I was with you until the "well paying jobs" part. Are they well paying in relation to the insane real estate prices? When I hear of developers getting $80-100k in SF, that sounds...not great.
There's a big dichotomy between the developers working for tech companies and the developers working everywhere else. Most tech companies do a decent job of taking care of people, but those 80-100k salaries are very common in the non-tech industries (who also employ thousands and thousands of technical staff).