Your setup premise is false. The pay increase is far beyond 20%.

1) The median household income in Denver CO is $64,000. That's around 77% higher than in Altoona PA. Two locations specifically referenced in the article.

2) The opportunities that pay a lot more than that gap, do not exist to begin with in Altoona. Software, Internet, misc engineer jobs - the locations that people are fleeing from are death zones economically. Denver and Boulder are quasi boom cities; the Altoona's are the exact opposite; that means, over the next ten years your income will very likely expand nicely in those CO locations, whereas you're very unlikely to see meaningful improvement in Altoona.

3) Lifestyle is important for most people and likely that much more so for people willing to move across the country for better opportunities. Boulder and Denver are both incredible by comparison to Altoona PA, when it comes to lifestyle upgrade.

To answer your question, the people desperately fleeing from all those dying economic zones, seeking a vastly superior future, are extremely smart indeed.

Minitel[dead]'s comment below is worthwhile: > I left Kentucky for California in my early 20's. I've been making > 100k per year since then and living as cheaply as possible to hold on to it despite the cost of rent. Most of my friends back home make 20-30k a year.

> The tradeoff is that quality of life is terrible. The cities are full of petty bug people. And COL makes living standards precarious for all but the wealthy and the extremely poor (government programs). The precariousness also inhibits the formation of stable IRL (as opposed to chat group based) friend groups.

> That said, after half a decade of this I've saved enough money to go back home and use stocks, real estate, and side hustles to put down roots with a decent quality of life.

> Sometimes I feel like Odysseus on Ogygia. It's easy to be trapped in one of these hubs so long that you miss out on the chance to exit young-adulthood gracefully. (Very sad the number of friends I have who decided to start a family too late and couldn't quite make it work out). --- Good luck making it to where you want to be!

It's good to remember that different people have widely varying preferences of quality of life - urban/rural, ocean/mountain/plain, wet/dry, tropical/temperate/less-temperate, etc. I'm glad not everybody wants to live in the same place!

Number 3 is really massive and a large reason I picked Denver over the valley. I can wake up everyday, hike a 14er for the sunrise, and be back in the city for work. If you're into mountaineering or an outdoor lifestyle, the cost of living is easily worth it.. The great thing is what you bring up though, the cost of living isn't actually that large when wages are sky-high for techies. I live 3 blocks from my office and I don't have to spend thousands a month for some shitty studio 30 minutes away.

> hike a 14er for the sunrise and be back in the city for work

Definitely not Longs. I guess you could drive to the top of Evans or Pikes Peak :)

Definitely Longs! It's only an hour and a half out.. Getting back though... the traffic just gets brutal.

It's a 10+ hour climb though? I'm good with a quick jaunt up Sanitas before work haha- you're (respectfully) nuts!

This is what people who are retirement age would have said about SV when they moved there.

Enjoy being retired in SV 2.0

4) Even if you already have a job. It is easier to finde a better job or find a new one if you are ever laid off in Denver than in Altoona.

I left Kentucky for California in my early 20's. I've been making > 100k per year since then and living as cheaply as possible to hold on to it despite the cost of rent. Most of my friends back home make 20-30k a year.

The tradeoff is that quality of life is terrible. The cities are full of petty bug people. And COL makes living standards precarious for all but the wealthy and the extremely poor (government programs). The precariousness also inhibits the formation of stable IRL (as opposed to chat group based) friend groups.

That said, after half a decade of this I've saved enough money to go back home and use stocks, real estate, and side hustles to put down roots with a decent quality of life.

Sometimes I feel like Odysseus on Ogygia. It's easy to be trapped in one of these hubs so long that you miss out on the chance to exit young-adulthood gracefully. (Very sad the number of friends I have who decided to start a family too late and couldn't quite make it work out).

> The cities are full of petty bug people.

What does that mean?

I think they mean a cross between a bug and a person. Sure wish I lived near some bug people.

> The precariousness also inhibits the formation of stable IRL (as opposed to chat group based) friend groups.

Also what does this even mean?

You make friends here and then 18 months later those friends move to Seattle/Portland/Reno/Las Vegas/Phoenix where they can actually afford to live.

