Artists and designers also live in the bay area and work for bay area tech companies, but they don't get paid the same salaries developers do. The video game in

Artists and designers also live in the bay area and work for bay area tech companies, but they don't get paid the same salaries developers do. The video game industry is also in the bay area, but they don't need to pay as much to attract talent. Their salaries are less than web devs, but not that much less. Salaries are a function of supply and demand. In that way, it wouldn't matter if the companies are in SV or in Kansas: they're still shooting themselves in the foot. Every company wants to hire the best, the top 10% of developers, when in actuality they probably only need to avoid the bottom 25% (assuming tech talent follows a bell curve). By setting up the ridiculous filters to hiring, they're artificially limiting the supply of developers on the market by 65%. In doing so, they keep the salaries of developers artificially high.