That attitude comes from a different era. That "most employees understand" thing came from a time when there was something called "Job Security" so people understood that in return for moving, they had a reasonably good chance at keeping their jobs.
In this day and age, where you live in an at-will employment world, I know of _nobody_ in the bay-area technology scene who would relocate to kansas from California. Can you imagine what would happen if you relocated to Kansas and then were laid off? Olathe doesn't even have a Craigslist entry. The closest entry I could find was Kansas City, and the Bay area has about 15x to 20x the number of job listings.
I'm in absolute love with Vancouver, British Columbia, and one day, if I'm very lucky, hope to return there, (I visit about 4-5 times a year, my heart really is in that city) - but I couldn't rationally relocate my career out of the valley.
There is a different between being a wonderful place to work, and a wonderful place to live.
Olathe is a suburb and is a part of the greater Kansas City metro. Kansas City is about twenty miles away.
Meanwhile, in Redwood City alone, within walking distance from my house, I can count about 20 companies who might reasonably employ me.
I'll agree there isn't as much competition, but, the high end positions are _very_ few and far between.
Also, it's great to have many "competitor" companies working within a few miles of each other. If you decided to leave a company like Playfish, all the competitor companies like Zynga, Rock You, and Playdom will want to snatch you up in a hurry.
Except that then we'd have to deal with taxes, and corrupt city government (ok, SF isn't much better in that regard), and paying a private security force so we don't get shot, and fixing up houses that are in worse-than-teardown condition. And when I just want to write software - it's probably not worth the hassle. Organizing a mass relocation can be a pretty big drag.
1. If you lose your job working for Megacorp, who else is willing to hire a senior software/hardware engineer in the state?
2. What kind of salary would you even get from the 1 or 2 tech companies in the area? These companies know they are the only shop in town and probably only pay $50-60K/yr. for senior level positions.
3. What type of quality of life are you going to have? Are there any artistic or cultural activities in the area?
If you can answer these questions positively, I say go for it. Personally, I'd rather live on either coast and make 6 figures than live in flyover country any day. If I want, I can work on the coast for 20 years and save enough money to live comfortably in flyover country the rest of my life.
But I do get the desire to live in a big city over a suburb. I've worked in a city for the last few years after growing up in a suburb, and waking up in the morning and walking through the energy of a city is just different than waking up, getting in your car, slogging through traffic to work, parking in a giant lot, and going into a corporate office park for the day. Just something like lunch is vastly different in a city vs. a suburb, and that kind of stuff matters.
And Olathe's claim to fame is not "a list in a magazine somewhere", that's distorting my point. I linked to a whole page of awards and emphasized the most recognizable. I used these awards, and that award specifically, to indicate to people that Olathe is a real modern place, not a podunk with four buildings like people seem to think when they hear "Kansas". I used them in conjunction with other anecdotes and data. You're distorting my argument to marginalize the place, again. I don't why there's so much disdain for not-California among people.
Some people like SF and that's fine. I don't want everyone from San Francisco to move to Olathe. But I don't like how there are just a handful of places that people consider "acceptable" and everything else is "flyover country". There is real life and existence, normal people, normal existence, normal cities with normal roads and normal stores, outside of California and New England. People disdainfully refer to everything else as "flyover country", and perhaps even refuse en masse to relocate to some place as humble as Kansas, surely not big enough to contain those people, and it's just really silly imo. There's nothing wrong with Olathe.
I'm all for people living where they want. I agree that Kansas isn't the right place for everyone. I am simply annoyed by the assumptions heretofore described, and that this group refuses to even give the place a try.