> It's more usual for just one partner to have the especially high powered career. Even more so after starting a family.

I believe the few high profile people who actually make the big decisions will usually have a partner who has a high profile career as well. Those key people wont move because their partner wont move.

I don't know about that. The two most common spouse occupations, of people I knew at Google in NYC, were lawyer and some sort of financier. Often (more than a few of those I knew) the spouse made more money and Google was effectively daycare for the other.

And in hotbeds like NYC, with the opportunities all over town, there's little career reason to go somewhere else. If Google left NYC, they'd lose most of their engineering team to other tech firms in the city.

The draw of NYC is also at least somewhat unique. I went to grad school with a lot of NY natives. A lot of them really cannot imagine living anyplace else. What? You can't do X at 3am? Inconceivable.

As someone who lives in New York City, that rings true to me. I remember being taken aback the first time I visited a smaller town and heard the ice cream shop was closed at 8 pm on a Sunday. It took a period of adjustment before I realized I was the odd one :)