I currently work in GR as a software developer so if you want the inside scoop contact me.
I will say Grand Rapids currently has some issues around software developers that are associated with our growing pains. Because of the rust belt depression of wages, we still haven't caught up. Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K. If you are an ineffective negotiator you might be lower. Many of my contemporaries have chosen to get remote jobs with the usual suspects. Zapier, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, Slack and others all have local people.
That said, this is a wonderful town that is changing all the time. The cost of living is low, though our real estate market is out of control and has been for a couple years. The developers here tend to have a strong sense of community and we generally support one another rather than tear each other down. We have some great local developers.
If you would like the low down on our growing town or are interest in moving, setting up a remote shop or building a company in our town let me know. I'd be happy to help you or get you in contact with those that can. (see profile)
> Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K.
I can't speak to the senior level, but compared to California those junior salaries are lagging by 50%, not 20%.
I can believe that. But I tend to not measure things by the California/Valley standard. Things there are just too exceptional and GR so small in comparison.
As another data point, in Portland (of the Oregon variety) junior developers are roughly ~80K, midlevel ~110K, senior ~130K and up. Still expensive, but about half of SFO.
Not looking to move, but just out of curiousity, how would you say developer salary / cost of living compares, to, say San Francisco? No surprise that both will be a lot lower in Grand Rapids, but I'm wondering how the ratio looks.
You can get a studio apartment for $700, no problem. You can get a cookie cutter 4 bedroom house in the suburbs in the $200's.
You'll need a car, of course, and as long as you're not eating at trendy places downtown, everything else is pretty cheap. Bars have $1 beers and burgers at happy hour.
Doesn't the city fine you for not having a green lawn though? Power also seemed to be significantly more expensive at nearly 14 cents per kWh, which can get spendy with AC being nearly mandatory with how hot it gets in the summer.
Additionally, another downside I noticed when I was there was that around 2am in the summer, the streets are often flooded due to people watering their lawns. Besides the absent or poor pedestrian infrastructure, this made my after work walk quite a bit more complicated.
I've never heard of the city fining you for not having a green lawn. You can get in trouble for not mowing, and if you're in an HOA, maybe they require watering, but my lawn stays plenty green without any sprinkling.
My electric bill is about $80 in the summer to keep my $125k, 2000 sqft house at 72F. Not too bad IMO.
And everyone (40% of the houses in my neighborhood?) who waters their lawn does so at dawn and dusk, not 2AM. If you water in the middle of the night when the grass is cold and dormant, you can get mold.
If you think that's expensive, try living in Australia.
Air conditioning is mandatory some areas, with temperatures in Sydney peaking over 40 C (105 F) in the summer, and electricity costs 27 cents per kWh (US$0.20).
That's ridiculously cheap electricity! I assume that's just the lowest tier? Can most people make it through the month at that rate, or do the rates typically jump mid-way through?
It's not really cheap. 20 cents per kWh is double the US average.
Australia has some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world, as Australia is completely incapable of managing its infrastructure properly.
Ridiculously cheap power to me means 2 to 4 cents per kWh. I consider 11 cents per kWh (which is what Seattle's rates are) to be extremely high, especially compared to areas just outside Seattle proper.
Well, I guess I'm in for a price cut someday when I move to a different part of the country. My electric starts at $0.27/kWh, then goes up to $0.48, then $0.55 for higher usage. I have no idea what the cutoffs are for hitting those higher tiers, as I've never done it.
Imagine that salary in San Francisco is $9000 / month and cost of living is $7000 / month. The ratio of salary : cost of living is 1.286.
Imagine salary in Grand Rapids is $3000 / month and the cost of living is $2000 / month. The ratio has "improved" to 1.5, but the more important figure of (income - expenses) has fallen in half.
I wasn't looking at the slash so much as the question "No surprise that both will be a lot lower in Grand Rapids, but I'm wondering how the ratio looks".
There are four numbers to compare, salary_SF, salary_GR, living_cost_SF, living_cost_GR, and two obvious ratios you could take. You chose to divide salary/living_cost for each, but you could also divide salary_SF/salary_GR for ratio_1 and living_cost_SF/living_cost_GR for ratio_2.
