The assortive matching is very real, but whether that's related to salaries is another matter. I live in a far smaller tech market than the valley, and it's pla

The assortive matching is very real, but whether that's related to salaries is another matter. I live in a far smaller tech market than the valley, and it's plain as day. We might have about 20 large employers that use the JVM. Out of those, it's so easy to see the good from the bad that many of the good places are skeptical about even giving an interview to someone working in one of the bad ones without a reference. Interestingly, places can transform by altering the way they hire and who they retain: I have worked for a place that was known as a terrible place to be, and changed their fate by building a very good interview process and laying off the weakest side of their staff. I remember doing the climb from the bottom myself: Few places hired new grads, but the ones that did hired pretty much everyone. it only took a few weeks for teams to realize who knew how to program and who didn't: inter team communication quickly became a network of the people that could get things done. Eventually, as people came in and left, the high performers started taking other high performers with them to better companies, where similar sorting happened again, but with a higher floor. What I have seen instead of big salary differences is that the best firms have better management and treat developers better: Given that outside of consulting, the market has relatively well defined maximums, the good developers congregate in places where the work is more rewarding and doesn't put high tolls on peoples' lives. In the valley there are companies that get so much more value out of developers that they can pay more, but even that has a ceiling, and when we get to that ceiling, being good companies to work for becomes the next differentiatior.