Inflation… what inflation?

[Coronita]

[quote=an][quote=deadzone][quote=an][quote=deadzone][quote=an]The 2nd sentence say 100% remote. We have no idea where the company head quarter is and we don’t care, since it’s 100% remote. For all we know, they don’t even have an office.

BTW, how do you know that’s bay area pay?[/quote]

No idea if that is Bay area pay, just picked that as an example cause it looked like higher salaries than are typical in San Diego.

But either way, I don’t see the logic that remote work would increase salaries, or that my company would pay me my San Diego salary, for example, if I chose to remote work from Arkansas. If that option was widely available, I guarantee a crap ton of folks would leave San Diego.[/quote]
If you say so[/quote]

No, if you say so. You are the one coming to an illogical assumption.

Look I would love to get a salary increase for working from home too. But not holding my breath it’s going to happen.[/quote]
You can apply for those positions and get the raise[/quote]

To be fair, those positions pay well. But they also demand applicants to be well qualified. Not everyone will be well qualified. So it’s not a guarantee that everyone’s compensation/wages will be going up. Primarily those who are in high demand.

[an]

[quote=Coronita]To be fair, those positions pay well. But they also demand applicants to be well qualified. Not everyone will be well qualified.[/quote]
I’m assuming that deadzone is great at what he does and is well qualified. If he’s not, well…

Like you Coronita, I’m actively talking with head of finance, CTO, CEO about the current state of engineering salary in San Diego due to these remote job postings. I’m in the hiring/managing position, so I know what it takes to keep things moving. We’re willing to pay top dollar for 10x-er. It’ll cost us a lot more if they leave due to these remote opportunities. As a leader, we can either stay competitive or lose your good people.

[sdrealtor]

Why would you assume that? He sucks at what he’s doing here

[Anonymous]

[quote=sdrealtor]Why would you assume that? He sucks at what he’s doing here[/quote]

Come on SDR, you’re better than that…
Oh right, you aren’t.

[Anonymous]

FLU and AN I assume are hiring for niche type positions within the wireless industry. San Diego is one of the (or the) hub for that industry so that may explain why you are not finding qualified applicants in Florida.

But I still don’t agree with your logic that folks are coming to San Diego en masse for the “lower” cost of living due to remote work. Just because you have anecdotal examples does not make it an actual thing. As Rich asked, where is the evidence that more folks are moving here due to remote work than are leaving? It is far more logical to think more folks would be leaving. Your wireless engineer making 200K would live like a king in most parts of the country.

Of course leaving SD to work remotely could be risky too. If the work from home trend is short lived, which I think it will be, then you could be screwed trying to get a job in your new locale down the road.

[an]

[quote=deadzone]FLU and AN I assume are hiring for niche type positions within the wireless industry. San Diego is one of the (or the) hub for that industry so that may explain why you are not finding qualified applicants in Florida.

But I still don’t agree with your logic that folks are coming to San Diego en masse for the “lower” cost of living due to remote work. Just because you have anecdotal examples does not make it an actual thing. As Rich asked, where is the evidence that more folks are moving here due to remote work than are leaving? It is far more logical to think more folks would be leaving. Your wireless engineer making 200K would live like a king in most parts of the country.

Of course leaving SD to work remotely could be risky too. If the work from home trend is short lived, which I think it will be, then you could be screwed trying to get a job in your new locale down the road.[/quote]
You assume wrong on both counts. I’m looking at MERN full stack developers. But it’s beyond who I’m looking for but it about what other companies are looking for and what they’re willing to pay. I must make sure we stay competitive, or my best engineers will get enticed by these opportunities and jump ship.

I did not say there’s a flood of people moving here due to “lower” cost of living. I don’t have the data or experience on that. It might be the case, but I don’t have experience in that. RE agents who work with people buying/selling homes would be the better person to ask for that. But I did say that these WFH opportunities are forcing local companies to compete or risk the loss to great engineers.

