The correct strategy I'd advise these days with my own experience being the caveat is that one should try to get as far along in a career as possible as early a

The correct strategy I'd advise these days with my own experience being the caveat is that one should try to get as far along in a career as possible as early as possible anywhere that jobs may be and then only start to think about quality of life and all that other jazz that occurs outside these hubs once you can command the terms of your employment with any prospective employer. It is far, far harder to get as far with the abundance of technically-lackluster non-amibitous 9-to-5 lifestyle companies that are abundant outside hubs on one's resume despite being very talented otherwise and to land one of these remote jobs for prestigious, highly ambitious coastal city companies making tons of headlines and making lots of people rich. Most of these non-ambitious culture companies are extremely caste-oriented and culturally tend to value tenure at a company or non-employment factors like veteran status to technical proficiency or even experience in management and individual contributor alike. These are the companies that people like to talk a lot about what "things used to be like" in political debates where people stayed employed for 10-20 years and employees almost have a family-like relationship to each other rather than drinking buddies relationship. There's some merits to this kind of culture and approach to life but it's something I think only works for some people long-term and perhaps even then only at a certain stage of life and it's in your best interest to understand what kind of culture you really do want NOW and to be honest to yourself about what kind of sacrifices / trade-offs you are willing to accept. You are pretty unlikely to go from rags-to-riches founding a tech company in Tulsa, OK as an extremely smart, ambitious person with a lot of capital (not rags anymore though, catch-22) around unfortunately unless you can cart around a small army of loyal, dedicated workers that want to keep working with you ahead of their own personal interests to oh... not live in Oklahoma (no offense to OK, just an example). It may work in industries with much longer timelines for success than tech such as restaurants perhaps, but even among ambitious chefs they tend to go to areas where they can compete and learn among the most well-regarded before opening their own restaurants.