[lipstone]

Quite frankly, I think Epic Systems realizes it can't compete with Facebook. But the value is much better in comparison to many non-FAANG Bay Area companies.

I was actually in a similar situation, where Capital One offered 90K for Richmond, VA and it seemed better than ~120k offer in the Bay Area. But then I got a Google offer and stopped considering both of the others.

The high-CoL companies really only make sense financially if you're in the upper tiers of pay (and/or on the path to reaching that level of pay).