[an]

[quote=deadzone]
Of course leaving SD to work remotely could be risky too. If the work from home trend is short lived, which I think it will be, then you could be screwed trying to get a job in your new locale down the road.[/quote]
Who said anything about moving out of SD? You’re the one who made that statement and then argue against it. That’s the definition of a strawman argument.

“A strawman is a fallacious argument that distorts an opposing stance in order to make it easier to attack. Essentially, the person using the strawman pretends to attack their opponent’s stance, while in reality they are actually attacking a distorted version of that stance, which their opponent doesn’t necessarily support.”

[Coronita]

[quote=deadzone]FLU and AN I assume are hiring for niche type positions within the wireless industry. San Diego is one of the (or the) hub for that industry so that may explain why you are not finding qualified applicants in Florida.

But I still don’t agree with your logic that folks are coming to San Diego en masse for the “lower” cost of living due to remote work. Just because you have anecdotal examples does not make it an actual thing. As Rich asked, where is the evidence that more folks are moving here due to remote work than are leaving? It is far more logical to think more folks would be leaving. Your wireless engineer making 200K would live like a king in most parts of the country.

Of course leaving SD to work remotely could be risky too. If the work from home trend is short lived, which I think it will be, then you could be screwed trying to get a job in your new locale down the road.[/quote]

Actually, it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in the wireless industry. Short of Qualcomm/Broadcom stock option bandwagon, Qualcomm/Broadcom is a pretty bad place to be if you are mobile application engineer, because they really don’t have any commercial mobile applications that make money in any meaningful way. It’s not their core business. So if you happen to work on mobile apps for Qualcomm/Broadcom, you are not making money for the company. You are a liability that will eventually get right sized if the rest of the core business isn’t doing well. If you’re an embedded software engineer, or work on chip design or do wireless design, it’s a great place to be. Application software engineer, I can think of many places that would be better. My current company is more IT’ish than pure wireless/mobile tech company. I don’t consider a company as being a tech company if the CEO doesn’t have a tech background, and mine doesn’t.

But my point was that it’s a misconception that those high salaries will be generally available. For example, as it stands, I’m going to be paying $140-50k for a mid-level mobile engineer maybe 4-5 years of experience. But there’s a wrinkle. That person better know his sh1t.

I get a lot of resumes that try to pass themselves off as a mid-level experienced mobile engineer, but I would say 70-80% of the resumes end up in the trashcan. And the ones that I phone screen, 10% make it to the panel interview. And we haven’t been happy with any candidate that makes it to the panel interview. … For instance, I get a lot of folks claiming to be a 5-6 year mobile IOS engineer. But if you take a look at their resume, most of them wrote an app on their own, something along the line of a simple “Fart Sound App” that a middle school kid probably can do, published it, and claimed that the years it took to develop that “Fart Sound App” counts as the 4-5 years of experience.

I’m sorry, if the bulk of your mobile IOS engineer experience is creating a homegrown fart sound app that maybe has 10 reviews on the apple store, those years it took you to develop the fart sound app don’t really count as relevant experience. And while I was a self-taught mobile engineer, it was different….When I learned about Android or IOS things were still relatively new and not many people were working on this…so it was quite likely self-taught people who were highly motivated people knew more than the industry…and what I self learned, it was pretty comprehensive beyond just programming the api…enough to understand how all the intricate details of of the OS so I could modify the OS, or add a new Bluetooth stack or add additional Bluetooth profiles or convince google to throw away Bluez and replace it with Bluedroid, partly an attempt at the time to fvck over Qualcomm/Atheros that was heavily dependent and invested in Bluez..and force them to reintegrate their chipset wit a brand new bluetooth stack theyve never seen before, that we had been developing since Bluetooth was first conceived, making their connectivity solution look really shitty in a new stack….in the same way they made our baseband solution look shitty… ha ha… that also involved having to work with google to fix a bunch of race conditions in Google’s Bluetooth Manager some of their engineers accidentally injected into the AOSP codebase. Pretty ironic, considering that I probably would never pass the Google interview process to be on their Android Bluetooth team, but there i was fixing bunch of concurrency shit some of their engineers who must have passed those IQ interview tests accidentally injected in the AOSP framework. but that’s beside the point.

