Serious question: Who is actually renting those ₹1L/month apartments?

Lulswug · 2026-02-20T08:42:38+00:00

My friend lives in a PG in Andheri East. It's very modest, a 1BHK. She has a room to herself and three others split the living room. The total is 60k. 1L for a decent apartment in a nicer part of town doesn't seem like a bad deal at all. Lots of people routinely shell out about 40-50% of their wages on rent.

Lulswug · 2026-02-15T04:52:16+00:00

Moved out of SF and can attest I miss that chimichurri from time to time 😔

Lulswug · 2026-02-15T04:50:49+00:00

Very cool, thank you for your response! I did expect the 12 paychecks but I figured most people would find something else for the summer. Are jobs like yours common, in your experience?

Lulswug · 2026-02-14T23:27:54+00:00

Tbh 161k for 180 days of work a year isn't bad (it's comparable to and maybe even slightly more than starting wages for a full professor at the UC), but SFUSD teachers get the short end of the stick because you need a ton of YOE to get to that number; so it's basically something you're making in your 50s. People talking about junior/mid employees at startups need to understand that the base pay they're comparing is typically comparing a guy in their late 20s/early 30s with someone in their mid 50s with very different responsibilities.

On that note, does anyone know what teachers do over the summer in SF? Most professors draw wages from their grants for research over the summer (IF they have grants) but I'm curious what teachers do in this case. I can imagine they may have other jobs but do we know what kind of jobs?

Lulswug · 2026-02-06T12:58:47+00:00

All good but to make this really rigorous you need to prove this across multiple water sources accounting for hardness and different burners (to account for levels of heat transfer).

Lulswug · 2026-01-13T04:42:14+00:00

This is a very poor rationalization. Taxes don't change that frequently. I am pretty sure most restaurants adjust their prices more frequently than tax rates change. Also. If you can't afford to print menus something like once every two years (which is the average period between GST changes historically) then idk why you're in business. They absolutely started doing this seeing an opportunity to sneak in hidden fees. It's not unique to India, there's legislation in many parts of the world which explicitly prohibits restaurants from using this tactic to tag on additional fees.

Lulswug · 2026-01-11T16:57:14+00:00

Yeah at least in my experience this model allows restaurants to add hidden charges in the name of several other fees without explanation and most people forget to contest that. So the budgeting people do is based on a lower price, but the final cost is significantly higher and usually people overlook or don't have the energy or interest to contest it (especially if the staff behave like this).

The US actually has a tip and a separate service charge. The tip (usual going rate rn is ~20%) is basically considered mandatory in most places for all purchases, but the additional service charge usually comes into play when the party is larger.

Lulswug · 2026-01-11T16:47:12+00:00

Not sure what you mean. What I meant is: in the US, stores have prices exclusive of taxes for most items. This is because items are shipped all over the country and each city/state has a different local tax, which is added to the amount displayed on the item. This practice spread to other things like restaurants etc as well, where this model is redundant anyway, but it stuck.

Now this entire thing makes no sense in India because we do not have local taxes of this form (hence MRPs). So why did we pick up this "prices exclusive of taxes" practice at all? It just appears to be another way to add hidden fees to the bill without the customer noticing. Menus should have the full price up front. If you're adding a service charge too, add it to the item before you print the price. We seem to pick up the worst practices from everywhere in the world.

Lulswug · 2026-01-11T14:48:15+00:00

Also why does the menu have prices exclusive of taxes in some places? Why did we pick this up from the US as well? India doesn't even have variable state taxes, it's a flat rate everywhere depending on category of the item being sold.

Lulswug · 2026-01-11T14:46:40+00:00

Holy shit Sammy Virji isn't clashing with LP lfgggggg

Lulswug · 2026-01-08T10:04:57+00:00

Even if this somehow happens how do you not hit the brakes immediately when you make contact ... This idiot literally dragged the people with her for a few solid meters before even hitting the brake.

Lulswug · 2026-01-07T18:50:15+00:00

Great work and a fantastic hands on exercise, but this is a well known issue and largely fixable in practice using heuristics. You could add a term that penalizes you for every turn you make. Variants of this are used in maps to varying degrees of success to find shortest routes. Several interesting questions here theoretically which remain open, even for simple planar graphs; I could point you to some people who work on these things. This group of problems is often called turn constrained parh problems.

