Hi all. My partner and I are moving up there from St. Louis in the summer for her job (very unique artist gig). I have a bit of a weird situation.
I'm a software developer with 10.5 years of experience. My job in St. Louis is incredible. They really want me to stay with them and work remotely, but at the same time recognize that this is a voluntary move on my part.
I make 115k with amazing healthcare ($70/mo with amazing coverage covers my wife and I, they have not raised their costs since 2001). They offered me 131k to work remotely, and I currently have a 3k quarterly bonus, coming out to 143k total.
I know I could get insane money from bigger places like Google or whatever, but I also know those places tend to grind people down and don't have great work/life balance.
So, my questions:
A) is 131k base fair? It seems low from what I've seen, but that's possibly skewed by Facebook/Google/Amazon/Microsoft
B) my partner's a freelancer and can go months without work, so we want to be prepared for that. is 143k enough for two people in a place like Ballard? I'm pretty frugal. I was comfortable on my St. Louis salary a long, long time ago with both of us being supported by it.
You can definitely make it at 143k in Ballard. I lived in a pretty expensive apartment on Market Street for a couple of years on just over 100k. It was a significant chunk of my take home pay, but I still had plenty to manage the rest of my life and save a pretty good amount of money.
Honestly, you should be able to figure this out for yourself? I assume you've been looking at places to live if you already picked out Ballard? You should therefore know what your housing costs will be within a reasonable margin of error.
I also assume you know your current monthly expenses for the two of you, and from that you can reason that those expenses will stay roughly the same (again, within a reasonable margin of error).
Combine the non-housing expenses you know from experience, and the housing expenses you're looking at for your new home and you should be good to go.
If you don't know those numbers, well then that's where you should start. But again, under the assumption that your major monthly expense will be housing, you can definitely be fine at that salary level in Ballard.
As for how competitive your salary is, I do work in tech (as several others here do), and you're right, the average total compensation is driven up by the companies you mentioned.
In this area, it's also worth knowing that years of experience is less important than the specific projects and technologies you've worked on. So I could probably give you a better "gut feeling" if I knew your background/saw your resume.
As someone who does hiring, my gut feeling is you're probably right around the median. Maybe a little high, maybe a little low.
The area is crawling with recruiters, so if you really want to see what you're worth, update your LinkedIn, turn on the "I'm open to a new job" toggle, and just wait. Take a few calls, have a few coffees, and you'll get a good idea of what you can pull.
