This assumes there is an untapped supply of developers across the nation and that all a company has to do is look outside of the traditional tech hubs, but that is not the case. The tech hubs grew in a self-fulfilling cycle, attracting nearly the entire supply of competent developers.
Now that supply is spreading across the country because remote work is easier, but that doesn't change the number of developers that these companies are competing for. I doubt that the supply/demand curves will move much at all.
>The tech hubs grew in a self-fulfilling cycle, attracting nearly the entire supply of competent developers.
This is a wild statement and I would guess it is coming from someone who hasn't spent much time professionally outside of tech hubs. There are tech jobs and competent developers everywhere. They just exist in a higher concentration in tech hubs.
> The tech hubs grew in a self-fulfilling cycle, attracting nearly the entire supply of competent developers.The tech hubs grew in a self-fulfilling cycle, attracting nearly the entire supply of competent developers.
Even ignoring the silly claim at the end, what you say isn't logical. New developers aren't born in SV, they move there because that's where the jobs are. If they no longer need to move there for the good jobs, they won't.
> New developers aren't born in SV, they move there because that's where the jobs are. If they no longer need to move there for the good jobs, they won't.
This statement supports my point. A large proportion of devs currently live in a tech hub. They moved there because there was opportunity. Telling all the developers that the opportunity will come to them does not magically change the number of developers. So if demand for developers hasn't changed, and the supply hasn't changed, why would salaries change?
The only way the number of available devs changes is if some new untapped supply exists outside of the tech hubs. My argument is that it does not, the majority of devs that could already moved to a tech hub or figured something out.
As a non-tech hub guy, I think your last point probably isn't true. Where I work, the best devs are not on par with the Stanford/MIT etc. people, but we can hold our own quite well with the next tier down from New York, San Francisco, etc. (A lot of the devs here are from India originally but some are locals and the point stands regardless.) I've worked with a few of those people from big tech hubs on joint projects (one or two even went to prestigious technical colleges), and we had a high level of mutual respect and trust in one another's abilities. Whether my salary will trend towards yours or vice versa I don't know, but I definitely think I could have gotten a pretty big bump had I moved to San Fran. I don't because of many types of friction (laziness, family/friend/other relation ties, age, so on). If that friction goes away I assume we'll become more direct competitors.
Sure, but that would be invalidating someone telling you no developers were born in New England.
SV is a 2m+ area filled with local schools, where many of the parents are developers and highly supportive of the education to be a developer. For someone to say “no developers are born in SV” is bewildering.
You've chosen to interpret a missing qualifier as "all" when the more likely response if you'd asked for a clarification would be "most". It was very clear what the point made was, and it was not that nobody born in SV ever becomes developers.
I live in the Midwest (unfortunately), and despite interviewing quite well it has been difficult to actually get those interviews while living in the Midwest. Previously on HN there were some interesting articles about bias against Midwesterners.
There's many great developers outside of SV but they're typically doing boring Windows-centric finance or engineering support work.
Of course it'll move the curve. Now companies won't be geo locked to US anymore. Yes they have offices in other countries but the salaries are adjusted according to their COL. Think of EMEA where lots of SWE would love US salary but still live there. So the net effect would be that the market will hit an equilibrium where that salary is now way lower for US SWEs than what they used to get but way higher for EMEA SWEs than what they used to get. Get ready for a big time pay cut.
Now that supply is spreading across the country because remote work is easier, but that doesn't change the number of developers that these companies are competing for. I doubt that the supply/demand curves will move much at all.