was a major outage, because they had terrible talent and nobody could actually execute anything properly in a maintenance window. And these were for highly "specialized" positions. in the more general, non IT departments ... it felt like most of the employees were a couple IQ points higher than qualifying for going on "re " disability. I got out of there real quick, once I realized I was going to be overworked/over-relied upon very soon being one of the few competent employees they could actually get their hands on.
that's how a lot of sh!tty IT departments operate these days. Overwork the lone, white/asian guy and make a bunch of diversity hires who are unqualified just to look good
My Onsite work criteria is:
Minimum $500k per year, free parking, free food pass from the cafeteria, free onsite gym pass, and my job responsibility is to do data mining and statistics, data science not with coding but with tools like SAS Enterprise Miner, SPSS, Azure Analysis Services, Google Analytics tools etc.... i.e. the hypothesis testing / regression / neural net decision tree k-means type stuff that I'm good at.... and for up to and no greater than 8 hours... that is doable. I'd be the best damn worker that they'd have and they'd get their money's worth for sure because I'm a savant at that statistics .
Anything less than that and it's WFH or bust.
Thanks everybody for their help!!
^ Also forgot to add to my post an unlimited access to an air conditioned room that I can sleep at nights on nights I don't feel like driving back. It can be something as simple as a small conference room with a twin sized bed. But it needs to be dark and have strong air conditioning, ideally its own AC unit that I can set to 65 degrees or less like in a hotel room.
And believe me I've stayed nights in real life in those type of spaces as well. The best one was at the old Hewlett Packard site on Legacy drive in Plano when I was working in that building in June 2016. On those hot summer nights from Monday to Thursday I'd sleep on the isthmus (6th-8th floor) located only at the top floors between the HP-occupied south end of the building and the dystopian vacant north end. The building... It was Ross Perot's creation in the early '80s. The isthmus itself was mostly vacant too except for a reception desk on the 6th floor and a few other very sparsely occupied spaces on the 6th floor and a few janitor spaces on the 8th floor.
At some point while I was working there, about midway through my 2nd week in... (The first week I spent sleeping in the elevator by the north tower which never got used but which got too hot, and I spent one night under the desk in my cubicle and one night in the heat on the 8th floor which wasn't air conditioned but with my box fan on blowing air in my face... I tried a LOT of different things).... but around mid-June I found me a nice little private conference room on the 7th floor that was very dark, had a lock, had its own AC unit and plenty of space -- more than enough, actually. So I'd have my sleeping bag and pillows and blankets up there and stayed nights instead of driving the long drive back to Denton on weekdays. I'd save money by only going back to Denton on Fridays and back to Plano on Mondays until my lease in Denton expired later that summer.
But it wasn't done there. In 2019 I found miscellaneous spots to sleep in the office campus on M-R weeknights when working for Fidelity because that was a long drive between Southlake/Westlake and The Colony where I lived. Also that was summertime (June as well) so no sleeping in the car, but just like with HP I leveraged the gym access for morning showers, but unlike with HP there was a fee. Still worth it though. Saved gas, mileage, and hassle. Also I got a bunch of free food, don't ask me how but I did. I barely worked but I made it look like I was working as I was at my desk enough to keep the contract at least for enough time.
In early 2020 (Jan-Feb) just before covid and WFH, I was contracting at Verizon, my last fulltime onsite location in DFW. Nice large office campus there at Hidden Ridge in Irving. I knew all the ins and outs of that building as well and there were plenty of nice dark rooms and places to sleep in the cellar (there were actually 3 levels of basement and they were barely trafficked and only an elevator or three flights of stairs from the gym and parking lot) and it was winter so didn't ever have to worry about needing AC. Sometimes I slept in my car under the darkest possible parking space in that garage if I was scared of getting caught alone sleeping in the bunker basement in the office but I never did get caught. Having the gym right there on the main floor close by in the mornings was convenient and also there was an open access basketball court, complete with basketballs, for me or anyone else to openly shoot hoops on. I probably spent more time shooting hoops there than actually working, though I pretended to work most of the days. IN addition to the main gym there were also these bonus janitor showers located deep in the basement that I'd use at night when I felt like a shower or rubbing one out because unfortunately that gym did close at like 8pm or so. I never had to pay there though.
Long story short, office working was always logistically miserable for me so once I got into fulltime WFH it was a blessing and one I'll never ever want to give up.
The closest I actually got to getting caught was on June 28, 2016 on a Tuesday my very first week and second day at Bank of America on Corporate drive in Plano. I was a dumbass by sleeping in the conference room in the "A" building but really there was no completely safe place to sleep there because it's a banking client and there's a ton of surveillance there. Fortunately that was only one night and I did get a lease and place to stay in nearby The Colony like a couple nights later. A little overpriced for one corner room in a rooming house from a landlord I met off craigslist but it was better than driving to Denton or losing my first (technically second, but first $70k or better) job out of college.
