> But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful, male SWE in the Bay Area making $120K+ a year in his 20s or 30s, who should be a magnet for women, turns out to be living in one of worst places because of male-female ratios among singles (and some other cultural factors).
Yes, it's quite simple: there are many more men in the Bay than women, so women have their pick, and they can afford to raise the bar far higher than $120k.
Also, $120k can be a nice annual salary in much of the US, but doesn't go far in the Bay where median house price is over $1m.
Consider just FAANGs in the Bay. There's probably not enough available single women just for every straight FAANG male employee (who would be making more than $120k/yr).
Anecdotally, I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them.
Fair or not, your "male SWE making $120K+ a year" has become the "common guy" of the Bay. The number of women is small enough that most of them can aim higher.
> it's quite simple: there are many more men in the Bay than women
I’m in Manhattan. The single sex ratio is reversed. (More single women than men.)
Male FAANG employee rants about how they should be magnets for women, but can’t find a date because something is wrong with all women, are equally prevalent here.
They’re all (a) the same rant and (b) as boring as the last one.
There’s a selection effect among well-paid software engineers at large tech companies that explains more of this than local statistics. That or these jobs turn interesting people into those who believe they should be magnets for the opposite sex, which tends to be a turn-off for most people.
> That or these jobs turn interesting people into those who believe they should be magnets for the opposite sex, which tends to be a turn-off for most people.
Tech selects for people who are object focussed as opposed to people focussed.
Most women prefer to date men who are good at wooing and entertaining them. Which means more people focussed than object focussed.
The tech men are frustrated because they are basically their best selves -- financially and professionally successful, able and willing to support a family. Traditionally that would be enough to make them a catch.
But dating women with careers limits the value of their financial support. And they don't have the skills to wow the women socially.
Realistically they can't develop those skills easily.
This is probably going to sound incredibly cynical, but the best advice I've heard for NYC techies is to try to date ballerinas.
They're beautiful and disciplined. But they retire before 30 and have to decide to either start a family or open a studio to start teaching. At that point most of the men they know are married or gay.
So likely to be more willing to overlook the social weaknesses of tech men.
Don Quixote appears from behind the curtain up stage left--his left arm confidently and lustily on his right hip, right arm arcing gracefully over his head like half a rainbow.
There's so much going on in this response, but my favorite parts, in order of appearance:
> The tech men are frustrated because they are basically their best selves
The tech men are frustrated because of entitlement. Handed everything on a silver platter hand-delivered to them by a person of color driving a rented Toyota Prius for half of their monthly income.
> This is probably going to sound incredibly cynical, but the best advice I've heard for NYC techies is to try to date ballerinas.
Leave my goddamn ballerinas alone.
> But they retire before 30 and have to decide to either start a family or open a studio to start teaching.
Most of the people I dance with are software engineers of one kind or another. San Francisco may be somewhat unique in that regard--I wouldn't know, but most of the dancers I know both professional and retired are insanely enterprising and know how to hustle better than most of the people I know in tech.
> At that point most of the men they know are married or gay.
Most of the men I know that dance both professionally and at an amateur level do not identify as gay--some have families--with other dancers.
> So likely to be more willing to overlook the social weaknesses of tech men.
Nope. It's _impossible_ to overlook the social weaknesses of tech men.
"Realistically they can't develop those skills easily."
software skills can't be developed easily either, yet programmers have powered through, persevered, and figured it out. where would programmers be if they shied away from skills they couldn't develop easily?
also, if you have underdeveloped social skills, you are not 'basically your best self'. i believe in the tech men! i believe that they can put their cleverness & perseverance to work developing their social skills! you can do it!
It's interesting how co-occurrent some genetic/behavioral traits are. I read an article about a study of domesticating foxes. After many generations selecting for propensity to come forward when a human puts out food, the semi-domesticated offspring showed a wide array of physical traits associated with dogs in addition to the behavior that was selected for.
Yet... as computing becomes more popular, I expect this stereotype to become obsolete. It roughly applies to myself and many of my friends. My wife calls me a robot. But hey, somehow most of us managed to find a spouse.
Thank you for your anecdote. I'm sure as soon as enough Bay area engineers read it, thousands of women will materialize out of thin air to compensate for the fact that there are 55-65% more men than women in counties like Santa Clara and Marin.
While I don't doubt that some guys have trouble in more favorable conditions, nothing will change the mathematical reality that even if every single man in the Bay found his perfect match, 40% of them would remain single because there are simply not enough women for all the men in the area.
