Sorry for the wall of text. I travel a lot on business, and am just moving to one of the outer suburbs of Austin from the inner core, so I happen to be very familiar at the moment with the comparison you are asking about.

Pull out a map of Austin. Locate West 45th Street which turns into East 45th Street, slide down along IH-35/290 until you hit West Oltorf St, cut across to South Lamar Blvd, then go up 360 and then up MoPac Expressway to the river until you close the loop back to around Mount Bonnell. Within this polygon, you will not find a 2500+sf 3BR/2BA for less than around $500K without some serious remodeling, and in some neighborhoods within this polygon like Tarrytown, listings are commonly in the $700K-$900K range. Pull out a bit to the suburbs in concentric rings around this area, and the prices start dropping. Your commute gets longer, too.

A lot of the appeal of Austin's Slacker'ish lifestyle meme comes from an era when house prices in this same area were in the $100-200K range in the late-80's. It was in retrospect very cheap to live here, a little disposable income went a long way, cheap gas in a beater car let you get just about anywhere, and the city was in a much more compact area so "anywhere" in Austin was only about 10 minutes away. There are a lot of residents who remember this era and resent the rapid rise in real estate prices that eliminated this lifestyle for most; this is where a lot of the "Welcome to Austin, now please leave" sentiment you see comes from. There are only a few use cases where this kind of lifestyle still holds true today.

One is student-level living in something like the ICC co-ops. There are the usual co-operative living drawbacks there. The other use case is if you have substantial (7-figure and up) liquid assets after paying off shelter costs. Both let you live in the more compactly-developed areas of the city, and pursue a relatively low-stress lifestyle that harkens to that meme. Even now, the real estate pricing and ownership dynamics are starting to edge out the former compactness of the city even in the downtown and campus areas, but if you are savvy or wealthy enough to live in these still-compact areas (for now), then you can still feasibly get around daily with a bike (and showers at your work destination).

For folks living in the concentric rings however, the already-familiar "go into the city" routine for night life and meeting urban friends that others know about from other cities has already become a feature of the culture here, and living outside that hip urban vibe commonly portrayed in national media is the reality for most, like young families or "only" $100-150K household incomes. Young professionals with your kind of salary will thrive in the core of the city, but I have no idea how they manage to save up any money with the kind of rents being charged, and IMHO it is much more imperative to save for the 20-30 year cohort now than when I was that age. Due to the car-centric nature of Austin's development, if you have to commute from the suburban rings to the center, it can easily take 45-90 minutes one-way at the height of a rush hour depending upon the specifics; there are some really bothersome bottlenecks scattered throughout the city that create this nightmare. An exception noted below.

Ignore what you hear about the "dangerous" East side. If you have had any experience with the rougher parts of the large tech cities, East Austin is tame by comparison. I served on a county grand jury that reviews and passes felony indictments, and from direct experience there I can tell you the most consistently roughest part of the city is around IH-35 and Rundberg. East Austin is mostly petty crimes; muggings and stranger-on-stranger rapes happen but are rare. Rundberg/IH-35 is where a lot of the drug-related and lower socioeconomic-associated crime is centered; you will see more violent crime in this area, but it is still nothing compared to East Palo Alto during the 1980's for example. You can also look up crime statistics on spotcrime.com, which pulls a decently-recent feed from both the city police and county sheriff.

The light rail offers some intriguing possibilities that might create exceptions from what I covered above. There are some condo and apartments built very close to the stations. If you can put up with the somewhat limited schedule and the higher prices (relative to their general area) of these multi-unit dwellings, then it is entirely feasible to enjoy most of the compactness of the "old Austin" experience in the core without having to live in the core. The light rail is very bike-friendly, but Austin drivers are more hostile to cyclists than, say, Portland/OR drivers.

Salaries are slightly lower than the big tech cities, but not by much, and if you work for one of the HFTs in town for example there is practically no difference. As long as you don't live within that polygon I described, or insist upon hanging out in that area all the time, you'll do fine. If you have a fairly high tolerance for the slow/zoned-out drivers that Austin is infamous for, which can make for shorter but much more road rage inducing rush hour commutes compared to the big tech cities, then you can have your pick of extremely affordable areas around Austin. If you can put up with 1.5-2.0 hour each way commutes, you can get palatial-sized houses (4000+ sf) on 1-5 acre lots for around $500K out in rustic areas. For the $1.5M that gets you a "normal" small house in Cupertino, that far out will start to get you onto lake waterfront, large properties. For a 1.0-1.5 hour one way commute, the $500K price point can still get you the same size house on a 0.25+-acre lot.

The others have already given you a good idea of what to expect for the heat in the summer and the restaurant scene here (Austin is a budget foodie's dream come true; Bay Area has way better foodie options, but I found them much more expensive to access). The allergy situation is not exaggerated, the city is frequently found in the AFAA top 10 worst cities for allergies, and is unique with three distinct pollen seasons that nearly cover the entire year. There are some excellent allergy clinics in town but effective treatments can get very expensive (thousands per year for severe cases). A common occurrence is a newcomer moves here, has no problems with allergies for 5-10 years, then develops severe allergies (or actually crack a rib from the violent, frequent sneezing like one of my friends suffered). A smaller, luckier group that guts it out from there instead of moving away develop a resistance to the molds and pollens, and the allergies gradually get better over the next decade or two.

Hang out in reddit.com/r/austin to get a feel for the vibes of the various groups in Austin, it is pretty active.

Fun factoid: Austin-the-city-proper has about 8000 more in population than San Francisco-the-city-proper. The SF MSA is much, much larger. But the core of Austin went through the 350-840K population growth in an explosive 33-year period of 1980-2013. San Francisco took over 100 years to accomplish almost that same population growth. The core is insanely popular, and the real estate business is eating it up right now, and will continue to make bank from this incredible mania for the core for the foreseeable future.

Something to realize about the Austin tech scene: it is active, but not as strategically important to many companies with a presence yet no headquarters here. This means you need to watch out what teams you join if you sign up with a company that isn't headquartered here. Tech recessions can really beat up the divisions located in Austin that are very operations-oriented or on bleeding edge product development, and this has gotten much worse as the cost of living has gone up in the past decades, and salaries start getting closer to big tech city salaries.

If you are a startup that has already assembled your team and just wants a cool place to chill while creating your MVP for example, it's hard to go wrong with hanging out in Austin outside the core. However, I could say the same about San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc. Austin definitely has its unique charms and quirks, but contrary to the hive mind, from my travel experience I can't honestly say Austin is all that unique now (there was a very small window of opportunity when it could have been turned into a truly unique city experience, but it is gone for good now). It's assuredly a nice city, but like a lot of things in life, it is what you make of it.