[sndean]

Quickly putting Apple's (assuming Bay Area) $161K into a cost of living calculator says that's equivalent to $82K in Cincinnati, OH. (You'd need to make $82K in Cincinnati to maintain your standard of living.)

So yeah, I'd say that adding locations is required. I'm not sure where the majority of the IBM software engineer jobs are?

[ganeshkrishnan]

IBM is all over the US (much much more locations than others mentioned here) and it's also split into two: product and consulting. Consulting get paid less and bring down the average but people choose it for location and project variety