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Took a gig in Tulsa and the pay data floored me
I moved from Austin to Tulsa for a contract role about 4 months ago, mostly because rent was killing me. Before I accepted, I dug into the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the metro area and saw the median salary for my position was nearly 12% lower than what I was earning back home. I figured the lower cost of living would even it out, but after running my actual monthly numbers, groceries and utilities here barely cost less. That stat made me realize pay scales are way more tied to local competition than actual living expenses. Has anyone else compared salary data between cities and gotten a shock like that, or am I the only one who trusted the wrong numbers?
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keith1648d ago
The thing about BLS data is it lags by like a year or more, so what you looked at might have been from before a big hiring push or a plant closing in that area. Tulsa has a lot of energy and aerospace jobs that come and go with oil prices, so the median can swing hard in either direction depending on when they collected the numbers. Nobody talks about the timing problem with these stats but it matters way more than people realize. Cost of living calculators have the same issue, they're comparing old grocery baskets and old rent surveys. Next time try looking at current job postings in your field for that city instead, the posted ranges will tell you more about what companies are paying right now than any government table will.
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