I'm from the middle of nowhere, USA. I recently left a local job that paid significantly more than "normal" software jobs locally (though fairly modest by by SF

I'm from the middle of nowhere, USA. I recently left a local job that paid significantly more than "normal" software jobs locally (though fairly modest by by SF/NYC/Seattle/Chicago/etc standards), and I was quite lucky to have been able to work there. Truly an outlier even among outliers. I left for family reasons (we were moving cities) and basically just assumed I would need to work remote to find comparable comp. Still, I applied to a few local places that happened to be allowing "work from home". The offers were just depressingly low. In talks with one local place, I put down my current base pay + current (expected) annual bonus as what I wanted for my base pay. The recruiter told me they'd be very unlikely to be able to come close to that, because the number I'd put down was the top end of the range that they paid people with twenty five years of experience. I ended up doing their interview process just to get practice but due to a clerical error on their side, despite the fact that the result of the interview process was a decision to hire, they weren't able to make me an offer because all the positions had filled up. So I'm still technically waiting on their promise that "as soon as a position opens up, you're the first person I'll be calling". Anyway, I took an offer from a coastal company for 3-4x what I suspect they were going to be offering me. The worst part is this company was lauded as one of the best, highest-paying, most-generous-benefits-having companies in my area. So, I dunno. Clearly whatever they're doing works for them. But I've got a fairly dim view of my local job markets. I also suspect they'll be the kinds of places that just outsource development and/or die rather than raise dev pay if widespread-post-covid-remote-work raises salaries locally.