I've been away from the bay for a while, but it's amazing how bad the dating scene is, for exactly the reasons you described. I'm currently engaged to an amazing woman who has only ever lived in working-class suburbs and smaller cities. Her exes and her friends' husbands are shockingly anti-intellectual, didn't attend college, have some substance abuse issues, and/or make well under 6 figures. She keeps telling me how amazing I am as a partner, even though in my mind, I'm just being a decent human being. Engineers in places like SFBA severely underestimate how attractive they would be anywhere else in the country/world.
> Engineers in places like SFBA severely underestimate how attractive they would be anywhere else in the country/world.
I agree completely.
> Her exes and her friends' husbands are shockingly anti-intellectual, didn't attend college, have some substance abuse issues, and/or make well under 6 figures.
Here's what happened:
Guys who are intellectual, attended college, have good discipline, and stayed away from substance abuse and similar problems - they moved to the Bay to get that "six figure job".
The Bay has thus become chock-full of these men.
The few women who moved to the Bay can have their pick. What would be a rare find elsewhere, is commonplace and boring in the Bay.
One of many anecdotes I could cite:
A friend of mine is a 25yo female working in recruiting in the Bay. If you pitched a date as an "intellectual, college-educated man with a good life and a six-figure job" she'd literally laugh in your face. She had 2 different guys courting her at the time, a startup CEO and a VC. She once showed me her Tinder account. Just by swiping 30-40 times, she'd find at least one guy who is an exec or VC making 7 figures per year, and it would usually be a match.
> she'd find at least one guy who is an exec or VC making 7 figures per year, and it would usually be a match.
> "120k/year"? You'd make her laugh.
I don't understand this fixation on earnings, I wasn't making half that when I found my partner. Making 7 figures won't get you a girlfriend, but thinking it will makes it likely any partner you do find won't stick around long.
One of two things are happening, either a, all the women you're meeting truly are fixated on nothing but a man's wallet (highly unlikely but possible) or b, you have some seriously unhealthy views towards women and relationships that you should work on before attempting to enter a meaningful relationship.
Women find men with more money to be more attractive. It isn't the only factor, but it is a significant factor like for example height.
> "A man can move himself two points higher on the attractiveness scale we used if his salary increases by a factor of 10," study author John Speakman told The Times.
The book "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley goes into depth about how men and women choose their mates, based largely on evolutionary biology.
People treat it like a character flaw for a woman to choose a man based on wealth and status, but why? A woman committing to a relationship likely means pregnancy and that requires resources and protection for years and years.
That's how it's been for hundreds of thousands of years. Expecting widespread birth control and changing societal norms to overcome all those years of evolution in only a few generations seems foolish.
You're right, but the flip side is that men are actively shamed for pursuing their own evolutionary incentives. There are two layers of competition going on, the sexual-economic one and the fluffy interpersonal one, but some people gain leverage by maintaining the fiction that one of them is obsolete. This fiction is enforced by calling everyone who notices it a misogynist or an incel.
I found my wife when I was unemployed. I wouldn't have it any other way. As a result, I remind myself to never forget it, and be extra good as a husband. Relationships are hard enough, if you're using your income (I had none, was on unemployment), or inheritance (I have none) as a carrot, you're in for a rude awakening someday. Apologies to Red Green, but while I'm not wealthy, I'm just a run of the mill software developer in Chicago.. she does find me handy and handsome!
Finding a spouse when you aren't well off or rich is the wave. From what I see/hear from my friends, dating is grueling. I've been with my mine for almost a decade.
attempts at explaining macro-scale socio-economics with the kind of game-theoretic arguments in this thread assume you can nudge one factor while keeping "all other things equal". It's hard to do this with perdonal anecdotes, yet that's what all of us have direct experience of.
Depends on the startup and what stage it is. If it's a successful startup, then the CEO is sitting on a pile of stock that will likely be worth millions. If it's also a later stage startup, then likely he is making at least as much as his senior developers on top of that.
Either way, he's a much better bet if you want to be a millionaire's wife some day. Also, executives typically have expense accounts that afford them a very nice lifestyle _right now_, even if their salary isn't that high. You can be making a modest salary, but leading a jetset life on business expenses.
> Are there really very many VCs out there?
Yes there are. Here's just one random list of them:
That's a pretty expected outcome when you pay that game.
If you take the sum of all the comments, it goes something like this:
1. Women are disproportionally flocking to a few guys at the very top of the income / success curve.
2. Those guys have amazing dating life, and no pressure to commit.
3. They will go through dozens of women and eventually settle with one. So if they date X women in their bachelorhood, only one 1/X will end up marrying them, and X-1/X will be left disappointed and unhappy.
