I believe Bill Joy lived in Colorado during his time at Sun Microsystems, working on Solaris and Java (if I recall correctly, I believe he worked with Gosling,

I believe Bill Joy lived in Colorado during his time at Sun Microsystems, working on Solaris and Java (if I recall correctly, I believe he worked with Gosling, perhaps it was other Sun projects). I would think he didn't suffer a COL adjustment. The most valued engineers have little to worry about and always have/will. There is rarely resistance to their interests. Everyone else is expendable. Your expendability increases porortionally to the problems you create versus solve. This reminds me a little of the 2008 recession where a lot of analysts at investment banks that were making a lot of money without much experience were fired and those jobs didn't return after the economic recovery. I believe that brought about increased algorithmic trading. It's tough to find sympathetic people to this issue. I imagine displaced tech workers, now living in lower COL areas will have trouble finding sympathetic ears as well. I would certainly prefer to be the employer versus the employee in this contest.