[captainbeardo]

  I tried hard to convince a couple of friends to come.

This is Stockholm Syndrome

  You’ll earn more here than you would anywhere else.

Because the rent is proportionally expensive. If money is your focus work remote in Indonesia for a bay area

  If you decide to move here, it means you probably have more ambition than average. Consider that everybody else you’ll meet in the Bay Area will share that with you.

I would say there is a greater chance that people share the same ambition when it comes to tech, but you can't say Silicon Valley has more ambitions people on average if most of them are slaving away at FAANG companies.

  California is stunning. It’s sunny year long

Not San Francisco

[neonate]

> Because the rent is proportionally expensive.

The article addresses that. For many people, the compensation more than makes up for it, and often by a large margin, e.g. more than the entire salary you'd make elsewhere, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18067642.

The truth is that the author makes a ton of good points for ambitious young people like himself, which is the audience he's addressing. Commenters who are (justifiably) tethered to their lives elsewhere have a strong incentive to deny this.

[kstrauser]

Furthermore, anything you can get off Amazon is proportionally cheaper. An iPhone XS is expensive when you're making Midwest salaries, but not so much when you're on a San Francisco payroll. A car doesn't cost much more in SF than it does in Iowa, so as a percentage of your take-home salary it's actually far cheaper.

[Altimor]

Exactly. Travel especially seems much cheaper on Bay Area salaries! I know some people who moved to India, and told me that they'd actually be "richer" once accounting for cost of living. Except they can't leave now, every trip abroad is months of salary.