I can offer only anecdotal evidence; take it for what it's worth (not much, I know). I lived and worked in the Bay Area for a little over fifteen years, almost

I can offer only anecdotal evidence; take it for what it's worth (not much, I know). I lived and worked in the Bay Area for a little over fifteen years, almost two thirds of it at Apple, and almost a third of it at a successful startup called Reactivity. I left in 2006 because of some catastrophic health events, and have lived and worked in Arkansas since recovering my ability to work. When I'm working, I find it pretty easy to command higher-than-average pay for this area. Of course, I fairly often work remotely for people still in the Bay Area, or in Boston or Denver, and naturally they're going to tend to offer me more than Arkansas companies would. But I can also command a pretty good premium in Arkansas. I don't know how much you can take from my example. I'm an old-fart developer now, with a long resume that has a bunch of famous names on it. People who are impressed by those things will naturally tend to offer more money to get them. I've seen some employers in this area become visibly more enthusiastic because of some of the people I've known and worked with, or that I can offer as references. My assessment is that some of that enthusiasm has been respect by association. On the other hand, there may be some real quality differences in engineering culture, and some fraction of the premium may reflect that. Some of the markets I've worked in outside Silicon Valley have significantly different standards and practices, and the differences are not often for the better. In some cases they've verged on infuriating or clown-car laughable. Maybe some fraction of the premium is employers paying for people they expect to know better, and maybe they're not entirely wrong.