Every article on salaries seems to really screw up two things. One is, salary is only a portion of total compensation. Which do they mean here? If you don't look at equity packages, my intuition is you're going to think SF sucks, since I think more companies there use stock incentives. I'm not sure anybody has good data on equity packages/total comp, and at the very least, it's not trivial even if you have that data, since for example you can't just treat an Uber RSU the same as a Google one. So comparing total comp, which is what matters, is a subtle issue with lots of methodological decisions to make that will alter the results, and when articles (including the original source at hired.com) don't even mention any of that, it's hard to take the results seriously.<p>Second is, you can't just scale up salaries by the COL adjustment when the comp is this high. If you do that, you'll think the following are equally good:<p><pre><code> - monthly income 10k, 3k on rent, 2k other expenses
- monthly income 5k, 1.5k on rent, 1k on other
</code></pre>
Not all expenses scale linearly with COL, and in particular, one of the most important imputed expenses, savings, doesn't scale that way, unless you plan to retire with the exact same lifestyle.