The above salary range seems accurate. I know newly minted PhDs in computer science may “only” get in the low $100,000 range at Google. So a salary in the mid six-figure range is totally reasonable with a few years of experience.
Recently a friend who is an engineer at Google in Mountain View got a transfer to Boulder, where they bought a house. He’d been trying to buy in Mountain View for a while…but that just wasn’t happening. Boulder isn’t cheap, with 178% the national average in cost of living. But it’s nothing compared to Mountain View, where the average housing cost is 7.5 times the national average.
What’s striking to me is the high variation in cost of living in American urban areas:
| Overall cost of living | |
| San Francisco | 272 |
| New York City | 180 |
| Seattle | 177 |
| Boston | 170 |
| Los Angeles | 166 |
| San Diego | 166 |
| Portland | 140 |
| Denver | 128 |
| Miami | 123 |
| Austin | 117 |
| Chicago | 111 |
| Minneapolis | 109 |
| Houston | 102 |
| Atlanta | 102 |
| Raleigh | 102 |
| Philadelphia | 100 |
| Phoenix | 99 |
| New Orleans | 96 |
| Dallas | 95 |
| Baltimore | 90 |
| Pittsburgh | 88 |
| Cincinnati | 86 |
| St. Louis | 85 |
| Des Moines | 83 |
| Memphis | 74 |
| Detroit | 73 |