This comment breaks the HN guideline which asks you to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of a point, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize (please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them).

The model in which masses of migrating people are too dumb to consider their own interest is less plausible than one in which a snarky internet dismissal might be failing to consider everything.

I am basing this on my own thought experiments while browsing jobs in various over-heated markets: Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Boston etc. Actually, the 100% increase is understated, the true figure is probably higher depending on the inputs.

Let's say you're living in Topeka, making $75,000, you happen to own an average home with a market value of $150,000. Amazon Seattle offers you a job for $130,000. Is taking the job a better deal when the average home in Seattle is $700,000? Your $1,000 Topeka mortgage payment will quadruple consuming 50%+ of your take home pay.

Could I posit for a moment that if you're not right out of school taking your first job that you should not accept an engineering position (making an assumption here) at Amazon in Seattle for 130k? If you have experience that number is way too low, even if it's only the base salary. Add 30k to that number, then add in the value of your RSUs that will be liquifiable after 1-3 years, and suddenly your argument stops holding water from a purely economic perspective.

Also, consider what happens to your asset value when your 150k home in Topeka grows at the normal rate there vs a 700k home growing at the rate home values are in Seattle. You could build a very nice amount of equity in the expensive market, sell it and then buy a gigantic/perfect/<insert your reqs here> house back in Topeka in cash and have no mortgage. These markets (Seattle, SF, Denver, ect.) have their appeal even if you don't care about the city life or mountains or whatever.

It doesn't matter how much you spend, it matters how much you save.

My mantra has always been spend your time and effort trying to make more money, not saving it. If you have a decent head on your shoulders, and a good family to fall back on, then investing in creating your network in a city or company with other aspiring people is going to win out many times over versus concerning yourself with saving.

Yeah, but maxing out your 401K contribution for the first 20 years of your career is much more productive than doing it the last 20 years. If it were not for the withdrawal penalty, I could retire now at 46 and live off the interest alone. If I keep slugging away another 20 years, I’ll have several $M.

You need to save when you are young to take advantage of compounding interest. Don’t get caught up in the rat race.

401(k)s don't provide the level of security I want. Given the history that I've learned and the current state of demographics and financials around the USA/world, I think inflation is the only way out, until it can no longer be sustained and then revolution. Simply because so much of society is invested in the "market", I believe the government has no choice but to keep bailing it out, but I figure that only helps you keep up with inflation.

My ideal is to directly have ownership in businesses with strong cash flow, good real estate value, citizenship and property in another country or two, and most importantly, to have the human capital of knowing the right people in government/medicine/law/etc to be able to lean on the right people when I need them.

I'm lucky enough to have a stable family so that I can afford to take risks to try to make the above happen (some of which I have made significant progress in), but I definitely don't plan on depending on my 401(k) other than as a worst case scenario.

This.

Not to mention, after saving similar (or more) you'll own a home 5x in value.

Making $75,000 in Topeka? That seems somewhat high. Is that just a number for a thought experiment, or is that realistic?

Getting fired/laid off in Topeka means you'll have a harder time finding a new job than you will in Seattle.

It cuts both ways; talent is harder to find in regions like Topeka, so that means much less competition compared to places like Seattle. It also means employers will work harder to retain decent employees compared to tech hubs where talented engineers are plentiful.

I've not seen any correlation between availability of engineers and how hard retaining efforts are. It really comes down to if management knows what they're doing, or has their head up their ass.

So don't get fired or start looking for a job when you see the writing on the wall.

It's not rocket science.

Cost of living is higher and the increase pay doesn't always make up for it...but also keep in mind the non-tangibles. If you move to one of those areas, you're going to surround by some of the top tech talent in the country. That means you're learning, collaborating, competing, and socializing with some of the best peers you could have anywhere. That has a lot of career advantages...mobility, huge potential for upside, exchange of ideas, etc. It also boosts the standards of local universities, schools, etc.

Unfortunately the nature of specialization means that jobs you are qualified for and will be paid well for are more likely to be located in dense urban areas. My wife and I, who are both engineers but with different specialties, had to face this recently when we relocated to her home state.

They're smart enough to know your numbers are wrong.