4. X can be 200+, so that's a lot of unhappy women.
5. Meanwhile tons of guys below the top would love get a date, and can't. They're also unhappy.
6. Evolution isn't optimizing for happiness.
To contrast this, I think at least a quarter of the ones I know have this as an ambition. Knowing people that do want something or that do not has nothing to do with averages, unless you happen to know everyone :)
I've had shares worth millions on paper that later turned out to be worthless many times... It really need to be a later stage startup with real traction for that to really mean anything.
However, it's a different path for top executives versus the rest of us.
If you follow folks at that level, you'll notice that even when their startup fizzles, they tend to come out on top.
There are ways to get paid well at an exit even when your stock are nominally worthless. If you're an executive. Not to mention that if their startup was worth $100m+ at one point, they would likely get a chance to start another.
None of this is criticism, by the way: many of these guys worked harder and longer than most engineers.
They did get disproportionately compensated for it, though.
One example: if you're the one who approves the sale, you can arrange for a cushy job with a golden parachute at the acquiring entity. Say, $1m/yr comp with $30m mandatory severance whenever you leave for any reason.
Congrats, you just got paid $30m+ as an exec for an exit that paid nothing to all other shareholders.
In her defense, I don't think she only cared about income. But she could easily screen out everyone making less than seven figures, so she started from that reduced pool, then further screened it for personality, etc.
> The few women who moved to the Bay can have their pick.
I don't think so. It's only when males are desperate to settle; living alone and spending their money on their hobbies/travel might be a much more attractive option to them than to bind to an unattractive female that went to SFBA specifically to capture a high-value male.
I think you underestimate the situation haha. Your perception of attractiveness is based on who’s around you. If the average around you is by New York standards a 5, then a 6 is above-average attractive. And a 7 is a solid catch.
Women in the Bay Area can easily score a few points higher than in more competitive cities and the opposite is true for men.
> I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them.
That sounds more like bullets dodged than a loss (for the engineers that is).
Sure. If that appeals to you, you're welcome to move to the Bay. You'll dodge so many bullets, that you'll forget what a date with a woman is ;-)
More seriously, while we'd love to impose moral views on reality, the simple fact is that when people can afford to be picky, they will be.
I don't know what you value in a romantic partner, but for simplicity, let's assume it's looks. If you arrived at some magical island where it was just you and hundreds of women, and 50% of those were supermodels, would you ever date an average girl?
If hundreds of supermodels are competing for your attention, I'm sure many of them would become amazing at fishing, modern dancing, pottery-making, or whatever other random skill you find attractive.
Obviously the point is that you still gotta survive on this island, and the reason why we have diversity in personality, physicality and intelligence is because different combinations of those things matter for survival. And it's unlikely that you would "date" at all in an island with such ratios.
>> If you arrived at some magical island where it was just you and hundreds of women, and 50% of those were supermodels, would you ever date an average girl
I would start acting like an asshole because that would be the only way of keeping most of them from making advances on me all the time.
I have no idea what your point is... i'm talking about avoiding women who are only interested in money or power, i.e gold diggers - that's not a healthy relationship for anyone.
>Anecdotally, I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them.
No matter ones income, it's better not to go anywhere with that kind of women. Also life tends to adjust this pretty quickly: they can be that picky until their early 30's, maybe even late 20's. After that available options narrow down substantially.
Galaxy brain: maybe the same qualities that make a guy more valuable in the professional marketplace and qualify them to be VCs and CEOs instead of entry level SWEs (interpersonal skills, superior judgement, long-range vision, managerial skills, identifying win-win solutions and building consensus for them, etc) also make them better romantic partners. So the salary is a correlation with an underlying shared root cause, not a direct causation.
Idk, $120k is still a lot. You are still begging the question that money even matters. There's an elephant in the room:
Basically men have vastly overestimated the importance of wealth.
A chart of the importance of wealth would drop off a cliff as you go from third-world conditions to a non-starvation civilization. Then it approaches zero as you get to NYC/SF where literally everyone is rich or else they wouldn't be living there. Guys who get mail order brides are basically arbitraging this (probably temporary) geographical difference in the importance of wealth.
Yes, it's quite simple: there are many more men in the Bay than women, so women have their pick, and they can afford to raise the bar far higher than $120k.
Also, $120k can be a nice annual salary in much of the US, but doesn't go far in the Bay where median house price is over $1m.
Consider just FAANGs in the Bay. There's probably not enough available single women just for every straight FAANG male employee (who would be making more than $120k/yr).
Anecdotally, I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them.
Fair or not, your "male SWE making $120K+ a year" has become the "common guy" of the Bay. The number of women is small enough that most of them can aim higher.