Moving to SF was a career multiplier. I instantly doubled my salary.
Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities.
Walmart was started in Arkansas. Warren Buffet famously lives in Nebraska.
But the Tier 1 cities create more wealth for more people than Tier 2 or 3 cities.
Salary or takehome? Sure, your net in SF will be higher than Orlando or London, but looking at resources such as levels.fyi, internal salary sharing sites at large companies, etc. the math for Seattle comp with no state income tax is pretty close to bay area minus tax.
If I hypothetically doubled my salary _and_ my expenses, that hardly seems worth it. Although NorCal is gorgeous.
All else being equal, the improvements in other non-financial areas (chances to grow social life, many more attractions, etc) should make up for it.
The savings gap hopefully should widen as well (unless it's a deficit, in which case, cut expenses).
If you go from say 120k to 240k in salary your housing may go from say 1k (12k/year) to 3k (36k/year) but at the end of the year 120k-12k is 108k while 240k-36k is 204 which is a net gain of 96k!
Of course you still need to eat and stuff but when you check out the "Regional Price Parity" [1] you'll see that nowhere do things actually become twice as expensive. So you're really getting a 2x boost in salary in exchange for a 1.3x increase in expenses.
[1]: https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-par...
Since the wages paid are based on _local_ prevailing wage, and the Bay Area has the highest prevailing wage, Google will get cheaper engineers.
This also avoids the US immigration system, which is a terrible, expensive, stress inducing (performance sapping) thing for staff (and businesses) to interact with.
Finally, by distributing engineers to other countries, they counter some of the political "They're not _local_" arguments being made in various countries.
I've never met a person who didn't understand that this show is satire. Every single tech person I've talked to about Silicon Valley thinks it's funny because of how plausible and yet ridiculous it all is, and because of all the totally accurate details scattered throughout—from golden handcuffs / resting & vesting, down to minor things like which drinks were stocked in the show's office fridges. And I lived in the Bay Area during its entire run, so most of my network is current/former Bay Area tech people.
The only reason I don't live there anymore is because I already got the "in" I needed, I think remoteness actually works best if you're ambitious (provided you visit occasionally), and because I really didn't like living there. Idc if someone takes the last part as an excuse, my work speaks for itself.