As an ordinary developer? Consider New York. The pay in engineering is about the same, but instead of keeping all the people with normal amounts of money across the bridge in Oakland and beyond, you actually have a meaningfully integrated city that tries to cater to a variety of wealth levels.
And even if you stay in an enclave of rich-and-fanciness, your neighbors will be in media, finance, and creative fields, not just wall-to-wall tech. My first neighbor in New York had recently left his old job at the AP as chief correspondent to the White House. The guy who lived downstairs was retired, but had run a machine shop, and collected crazy old radios.
The result of fleeing middle class is that you have a city with a strange mix of very wealthy individuals (who can afford the high COL) and very poor people (who cannot afford to move out).
There is a significant emotional cost to leaving behind everybody you know, moving to a new place where you know nobody, and have to build new local social and professional networks. Making a long-term plan where paying that cost is factored into your current decision is naive at best.
I'm curious about how an excess of men can hurt women in the dating market.
However, the diversity of men may be limited (e.g. they are all software engineers...). It would be like going to Baskin-Robbins and all they had was various types of strawberry ice cream.
When you go back to the ice cream shop to demand some kind of control over what kind of ice cream flavors end up in your cone, the shop-owner apologizes and reveals that the reason why the other flavors are at random is because he doesn't actually scoop the ice cream, the giant ice cream cones actually arrive like that from the factory, and although 70% of the cones do come with some claims about which flavors are inside, 60% of those claims turn out to be false, so nobody pays attention to the label, and anyway here's another giant cone, maybe this one will turn out great and really be "your kind" of cone.
https://www.salon.com/2016/02/07/the_guys_who_wont_hear_no_m...
http://www.theonion.com/article/romantic-comedy-behavior-get...
When men are over-represented, true, women in general will find it easier to arrange dates. But those dates will, in general, be of lesser quality when men feel increasingly pressured to actively mask their flaws, in an attempt to stand out from other men in the dating market. Women then require more time, on average, to parse a potential partner's true personality and intentions, and develop trust. Requiring more time to develop trust raises the true cost for women of giving an individual suitor a chance.
(note: the prior paragraph is gendered because of context, but it also applies vice-versa in dating markets where women are over-represented compared to men, e.g. New York).
This sounds to me like nothing so much as confirmation bias. I've lived in SF for six years now, and gone on dozens of first (and far fewer, but still nonzero, subsequent) dates. While I do see some slight evidence for this notion, it's the exception, not the rule, in my experience.
That is to say, "the plural of anecdote is not data."
If you have a family, your costs are astronomical. Mortgage, daycare, multiple cars, school-related fees.
If you're single, you're dealing both with the gender-imbalanced dating market (the imbalance hurting both men and women), as well as the difficulty of saving for a SV mortgage. If you plan ahead of time, coming into SV, that you're going to leave SV eventually because of the high cost of living, then that future move is going to come at the cost of most of the professional and personal networking that you built up and will have to say goodbye to, and build all over again after you move.
Sure, SV is the mecca for professional networking and VC funding, but a) you don't need to be in SV to be successful (counter-examples abound) and b) is it really worth it?
The death of cheap eats in the Bay Area is just a symptom. You're either making enough money not to care, or you're wondering anyway whether it's worth it to live there.