There are tech jobs everywhere. From Toronto to Paraguay and from SF to NYC and everywhere in between.

Technology is everywhere, it is almost impossible to find a place where there are no tech jobs. But the bigger cities tend to have more of them and for better pay and Silicon Valley, New York, DC, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and so on will have the best paid jobs but also the highest cost of living.

Silicon Valley is an outlier in many respects, you should not calibrate your worldview by it. If you mean by tech job: a place where I can sit in a chair and make 7 figures easily then indeed, there are no tech jobs outside of SV and Seattle.

Look, yes, obviously there are more jobs in the biggest cities. Why people insist on translating this into “there are no jobs anywhere else” is anybody’s guess. But it extends beyond preference or opinion and into objectively, verifiably, factually wrong territory with remarkable consistency.

It makes the people who claim it look ridiculous, but they seem to think it makes them look — I don’t know what — something not ridiculous. They don’t merely say it; they say it with aplomb and even contempt. (Maybe because they get universal agreement every time they bring this up with people in their real life?)

The person we’re responding to in this thread is an almost archetypical example. Is this some sort of “winner take all” bias? It’s very weird.

Programmers in the most expensive cities are doing fine. But this cultural wisdom is doing very real harm to people who would be much better off in cheaper cities. They think, “well, sheesh, it’s hard here, but I probably couldn’t even find a job in Pittsburgh.”

And that’s factually, dangerously wrong.

The problem here is the concentration of jobs.

For my specialty, there's lots of places where I could go to get a job. But it might be the only job there. I had some silly company try to recruit me to La Crosse, Wisconsin not long ago. The work sounded really interesting and was a good fit for me, but it's most likely the only company in that town that would have such a job for me. That town isn't near anything. So if I were to relocate there, and the job didn't work out, I'd be screwed: I'd be forced to relocate again (at my own expense most likely) to someplace else. I've seen quite a few jobs like this: these jobs try hard to recruit people like me, thinking that because I'm older and experienced that surely I have a family (nope) and want to "settle down" in some nice small town (nope) and will be happy to take a low salary because the cost of living is supposedly so low (it really isn't, only housing prices are low in places like that, and they're not that much lower).

My examples were big, dynamic cities like Cincinnati, Nashville, and Indianapolis — metros with millions of people, not isolated college towns with an urban population of about 50k — which renders this response a non sequitur.

Heh, the psychology underlying that opinion is fascinating.

Part of this could be a need to feel that one's own choice was rational or ideal. People make decisions based on emotion, and then invent reasons to justify the decisions.

A related factor could be the fact that a person could be compelled to move if they knew of a better place, but moving is a pain.

Another possibility is being unreasonably picky. Maybe somebody feels they need to be near all of the big internet giants, not that they can simultaneously work at them all.

A failure to consider cost-of-living may lead one to an unreasonable cut-off point. If a person does normal software development and sets a minimum salary of $300,000 then yes, there are "no jobs" in nearly every location.

I’ll humbly quote myself from an earlier comment:

If you accept that the South and the Midwest are legitimate places to live, then you're forced to really consider it, which is difficult -- moving long distances is hard! It's much easier to conclude that those places aren't real options.

The South is a legitimate place to live, just like Saudi Arabia is.

If you want to talk about quality of life, that's another issue.

If you're not a gun-loving church-going conservative, you're not going to be very happy relocating to the South. It's already horribly hard to make friends over the age of 30 (this comes up here on HN often), and moving someplace where the locals are diametrically opposed to your worldview is not going to help with that.

This response is absurd. It says everything about this conversation and your place in it that you’re not wildly embarrassed to compare the South to Saudi Arabia.

This response isn’t like a little wrong, or a bit of hyperbole — it’s egregiously and embarrassingly wrong. It’s not just, like, your opinion, man. It’s a factually absurd, untravelled, ignorant comparison.

No, it's not. I grew up in the South. If you didn't, you have no right to even say these things.

Echo chambers are dangerously wrong in many ways but today anybody that can use a browser should be able to verify the information for themselves with a little bit of work if it really mattered to them.

I’m from St. Louis and even there six-figure programming jobs are pretty easy to get. There’s no nice way to say this: you don’t know what you’re talking about.