Maybe but I think people will figure out the talent deserts have more oases than people think. There are more options for talent than just SV. Remember much of the US talent in SV come from other parts of the country. Many would stay local if given the opp to stay local. So instead of drawing talent to SV, SV could seek the talent in those markets (where talent is growing).

Maybe people in the abstract would, but at the level of individual people and companies talent isn’t fungible. If Stripe were to lose 100 senior engineers in a move to Salt Lake City, but could pick up 110 new ones at 90% of the price, it’s not obvious that would be a net win.

Not in that year, but long term it can be a win (obviously depending on their goals).

One perspective is that the exchange permanently hamstrings the company. You spent let's say 3 years on average, training those engineers to be the best people in the world at solving Stripe's problems, but now they're gone with (unless you're gonna do double payroll for a while) only an arms-length handoff to the new staff. That's 300 person-years of training, gone forever. Arguably even worse, it propagates upwards; there will be some number of valuable, important projects which can no longer get done because the needed expertise was lost.

Well, one option is to keep key people who don’t want to move remote and then through turnover replace them with new talent just as if the company had stayed. It’s not like key engs stay forever.

Oh I agree with all that. I don't live in SV/SF myself and have no real interest in doing so. But so many people have the attitude that you can't have a tech career if you don't live in SV that it would probably be difficult for an existing company to move out of the area without losing a lot of people (or at least letting them work remote).

It is not about an oasis, it is about top of the funnel. To hire 1 eng, you have to interview 5-10, and have to phone screen 20-30, and have have hacker rank tested 100-200. Now scale that to a 1000 person eng team

Thing is that top of the funnel is not composed of majority local people. Many are people who relocated and many are people who are not local now but if hired the company would move them. If they can move them to SF they can also move them to another major tech oriented city.

That may be true but plenty of companies around the world that are nowhere near California somehow manage to hire technical talent. The Bay area has a higher density than many places but there's more competition for hiring too.