I'm a new grad looking at job opportunities in various US cities. I'm not really tied to any particular place, but I was looking into salaries and cost of living recently and wanted some insight.

The median salary for software engineers in Austin, TX is 168k-184k as can be seen here vs the median salary for software engineers in San Francisco being 253k-279k, shown here.

The median house price and rent in in Austin, TX is 489k and 1,700 respectively though, with SF being all the way at 1.5M for a house and 4,800 for rent!

It doesn't have to be SF and Austin exactly, but do you think the ratio of Austin's salary and CoL makes it more worth it compared to SF? Do you know of any other cities I should consider too?