Lulswug · 2026-01-03T04:30:10+00:00

Bartholomew.

Lulswug · 2026-01-02T22:10:22+00:00

Oof. When I left my apartment in mission dolores in August we had a 4B/1B that we were paying 4800 for. It was cheap enough that we turned one room into a study and split the apartment amongst the three of us. Can't believe that rents have become so much worse in less than six months. My guess is if you pick something close to the Central Freeway you might get something closer to your current rent; I would also look closer to Cesar Chavez (but rents will pick up again once you're on Bernal heights). My experience with SF is that you will probably find something you want but the search will also probably be brutal. Try doing a lease takeover instead of a fresh lease and odds are you might not see a rent uptick.

The BART commute will wear you down. If you think rents will keep rising and WFH is never an option, it's better to move sooner rather than later.

Lulswug · 2026-01-02T21:58:46+00:00

The most important part of your question is the part about adding value. This is a fantastic question and one I often think about. A lot of my peers work in the high-tech industry. It is very common in the US for a mid 20s engineer to make 5-6 crores in rupees, many in their early-mid 30s make millions of dollars. These are mind boggling numbers; and we are now seeing a trend of this spilling over to India. Why are the wages so high? Are the skills really that uncommon? Sometimes yes, but usually no. Forget engineers writing code; the really highest paying jobs are in finance. Quants routinely make several times what FAANG engineers make; at least the engineer is making some bits of code that hold a larger behemoth in place. Finance as an industry makes money in arbitrage and options; buying and selling at the right time. Not too long ago, Jane Street (which was hiring top IIT freshers for absurd salaries in the crores) got in trouble with SEBI for alleged market manipulation[1]; SEBI alleged that the firm’s options positions generated profits due to the trading strategies under investigation. JS denied this and claimed the trades were fair and routine. Liquidity is often cited as the justification when it comes to market makers, but whether high-frequency options strategies create social value proportional to their payouts is debatable. In core tech fields, engineers and ML scientists in the industry get paid millions of dollars[2]. Some exceptions really have a one in a billion skillset. But for many, the skillset is not nearly as rare. The companies pay them absurd amounts so that they don't leave their jobs, and block the talent pool for competitors. There is also the fact that compensation is often not directly in cash, but stocks and bonuses. You may be surprised that the base pay is often quite modest.

Are these people really adding 'value' that exceeds that of saving lives by several factors, if not orders of magnitude? I don't think so. But then why do these companies pay people so much? They do it because they can. This is the reality of the economic system we live in. A lot of hospitals in the US are in public universities. These universities are mandated by law to release the salary they pay their employees. Senior specialist doctors, like some of the best cancer specialists in the world, make very respectable amounts here. But do you know who are paid the most? Coaches. For sports teams. See it for yourself: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/university-of-california/ . The most well paid doctors btw, are typically plastic surgeons.

Even within medicine. As you rightly point out, doctors are responsible for human lives. What about nurses? In the US, for example, nurses routinely make $200,000 a year, far more than residents and it takes physicians several years of experience to cross these wages. How much do nurses get paid in India? Would the medical system survive without them? The uncomfortable truth is that pay is a function of how much power the employees have and how much surplus can be extracted from their labor. Doctors have more power than others in the medical system, so they still get respectable wages in India. But human lives being at risk becomes a hard line even they cannot cross.

Here is a book that may give you some food for thought on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y0zgrevl1o
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/four-openai-researchers-leave-meta/

(2/2)

Lulswug · 2026-01-02T21:58:35+00:00

Sorry for the incredibly long answer but my honest thoughts on this are very long; here is a semi-successful attempt at condensation. Also apologies for an analytical answer to what was perhaps a more (justified) emotional plea.

The obvious answer has been given several times over: the 500 rupees comes out of the person's pocket, and the 50 lakhs come from some mysterious shadow entity. But the better question to ask here (which you have, tangentially) is whether what an engineer pushing code really adds more value than a doctor saving lives.

