What you call "location adjusted bs" is actually just supply and demand. The supply of good, experienced software developers willing to work for $100k in the B

What you call "location adjusted bs" is actually just supply and demand. The supply of good, experienced software developers willing to work for $100k in the Bay Area is practically non-existent when "normal", nothing-special suburban houses there can go for a couple million. There are a much higher supply of developers willing to work for that in Poland because the CoL is so much lower. Similarly, a gigantic reason American companies hire overseas in the first place is because wages are lower outside the US. Without that wage differential most of those jobs wouldn't exist.