Sorry, no Austin.
Kind of low, but looks like median salary of a robotics engineer in California is around 110k. according to indeed. Possibly they get paid a lot in RSUs and options. But, will there be enough of these making the income in upper range to support homes selling at 1.5 Million and above ?
1 Like
Nowadays because RSU is a large component of the pay, house price becomes correlated to the stock price of the tech industry. Since FAANMG employed much more techies than startups combined, house prices in BARE are correlated to share prices of FAANMG. This year, huge increases in shares prices:
My question was how many engineers getting sky high/wind fall income to support high prices? Even in best case, the prices of SFBA homes do not rise faster than 7-8% per year in long run (doubling every 10 year) . Incomes of a few outliers do not drive market. And markets are segmented. Someone making VP level salary might not want to buy in Eastern Side. And if bay area is running into capacity constraints, and sounds like it is, then market have strange of getting around it. So, basically everything seems tied to support the 7% appreciation in home prices. Anything above it is difficult to support, going purely, by economic numbers.
Software engineers straight out of college make more than $120K (not counting stocks and bonus) in most companies now a days. These numbers are totally off.
1 Like
The numbers from indeed are median and outliers must be making a lot more. For example, I have been told FB hired a fresher for 250 K salary. To drive a market, there must be enough of these to push the prices up. Else they will fall in the same ratio I was suggesting. In last 7-8 years, since the money printing by FED, the price rise are simply inflation. Roughly, a 1.5 M home is actually a 1 M home in 2010 dollars and a salary of 120K is around 80K in same dollars. All the numbers are connected. you cannot change one without changing other for a long period of time.
Interesting.
There is a job opening for a robotics engineer in Iowa. Average salary in the area is 93K
Job opening
https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=4c4e7683d7fa4063&tk=1ds3u7ee3b84l800&from=title-salaries
Qualification: PhD 
Don’t give basic degree fresher false hope 
Min GPA for PhD is 3.66, right?
We went to lunch with one. I use to rent to VP/ Director, nowadays only to SM to very senior ICs.
What does Salesforce dev do? Customization? Why does it have its own category? Many people do that kind of work?
looks like the ratio for VP salary is same. About 1.5 times. 163 K
Only 2% of homes are sold a year. You don’t need every house to be affordable by every person living in it. Just the 2% selling need to be affordable to buyers.
2 Likes
Exactly.
And housing markets in Tier One cities like SF and Seattle are global. You don’t even need them to be affordable to local buyers.
1 Like
But, you need a home to make economic sense to its owner. Rents drive the price of the home.
Not necessarily. Different locales have different cap rates. There are two ways for landlords to make money: cash flow ie rent, and appreciation. In high appreciation markets like SF people are willing to pay more, i.e. lower cap rates, for a property than in Iowa.