As Silicon Valley salaries rise, they will eventually reach the point where more employers will decide to spend their personnel dollars elsewhere. Engineers in

As Silicon Valley salaries rise, they will eventually reach the point where more employers will decide to spend their personnel dollars elsewhere. Engineers in Austin or Ann Arbor or Cambridge (either one) can work out of local offices, or straight out of their homes, and produce more lines of useful code per dollar than their peers in Palo Alto, Mountain View, or Sunnyvale. Go ahead, call it "inshoring" and look down your nose at those cheaper programmers if you like. They'll still be taking your jobs, and you'll be left living in a very expensive place after the salary bubble collapses. The only question is when. I think the process has already begun. Some might predict another year or two. Nobody sane would expect the ride to last longer than that before supply and demand reassert themselves over mere fashion.