[tptacek]

You're not following. Broadly speaking, better talent costs more money. The more money you have to spend on talent, the better the talent you retain will be. It's not about looking for "cheap labor"; it's about being able to find, recruit, and retain better people.

Think of it as a market inefficiency (albeit one that is difficult to "fix"): the stickiness of people's locales prevents them from maximizing their opportunities and decreases demand for their services in SFBA and increases their supply in (say) MSP.

[protagonist_h]

In other words, you want to hire in places where there's a large pool of good developers, but few employers competing for them. Am I following you now?:)

[tptacek]

Correct.