[keiferski]

The thing is, salaries are only high because they are based on geography. The extreme cost of living in SF and NYC contributes to the high salaries in the respective cities. If the COL were lower there, the salaries would never have become so high.

It is counter-intuitive, but I actually think everyone benefits from super high salaries in coastal cities, as it makes the benchmark rather high and thus even non-coastal employees benefit from a high expectation of a ‘proper’ salary. In other words, I’d FAANG were paying devs $50,000 a year in SF, there’d be zero chance that a dev in Iowa or Missouri would be making anywhere close to that.