It's not all about getting paid the most for some people. I think a challenge for the case of physicists that want to work in that field is that there are more

It's not all about getting paid the most for some people. I think a challenge for the case of physicists that want to work in that field is that there are more of them than are jobs. Compare to programmers (of all levels), where there is basically endless demand in most big cities, and in the top say 15 tech centers in the us probably a few 100k jobs are available in total. I'm sure Seattle has 50k jobs.