[thehardsphere]

A possibly flawed analogy follows:

Hollywood is the biggest city in the world for acting, followed by New York, and maybe Vancouver is in third place. I'm pretty sure people working as actors in any of those three cities are going to be paid more than actors working elsewhere, because there's greater demand in Hollywood/NYC/Vancouver than there is Omaha, Nebraska.

The biggest cities for software are San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, New York, and Austin. Probably not in that order anymore, but that's where most of the action is. If you're not working in one of those places, you're probably not making as much because there's less demand in your area for software people. All of these cities are in the US and none of them are in Europe.

[astrange]

There's also video game industry, which produces software, and traditionally the only kind of software normal people enjoy using to the point of getting emulators for.

It's a little more distributed: http://www.gameindustrycareerguide.com/best-cities-for-video...

I'm surprised SF comes up so much still. Isn't the rent an existential threat to the industry?

[thehardsphere]

The rent is a minor expense if it gets you access to a competitive labor market and venture capital you otherwise would not have.

Plus, I imagine that many of those studios may have gotten their start before things like Unity and Steam made it possible for anybody with enough time on their hands to make and publish their own games very inexpensively.