On that Tuesday night around 10:30pm or so I was sleeping under the desk in that conference room and it was closed facing looking in, but open faced looking out. The fat old white guy who was doing security for securitas that night opened the door and holy . I opened my eyes to slits and just hoped for the best. Didn't make a sound. He turned the light on and looked for about 10 seconds then turned it off and closed the door back again. I was frickin' relieved. Scary .
Surprised as a contractor you did that and took the risk of them canning your a$$ thinking you were crazy imho
I'm not jewish, but I'm a paleo for sure. A unique ass individual.
Surprised as a contractor you did that and took the risk of them canning your a$$ thinking you were crazy imhoAnd been doing that since 2016.
Even before 2016. The years at UNT in undergrad. 2013-2016.
First semester, fall 2013 I would wait until nobody's looking and stuff my tote bag with gallons of milk from the meal plan cafeteria halls to feed my Kefir grains for the yogurt I made in my dorm room. I did have a private room and that did cost extra, but it was worth it growing up an only child and all I wouldn't have done well with another guy sleeping in my bedroom. As for the Kefir yogurt making... was something that kept me occupied and healthy that semester.
Throughout (especially first year because i had the unlimited meal plan which was required for first-years, but the other 2 years I bought on-campus limited cafeteria meal plans which I'd use strategically) I'd do a lot of stuff like stuffing backpacks full of containers of food to eat (I never had a problem eating leftovers; my mom raised me to eat leftovers basically) and take back to my apartment and I'd have a whole fridge loaded with leftover dorm hall food. And instead of buying expensive sodas for my apartment I'd just keep gatorade also stashed from the dorm cafeterias because that kept forever. I got acclimated to enjoying heavily diluted gatorade (I think it might have been powerade actually) because it lasted longer and I always made a point of emphasis to stay hydrated because of kidney stones.
When I wfh I seem to miss lunch and do about 10 hours. It's much easier going in because the day is over at 5, I get a lunch and get some side chatter.yeah feel like I'm halfway there working from home... feel much more energized working from home 6-7 hours a day making well into six figures as opposed to driving to the office every day trying to work while Shaniqua is yelling on the phone and arguing with her boo-thang in the cubicle next to you for 8 hours a day.
Speaking of, some lunatic recruiter called me the other day (I'm always willing to listen in case there's something better out there). Call was going ok until I told her I was working remote, and she said "Oh how does it feel to only work a few hours a day"...assuming that all WFH'ers dont actually work. I could tell this was not going to go well
You don't want to be in that game, competing with cheap visas, tbh... plus there's high demand for direct hires if you're in the right place in CA and you're demonstrably good.
Sup bro. Congrats on the move.
Depends where in California and how far you want to commute. Just to give you an idea, in West Los Angeles, a 2 bedroom apt, rent is ~4k/month. Total expenses are probably around $6k/month, considering electricity, internet, water, groceries, gas, etc.
Houses start at ~1.5m. But that's amongst the most expensive areas. If you head down to Hawtorne or Torrance you might be able to get something cheaper, but have to commute more. You do have nice beaches and great weather all year round.
Then there's the east side, which is cheapest (depending where). San Francisco is more or less the same, just slightly more expensive, minus the beach.
If yo get out of the cities and like to drive, things get cheaper as well.
Again, it's all about having a job that covers those costs and puts you in a compe ive place. It's true that in the tech world you can do a lot of this stuff remotely, but companies aren't dumb. They know what your overhead is and what the average salary for a position is in every area.
Other considerations you might want to think about are things like healthcare, for example. Texas is definitely one of those States that rank pretty poorly on that.
1. I'm not in CA
2. (more important) I'm not demonstrably good. I'm mediocre at the actual job, at best. My best job skill by far has been interviewing and then keeping up with all the bare minimum required tasks to stay employed as long as possible. I figure all my energy to work hard got pretty much burned out in high school and college.
I'm a full time employee for employers based out of India and the key to staying employed for a year or longer at a time is to fly under the radar and not make a big name of yourself. Don't piss people off, and try to be forgotten. Do the bare minimum (such as keeping up with emails, compliance trainings, and password resets on time) to not trigger a flag.
To date, my best job skill by far and away... is interviewing. Great at hyping and selling myself and my resume up to the point where they want me. After that I'm pretty much a zero when it comes to work ethic.
yeah IT can be one of those fields where it's best not to be known as the superstar, especially at a sh!t company where talent is at a premium. People will never leave you alone and you'll just get more and more dumped on your plate. But at certain places, going above and beyond has helped me acquire the additional skills that have helped me get better jobs in the future. my remote gig now was actually because I did great work for a client 4 years ago as a contractor, and they wanted to hire me full time agreeing to have me live anywhere when many of them are required to go onsite once a week and be in the area. Wouldn't have happened if I didn't bust my a$$ for them beforehand.
But yeah, I've worked at poorly managed, re factories where it's best just to lay low and job hop as soon as you can and forget about forming any kind of relationships rofl
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