In past discussions on HN, it has been pointed out that salaries aren't directly related to local cost of living.

It's similar to the fact that the price of manufactured goods don't vary linearly with the cost of producing them. They are related, in the sense that if the cost goes up, supply tends to go down and so the price goes up. But not always.

In Silicon Valley, Seattle area and NYC there's intense competition for qualified information-technology labour. So the price of labour (wages) goes up. They pay more not because the living cost there is high, but rather because they can afford to pay more and still turn a profit. In turn, lots of well-paid employees in an area tend to raise its living cost.

There are major European and Asian cities with living cost comparable to the above areas, but I don't know of any that pays IT salaries as high as SV/NYC. There are probably many reasons for that, but I guess one of them is that highly profitable software companies are very concentrated in the US. In Tokyo, for instance, the only companies that pay as well as US companies are foreign financial companies. These are just a handful. In average, salaries are much lower.

I'm not sure he was arguing there had to be a specific correlation. But as you said, in major cities such as the one you've listed, it tends to be higher. No matter how you look at that, location does influence pay to a strong degree whether its direct or indirect influence.

Right, that's why I said "somewhat". People are really trying to put words in my mouth in this thread, sheesh.

Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. My intention was to complement your comment, not to argue that you were wrong.

I got that... was referring to the direct replies.

I hope you weren't referring to me given that I wasn't even replying to you (clearly obvious from the branching of the reply). My response originally stem from this comment:

"In past discussions on HN, it has been pointed out that salaries aren't directly related to local cost of living. "

If anything, the argument was in support of the original statement you made here:

"This totally depends on location". I have no clue where you got the idea I was putting words into your mouth when the argument I was presenting was in support of your very first sentence.

There's not actually that much difference, once you take into account factors like holiday allowance (in the UK you typically get 25 days vs 10 in the the US) the difference is only about 10% - well with the yearly variance of the exchange rate.

in 2008 when the GBPUSD rate was around 2 (versus the 1.6 it is now), salaries in the UK were substantially higher than those in the US.

It's mostly down to currency fluctuations more than any real perception of the worth of software developers.

in nyc, 30,000 a year will get you an untrained monkey with no skills at all... or someone with no concept at all of what they can get paid.

Right I would say that is the same for most of the US. If I had to venture to guess, I would imagine the national average for entry level is around 50-60k and senior developers are north of 100k in most major metros.

hence the range.

Oops, meant to specify the bay area.