Former position at Facebook: Operations/release engineer
Why he left: Kulka worked as a Facebook engineer for five years, and his reason for quitting in 2015 was simple: He wasn't making enough money.
As Kulka quickly learned, even a six-figure salary sometimes isn't enough to support a family of four in the notoriously expensive San Francisco real estate market. He tried selling his Facebook stock and having his family live with a roommate for some extra cash, but after the birth of his second child in 2013, he said he realized his family would have to make a change.
"There were a few choices on the table," Kulka wrote in a column for Vox. "Move to a bad part of town where rents are cheaper, move into an apartment, relocate to another city with a Facebook engineering office and an equally expensive housing market, or leave the best job I may ever have and return to Arizona, where my wife and I were happiest living."
Kulka and his family chose to move back to Arizona, where he works as a DevOps manager for Parchment Inc., a software company that manages school transcripts. He said he hopes big tech companies would eventually reconsider their focus on Silicon Valley and other places with high costs of living.
"It can easily work for a single 20- or 30-something with no family and a few roommates, and they can prosper greatly from it if they’re able to save responsibly," he wrote for Vox. "But for a person with a family of four who has a certain lifestyle that they want to try to maintain (a nice-ish $40,000 car, the ability to go out once a month and leave the kids with a sitter, a house that wasn't last remodeled in '70s, etc.), it can be difficult."