I think some of the context is lost here. The GP was talking about banking jobs with CS applicants not really passionate about CS. The majority of banking jobs are in NYC, so there really isn't really a huge choice. If you're applying for a CS job (not IT) in banking, almost the entire job market is in NYC.

My argument was that of course students are not passionate, they are worried about student loans, homes, rents. (Fun exercise go to the same Zillow link and try to find homes in NYC max $250k. Then, on what you find, look at the transportation options are into NYC.)

I'm glad you brought up NC because it has a decent sized banking sector but also offers great QoL. I actually left NYC and took a super-interesting job a bit north of you in Virginia. Homes are affordable, QoL is great.

There is a catch though: there arent all that many other interesting jobs in tech (as there were in NY/SF). The startup scene is tiny. There are few FAANG jobs here though Amazon is supposed to come soon. There are some awesome CS research-type jobs, in govnt labs.

There are lots of interesting consulting jobs to be fair, as well as FAANG SE jobs. There are lots of interesting data-type jobs in Intelligence. There are also tens of thousands of totally dead-end tech jobs where you do nothing all day at government offices. A friend told me he's been waiting two months to get approval to install a pip library on a government machine. Another friend works on ancient systems.

Good QoL - absolutely.

Good home prices - absolutely.

Jobs i'd be passionate about - some, hopefully more coming with remote.

Am I obsessively passionate about the work here? No, i'm mostly enjoying the outdoors.