These days, if most of a person’s experience is from their own app with a handful of reviews, and they haven’t really done anything mobile related in a professional environment…sorry, that says they aren’t really an experienced mobile engineer…

It’s also interesting to look at their educational background. Most of the candidates don’t have a CS or Engineering degree/training. Not that an CS or Engineering degree is absolutely necessary to be a good mobile IOS or Android engineer. But you see some of these candidates were a B.A. major (nothing wrong)… Took a 7 month online IOS mobile “immersion course” (with no prior software/programming experience), somehow managed to be “lead instructor” for IOS mobile software engineer immersion course (despite the extend of their experience is 7 months crash course on IOS, again with no prior programming experience), and on their resume counts both of those things as part of their 4-5 years of IOS mid-level experience….And the funny part, I see a bunch of other candidates that fit the same profile….I don’t even need to phone screen those candidates, or give them the take home “write an app so we can review” interview takehome assignment. I know it will be a waste of time… Still, occasionally I let one go through with the interview process, just to see if I might accidentally overlooks someone with sheer natural talent….I haven’t found one that is….

[Anonymous]

[quote=an][quote=deadzone]
Of course leaving SD to work remotely could be risky too. If the work from home trend is short lived, which I think it will be, then you could be screwed trying to get a job in your new locale down the road.[/quote]
Who said anything about moving out of SD? You’re the one who made that statement and then argue against it. That’s the definition of a strawman argument.

“A strawman is a fallacious argument that distorts an opposing stance in order to make it easier to attack. Essentially, the person using the strawman pretends to attack their opponent’s stance, while in reality they are actually attacking a distorted version of that stance, which their opponent doesn’t necessarily support.”[/quote]

I was just pivoting the subject here discussing the hypothetical risk of folks taking advantage of the current remote work opportunities by leaving the city where their industry exists. This was not an argument either way for salary impacts from remote work.

But others on this thread (sdr and flu certainly) are arguing that remote work is causing more people to move to San Diego, I don’t believe that in the long run more folks are moving here vs. moving out due to remote work. Doesn’t make sense and there is no evidence to support it.

[sdrealtor]

That is not what either of us are arguing. We aren’t saying more people. We are saying more highly compensated and rich people. These days po folk need not apply

[Coronita]

Back in 90ies, the real estate market in SD was just barely recovering from a very large recession that happened in SoCal, primarily in the L.A. and S.D. areas with a heavy concentration of defense contractor businesses that vaporized…

Around that time Irwin Jacobs started Qualcomm and brought 4000+ jobs to San Diego and made san diego a wireless/telco center, with a bunch of other telco’s that followed….Back then we had the same problem. While we had a lot of job openings, very few of the local employee pool in SD were qualified to do the work. So we had to hire outside and convince people to come here. They did come. From all over the US and overseas. And they filled those open jobs….

Forget about Qualcomm right now, and there 20k+ employees. Let’s talk about Amazon, Walmart Labs, Google, and now Apple who have decided to expand their footprint also in San Diego….

20 years ago, I would have said the high tech, high paid jobs in san diego were next to non-existance, unless you were a QC employee. Things are quite different now. In addition to Sorrento Valley and the Rancho Bernardo corridor, Carlsbad has also become a place where tech startups like to incubate, as two of my former employers were there. Yes, there is still a footprint of lower paid, older type of companies that are still stuck in the 80-90ies type of work and 80-90ies type of compensation. But that is slowly becoming less and less… I won’t even go into all the bio-tech and medical-tech companies that are starting (which unfortunately for me I am probably not qualified to work in)…There’s a boatload of opportunity there, and if you’re skills are in those area, it’s going to be a goldmine for you..I think bio-tech and medical-tech is even stronger here in SD than in Bay Area. I don’t see Illumina going anywhere soon, nor any of their offshoots.