So, you might find that it's a 50% lower salary, and an 80% lower living cost. That would be informative.
Numbeo is a great site for cost of living comparison. Here's SF versus Grand Rapids[0]. To sum, if your takehome is $7800 in SF, you can live a similar lifestyle on $3700 in Grand Rapids.
That of course depends on what you're going for. The 'lifestyle' comparison only takes into account basic goods. It doesn't take into everything else that actually affects your personal quality of life (cities vs more rural life each have vastly different benefits).
Not only that, but many things have a constant price: international air tickets, cars, and computers don’t vary in cost much between GR and SF (some are even more expensive in the lower cost place).
Arbitrary example:
GRR -> Copenhagen roundtrip is ~$1,100 USD.
From NYC or SF I can do that for ~$400-$500. Pretty much anywhere else I could pick has a similar differential.
That's a massive cost difference, especially when you're looking at 2-4 person vacations. That's a problem in pretty much every rural area (flying out of Ithaca was expensive as heck). I'm able to travel way more as a result.
All good points! And since each person has their own take on these other factors, I guess it explains why people live different places. (Besides our west coast snooty "flyover states" attitude -- lots of people really do want to live where they live!)
You have never flown anywhere but Canada, then. I Have to come to GR 2x per year from abroad, and in order to afford it I fly into Chicago and take the train, or buy separate tickets on the 45 minute puddle jumper (which is an Embrayer Air 150, most uncomfortable plane in service in the states). Flying into Detroit or Grand Rapids from SFO is always 50% higher than flying to New York.
I had to buy a family member a flight from Seattle -> Detroit for next month, it cost $600. I'm about to fly myself from Istanbul to San Francisco, that flight cost $500.
There's a reason they're called the flyover states.
I also notice that is the cost for renting in both places. If you want to buy a house, and if (for example) you wanted that house to have a yard, it might impact that differential. But, interesting site, thanks!
Our state government is not great. But the local GR government has been generally decent. Utilities work and are maintained. Grand Rapids also owns and maintains its own water plant and direct connection to lake Michigan. The local government has also been responsive to our local housing bubble. Though it remains to be seen if they will be effective.
That said, our roads are still shit. Like the rest of Michigan.
Power and water seem significantly more expensive than out in the PNW, which can get spendy considering the city mandates green lawns and AC is needed for most of the summer.
PNW is kind of special with all the dams providing power and abundant fresh water compared to most of the rest of the USA, I can remember reading about aluminum plants and data centers moving there for the cheap electricity.
40k-50k as a junior developer? Would a junior at your company have the same skillset as a junior at Google/Facebook/Amazon? Are you not expected to work 60h+ a week? Is it pretty lax? I just can't fathom how it could be so low. I'd understand 65-75k for a junior in Michigan.
As a UMich grad, most of us left because of the low salaries. It’s appalling how little software engineers make in the state and how much companies complain about an inability to find talent.
I left because I never had interest in staying in Michigan in the first place, though Ann Arbor is absolutely gorgeous and if I wanted to live outside a major city it would be one of my first choices.
Salary is one part of that, but unless you grew up in the area, most non-hub-city regions are a hard sell for young folk, and Detroit hasn't yet recovered enough to be "hip". People used to have for move specifically to find a job, but in tech there are so many jobs available currently that you kind of get your choice of destination if you're a capable engineer, especially with remote work available.
Is it considered normal for developers to work 60 hours a week in the USA?
Because from my experiences in Australia and New Zealand, the majority of people work a 40 hour week. Everyone in my office has cleared out by 6 PM.
$50k a year for working 40 hours a week in the midwest with its lower cost of living sounds like a fine deal. Those kinds of wages are fairly normal for software developers to earn internationally in other developed countries like Australia or Germany.
$50k doesn't go far. Other countries have taxpayer funded healthcare (easily worth $10k per year), 1 year maternity and paternity leave, 6 weeks of vacation, and stronger employee protections (so that you actually are working 40 hours a week).
I earn the equivalent of US$55k (plus bonus) here in Australia (I could be earning more, long story) as a relatively junior developer.
