So a recruiting agency who makes money from placing applicants in the Bay area, a place with a shortage of developers, writes an article to convince more developers to move to the Bay area ? Yeah, totally trust their data and the data they selected for this article!
I didn't get very far, but their first section has a huge disconnect between data and the text. Text:
> So assuming you’re looking throughout the Bay Area for a good deal and you’re comfortable renting rather than buying a home, as most of us are during the early stages of our careers, higher Bay Area salaries at least cover the costs of higher rents.
Data:
> engineers at top tech companies in the Bay Area stand to make between $15,000 and $33,000 more per year than engineers at top tech companies in Seattle.
and
> median rent is about $1400-$1500 a month (or roughly $17,000-$18,000 a year) higher in the Bay Area than in the Seattle metro area
Somehow $15k-$33k marginal income "at least cover" $17k-$18k. That's just outrageously untrue, even if you ignore the fact that it fails to cover any of the numerous other ways that SF is more expensive (food? local services? CA income tax?) or the fact that you have to pay taxes on the extra money (which brings $15k-$33k down to $10k-$22k, assuming a conservative marginal tax rate estimate of 35%).
Even assuming they aren't missing anything, cherrypicking data, etc., their data doesn't come close to supporting the claims they're making. Claiming bias seems like a pretty generous interpretation here.
"You don't know what you don't know". We have no idea how they selected, curated, pruned, or otherwise "cleaned" their data set to meet their needs. What we can say, definitively, is they DO have a bias to encourage more developers to move to the Bay Area.
"Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say."
- William W. Watt
"If you are interested in moving to the Bay Area and joining a successful company or a tiny startup, Triplebyte can help you find a job. Give our process a try here. "