IT bell weathers are also pretty solid now here in SD. One of my old colleagues founded the Service Now office here in SD. They have a pretty big footprint. Walmart Labs is also pretty much here to stay and giving Amazon a pretty good run for their money. 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that because my understanding was the Walmark Labs mobile team was tasked with just maintaining deprecated app and so I didn’t decide to join that team… I think they’ve moved beyond that there seems to be a lot of innovation happening both in Sunnyvale and Carlsbad.

I think there will be some people that leave SD due to the changing industry and those who can’t take advantage of the new opportunities and also who have not taken steps to peg their living costs earlier as the cost of living start to rise here. Double edge sword of better opportunities for people with skills and that brings more money into the region which in term probably will drive up living costs more which in turn while put more pressure on those who have not fixed their living costs and also unable to take advantage of the changing/new opportunities…those people probably will have no choice but to leave…

[sdrealtor]

Same answer as mine with more details. Thx flu

[Coronita]

More of the details I’d say is… Given that we have a increasing higher living cost in San Diego, it seems like there are 2 primary ways to survive here.

1. Be part of the new industry/professions/jobs whatever that are commanding the higher paying compensations to allow you to absorb these higher living costs in san diego

or

2. don’t be part of the new industry/profession/jobs/whatever that pays differently now, but ensure that you have taken appropriate steps to keep your living costs capped…IE you bought a house years ago when you still could….

See not everyone here in SD must be working in those new high paying jobs in order to survive. Those people that bought their homes years ago, can continue to operating as is since they capped their living expenses more or less even while home prices/rent are sky rocketing. So while they might not be the most employable and be able to obtain the highest paid current jobs…frankly, they don’t need to in order to remain in san diego….

It’s one of the main reasons why I went into rentals. Because I knew there was a day where my skills and age isn’t the most desirable and I wouldn’t be able to command the highest pay that keeps up with higher living costs, as most engineer’s salaries tend to taper off and run flat much sooner than other professions…and so a lot of my financial decisions were made outside of engineering to mitigate WHEN (not if) that occurs….Let’s not even talk about changes to taxation policies that could flatten that earning curve much sooner, considering in some cases, that W2 income would be considered by some as “rich” and be taxed more, with very little things you can do (IE no real tax shelters for W2 salary slaves)….Fortunately for me, I’ve been able to overextend my stay in engineering beyond what I thought I would have been allowed stay in this field…by simply moving into management to prolong the eventual career death I’m pretty confident I will eventually experience, short of starting my own company that is profitable…which all else being equal, I’d rather open a Boba bubble tea place, lol.

[Anonymous]

[quote=sdrealtor]That is not what either of us are arguing. We aren’t saying more people. We are saying more highly compensated and rich people. These days po folk need not apply[/quote]

Perhaps due to changing job environment, but not necessarily related to remote work, which I don’t believe is going to be major factor one way or the other relating to SD home values in the long run.

And the fact remains that RE values are going up all over the Country, not just SD. SD is going up more, admittedly. But is that difference really attributed to all of these new high paying jobs, or, is it just the good old sunshine tax we’ve always had.

[Anonymous]

Question for Corona and AN related to Engineer’s salaries. What website do you use to see San Diego salary data? Has it shown significant salary increases in recent years for apples to apples jobs (i.e. inflation)?

Many of you have been reporting big increases in salary and/or difficulty hiring. It sounds to me like you guys are hiring for very niche positions. Although admittedly I am one of those folks you mentioned that is stuck in 90s/00s technology and mentality so the jobs you describe are completely Greek to me.

[Author]

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