I think this is, as usual, specific to the Bay Area and maybe NYC, and also limited to the top 10% of developers at tech companies.
I don't think tech salaries are all that great even in other big cities like DC or Denver, especially as home prices have also passed their 2007 highs, while salaries were stagnant and bonuses or equity are nothing like in FAANG companies. This is especially true when non-managers salary cap at about 40, which is when many professionals in other industries are just getting started making good money.
A lot of small cities might have no real tech companies and only a few large Fortune 500 companies that employ half the software engineers in the whole city. All it takes is one or two of them to decide to offshore half the IT department to Bangalore while signing a big deal with Cognizant or Infosys for the other half in house (i.e. H1Bs brought in from India). If you're stuck in that city, you're looking at wage stagnation for a long while.
It's still okay if you're a good developer - top 25% - at age 27 making $90K in a low COL city, while most of your peers are barely out of grad school. But it's not when you're 40 making $120K and all your peers - nurses, government workers, sales, lawyers, entrepreneurs - have caught up, often with far more stability and better working conditions. I think software engineering has gotten to be a dead-end career for a lot of us not working at tech companies in big cities, and globalization and H1Bs have continued eating away at the industry for the majority of us working as contractors and at big corps.
I think this is, as usual, specific to the Bay Area and maybe NYC, and also limited to the top 10% of developers at tech companies.
I don't think tech salaries are all that great even in other big cities like DC or Denver, especially as home prices have also passed their 2007 highs, while salaries were stagnant and bonuses or equity are nothing like in FAANG companies. This is especially true when non-managers salary cap at about 40, which is when many professionals in other industries are just getting started making good money.
A lot of small cities might have no real tech companies and only a few large Fortune 500 companies that employ half the software engineers in the whole city. All it takes is one or two of them to decide to offshore half the IT department to Bangalore while signing a big deal with Cognizant or Infosys for the other half in house (i.e. H1Bs brought in from India). If you're stuck in that city, you're looking at wage stagnation for a long while.
It's still okay if you're a good developer - top 25% - at age 27 making $90K in a low COL city, while most of your peers are barely out of grad school. But it's not when you're 40 making $120K and all your peers - nurses, government workers, sales, lawyers, entrepreneurs - have caught up, often with far more stability and better working conditions. I think software engineering has gotten to be a dead-end career for a lot of us not working at tech companies in big cities, and globalization and H1Bs have continued eating away at the industry for the majority of us working as contractors and at big corps.