Google v Facebook salary inflation riles Big Data startup As Google and Facebook fight over Silicon Valley's top talent, it's a good time to be an engineer. According to one report, when Facebook tried to lure one engineer away from Google, Mountain View counter-offered with a 15 per cent pay raise and $500,000 in restricted stock. And he left for Facebook anyway. Then, according to …
As one of the best coders I have worked with used to say: "That is for management, not for smelly engineer like me". A real engineer even one undergoing the glorious californication experience is not getting 3m in stock.
This sounds more like Google and Facebook running the kind of advertisement campaign you would be expecting from an advertising oriented privacy invading evil empire. See kids, we gave an engineer 3m in stock. You should now be ready to kill to become one of us.
If you are not quite ready to kill, be ready to relocate to a place where you will have 30% negative equity, your wife will have nowhere to work (unless she is also a member of the Hive), your kids will go to a university which has no money because the country is tens of times its GDP in the red. It is also a country which the evil empire will leave once it is done (and once the country stops being a tax heaven).
And trust me, nobody will be giving you 3.5M in stock if you decide to leave _THAT_ place.
If you're moving there then negative equity won't be a problem.
Negative equity of 30% applies when people bought their houses during the boom for, say, $1M and they're now only worth $500k and they owe the bank $650k. If you now move into the area and buy the house off the sap for 500k then you won't be in a negative equity situation. Of course if the value drops further then you''ll be in the hole...
As for the wife having a job... you can live in surrounding cities and catch the Google shuttle to work.
There are valid reasons to keep away, but not those that you mention.
I'm very happy to live in a place where I bought a house (+ ten acres) for approx $100k ten years ago, and it is now worth $400k while I owe the bank approx $60k which will be paid off in less than 5 years at approx $250 per week, This is of course nowhere near USofA.
Being only 30% upside down on your house at the end of the next 5 years, even if you bought it today (assuming you could find someone damn fool enough to finance it), will be considered good. The foreclosures didn't stop because the market bottomed, they stopped because the damn fools didn't keep the paperwork straight and now nobody can figure out who actually has a right to foreclose on the houses. Once they figure that out the foreclosures will start again and the market will go down again. Especially in California, where the state government looks about like Greece these days.
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