I agree with all of your arguments except the last one. 1) you should be able to be housing secure from your job 2) $200k+ is an absurd amount of salary The

I agree with all of your arguments except the last one. 1) you should be able to be housing secure from your job 2) $200k+ is an absurd amount of salary The solution isn't paying MORE salary to further inflate real estate costs and price out ever more service workers that you depend on as a city. The solution is opening offices in one of the many LCOL tech hubs and/or having a remote-first culture. Open an office in Kansas City (for network infra secret advantages) or Baltimore (for ed/med/gov/NYC access at low cost) or, if you're hiring new grads anyway, any random "big university" town, and see what kind of crazy talent you can attract and retain with 100k. Real estate prices should not be driving costs for a software company. It's insane.