But then you have to add my annual leave entitlement, I get 4 weeks annual leave plus 2 weeks of public holidays (this country is so amazing, they give me a day off to watch the horse races). I hear that the standard in the USA is 2 weeks for a professional job. So I essentially get a 10% bonus in holiday pay. I also get 10 days of paid sick leave a year, and 3 days of bereavement leave for deaths of close relatives.
I also have 9.5% superannuation on top of my salary, and I don't have to pay health insurance. For the luxury of (almost) free healthcare, my tax burden is only $700 more than it would be in Grand Rapids. According to a random website I found, I'd be paying $3,000 per year for health insurance in Michigan [1].
So my income, adjusted for superannuation and annual leave, is around $67k, add the health insurance to that and I'm at $70k. Apparently cost of living in San Fransisco is about 40% higher than Melbourne [2], so on that comparison I'm not doing poorly, but Melbourne is about 20% more expensive than Grand Rapids [3]. I'm always skeptical of Numbeo though, because the numbers are quite off. Basically though, I have US$20k (plus bonus) per year of disposable income after I pay for food, rent, and utilities.
Thanks for the numbers! The US is great if you're in the top 20%, especially if you're married to another in the top 20%, but otherwise I think most people would be better off in more equitable countries.
You're right. This is definitely low. I currently live in Pittsburgh. We hire our junior devs at about $65k starting with pretty good benefits. I threw Grand Rapids in a cost of living calculator and it had that salary at about $61k in Grand Rapids (5% cheaper). I'm pretty sure you could get entry level jobs in places like Cleveland and Rochester for similar costs. I haven't looked, but I'd be willing to bet you could get a similar starting salary in North Carolina or Virginia. Everyone is different and I don't want to knock anyone for being happy, but I personally would look to one of the other cheap COL areas if I was starting my career.
It rampages through the city like a plague every December through March.
Leave home in the dark, get home in the dark, it's overcast when you do go outside.
Snow comes and goes, it gently falls constantly due to "lake effect", and you'll have a few 10" snowstorms from November through February. Plus a couple random 40-60 degree days where it all melts off.
There is a ski hill (Cannonsburg) half an hour away, but it's only a hill - not a mountain. People ice fish, snowmobile, play hockey, and generally enjoy the winter - but you have to get out and use the right lights, or else you'll join most of the rest of the city in some mild depression.
When my son graduates high school, and our network of great schools, family, and friends becomes less of a tie, I'm running.
Couldn't agree more with this comment, it's why I left and dread ever moving back (my entire family still lives there). I will be taking monthly trips to warm destinations during the winter if I ever moved back.
Now the summer time is a completely different story...
Here's a good site for looking up the temperature, rain, snow, and sunlight data on US cities [1]. They have pretty fine grained coverage--around 170 cities in Michigan, for example.
If you hate snow, stay away. Winters are usually bad for at least 2-4 weeks sometimes much more. Weather constantly changes and can be unpredictable. Chicago is the same.
I was born here so I am fine but I have met SE Asian, Indian and Japanese people here who were kind of miserable. But you get used to it after a while.
> Winters are usually bad for at least 2-4 weeks sometimes much more. Weather constantly changes and can be unpredictable. Chicago is the same.
Lake Michigan has a large impact on weather patterns. Grand Rapids on the east and Chicago on the west do not have the same weather in the winter. Lake-effect snow is rare in Chicago, and the colder it gets the higher the likelihood of sunshine. Many days it will feel as though sunglasses are a safety item.
I will say Grand Rapids currently has some issues around software developers that are associated with our growing pains. Because of the rust belt depression of wages, we still haven't caught up. Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K. If you are an ineffective negotiator you might be lower. Many of my contemporaries have chosen to get remote jobs with the usual suspects. Zapier, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, Slack and others all have local people.
That said, this is a wonderful town that is changing all the time. The cost of living is low, though our real estate market is out of control and has been for a couple years. The developers here tend to have a strong sense of community and we generally support one another rather than tear each other down. We have some great local developers.
If you would like the low down on our growing town or are interest in moving, setting up a remote shop or building a company in our town let me know. I'd be happy to help you or get you in contact with those that can. (see profile)