In the midwest, a dev with no professional experience straight out of college can expect to earn around $3,450 monthly (post-tax), plus benefits, no signing bonus, and no stock options.
It's really pretty irrational (in terms of pay, career progression) to be a dev in the Midwest. Even if you don't like Bay Area cost of living there's Portland, Seattle, Boston, etc. the only reasons I can think of to stay would be a serious desire to own a suburban home or to live near your parents.
Is it really? Bankrate.com's cost-of-living calculator tells me the equivalent income in San Francisco if you're moving from Columbus, Ohio earning $110K is $213K. That would be an approximate salary of a senior developer. And these are jobs where 40 hrs is the norm, in addition to medical, dental, disability, life insurance, 401k match, and bonus.
Personally, if I were to choose the Midwest, it'd be Chicago.
Glassdoor has an average software engineer in Chicago making $75k. Bankrate says the equivalent income in SF would be $113k, and Glassdoor has median salary in SF as $103k.
$10k is a lot of money to be sure, and you are paying a premium for SF, but it's not always so dramatic.
Employers seem to be pretty good at adjusting salaries by geography according to cost of living. You can't really "win" unless you can convince someone to pay you a Bay Area salary to live in the Midwest. And maybe you can, but if they're smart and the market is efficient, it won't last long.
None of these are exactly cheap cities (Portland might be the closest), and not everyone wants to move to a city just to do a job they could have done from home.
There's attractive urban living in the Midwest (and the South) too. Coast = urban kewl stuff, midwest = suburban lame stuff, that's a huge simplification. I'd actually say the opposite. If you desire to own an `urban` home, you have a much better shot at it in the Midwest, than you would have at the coasts. Average dev income will push you to the burbs on the coasts, but not necessarily in the Midwest.
Well, the big exception is Chicago. ThoughtWorks is not held to be a great employer and requires a lot of travel; other jobs are often very corporate, working on enterprise software in drab low-rise office parks in the north suburbs. The only thing that really resembles the SF office culture (AFAIK) is in quant trading firms. I guess I'm discounting those out of personal distaste for HFT.
