They talk about the cost of living and salaries, but that's been the case for a LONG time.

I remember working tech support for a company acquired by a company in the valley. They had a tech support team too and we were added. They were twice our size ... and they were horrendous at their jobs. We outperformed them at significantly lower cost to the company. At one point the head of engineering caught wind of a possible new issue and asked "Please assign those tickets to people in Minnesota." But it never seemed to matter, nobody with authority wanted to out their department as unnecessarily expensive.

Maybe those numbers matter now, but I'm skeptical.

How much of this was from WFH, which enabled people to take their California job somewhere else. As that's being dialled back whenever possible, this curve might be rather different in a year or two.

Unless the VC funding is starting things up elsewhere and people are willing and able to go work there.