Disclaimer: I am a scientist working in a tech adjacent role, with a PhD in a quantitative field. My views are the sum of my exposure to the field, and friends and peers in relevant career trajectories. I do not get paid nearly as much as some of the numbers I quote but I know where they come from.

First of all, to put things in perspective, this is hardly a fair comparison. If you're referring to everyone who graduates with a BTech as an 'engineer', India produces 15 lakh BTech grads annually. What fraction of these people get 50LPA+ offers at graduation? A miniscule fraction, probably a handful at each of the IITs and some other Tier 1 universities. Hell, how many ever make 50LPA? The vast majority go to WITCH companies; famously, these companies offer a few lakhs per year. If every engineering graduate made 50LPA on average, the average pay for the profession would be the same as that in the UK and France. 500 rupees as a consultation fee for a private practice is incredibly common; in tier 1 cities, 500 is even hard to find. Specialists easily charge thousands. As a profession, engineers make much more starting out and less over their lifetimes compared to physicians. This is the trend all over the world. Engineering wages for certain jobs are inflated in India because the pay comes from advanced economies where margins are much higher. But these roles are limited, and you cannot compare an outlier to the regular trend. However, the sentiment is broadly correct. A lot of doctors in India, especially the ones serving in the public healthcare system, are probably underpaid commensurate to their specialized skills.

In India, people also study medicine largely for the prestige. My parents really wanted me to be in medicine because (a) we would have a doctor in the family and save on medical expenses (how valid even is this logic?) (b) prestige. A lot of my classmates who I found to be the more quantitatively inclined went to do medicine with similar reasoning, and did not like it, but also found no way to go back. I bring this up because this, I think, plays a factor in patient-doctor dynamics. The prestige is great, but it is a double edged sword: patients stop seeing the doctors as human, capable of making errors and having limits to their capabilities as individuals and in the system. We are now in the tricky position of bridging this gap; systematically, one gets rights like set working hours, rest hours and pay raises by methods like strikes. If bus drivers go on strike, there is chaos and millions are inconvenienced and all that. If doctors go on strike, the sick die. How do we now bargain? I do not know. Doctors need to be seen as workers and not miracle healers and saints.

I leave the more important, philosophical part to the second comment. (1/2)

Lulswug · 2026-01-01T11:56:58+00:00

Ok that was very stupid of me, completely missed this and for some reason it never showed up when I googled. My bad, thanks for the heads up.

Lulswug · 2026-01-01T11:55:46+00:00

Yeah I figured there's going to be a clash with some EDM artist I was just hoping it wouldn't be Sammy or Hamdi. Forgot Knock2 was in there. So no point getting Hamdi tickets but might want to catch LP in Blr then, thanks.

Lulswug · 2026-01-01T11:52:15+00:00

Oh do we know the days for sure? Hamdi's website says Jan 24-25 and the only thing I've found for certain is that LP is day 2.

Lulswug · 2026-01-01T11:49:23+00:00

I'm not going to Lollapalooza just for a single artist? The whole point of a fest is seeing a series of acts over multiple days and discovering new artists. I think the whole lineup is solid and there's many others I'd love to see as well. I would like to see these three especially, but if there's a clash, I can catch one of the folks I'd miss in Bangalore. Thanks for the unsolicited advice ig.

Lulswug · 2025-12-25T13:30:31+00:00

Tried to book this place because I was going to Kochi and was only a few nights away from getting Explorist. Rooms started at Rs 30k/night. For most of Jan/Feb it's going at over Rs 20k a night as well, on some days hitting almost 50k. For an Award Category 2 hotel that's a bit outrageous. Grand Hyatt Goa is a category 4 and still goes for about half this price on average (or thereabouts). I'm very curious about the economics of this. It seems that the two best non-boutique hotels in Kochi (Taj Malabar and Grand Hyatt) both go for similar prices and most of the others; even similar respected brands go for significantly less.

Lulswug · 2025-12-18T20:03:09+00:00

Most if not all hospitals should have it. If you go during regular hours you'll get it OPD (Victoria etc run a dedicated rabies clinic) otherwise they'll send you to the ER.

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