1) These types of comments always make me cringe because it's built on an assumption that everyone is solely trying to optimize for income. I know plenty of people who would take a pay cut to continuously work on what they consider more interesting problems than, say, a social media app or basic CRUD app.
2) COLA matters. $174k in, say, Southwest HQ in Dallas is roughly equated to $422k in SV.
It’s ridiculous to suggest that compensation isn’t correlated with quality. There are many exceptions but it’s a good rule of thumb in the absence of additional information. It also just passes the sniff test - try comparing the Southwest Airlines app to the united airlines app.
I don’t think COLA matters all that much. The reason SV pays such high salaries reflects the underlying higher productivity of those engineers. The fact that much of that income goes to landlords in the Bay Area is orthogonal to the underlying quality of the engineers.
Nobody is claiming they aren't correlated. The question is: how strong is the correlation? The OP seems to insinuate they are extremely correlated on account that it is the sole consideration in the comment.
Like so many strong claims made online, it's an overly simplified mental model for something that is much more complex in reality. Like you said, we need more information before making strong claims.
2) COLA matters. $174k in, say, Southwest HQ in Dallas is roughly equated to $422k in SV.