I would say the factory worker mentality is actually an "everywhere but west coast US tech firms". I worked for a while for a few New Yorkers and they had exact

I would say the factory worker mentality is actually an "everywhere but west coast US tech firms". I worked for a while for a few New Yorkers and they had exactly the same mentality, but they came from finance. "Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team ... Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win" This mentality and most of the wage inflation is down to extremely loose VC markets that are almost entirely focused on software, not something actually inherent to the USA or the job market. There are huge numbers of firms and industries which are not winner takes all, and in which price does matter. Being cheap can in fact matter if the market you're in simply doesn't have a single winner and lots of losers. VCs generally aren't interested in such businesses however, because they only care about businesses that could potentially have absurd levels of return, which in practice means they select firms that make promises of entirely dominating their chosen area. But that's really hard to do through skill alone, hence the proliferation of companies that simply attempt to buy the entire market using nothing but VC money (see: Uber).