But I do agree with you, it's high risk and there's a lot of luck involved. And it's much more important to find a job that's a good fit for you.
When we think of SF software, we think of software created by a company whose core product is the software itself, especially when the end-users are individuals or other software companies.
This is quite a bit different than most software developed outside of the bay area. Most of it is either in-house stuff or industry-specific B2B stuff. In these situations, the software doesn't have to be pretty, it doesn't have to use cutting-edge tech to woo investors, resource utilization is much less important, and hell - it usually doesn't even have to scale. It just has to work. It just has to make someone's job incrementally better, and it'll be a success.
This software can be tremendously valuable, and creating it has its own unique challenges, but the job is indeed a bit different than software engineering in the bay, and the compensation is different as well.
And my current job quite often has multiple teams from multiple employers/agencies from multiple time zones - even being able to have key meetings with all hand present would massively speed up - we could have avoided so many problems and delivered things months quicker.
They’ve actually seen a huge increase in productivity by moving to a virtual model during the pandemic — exactly because nobody is wasting 2 hours of their day waiting on elevators or waiting for meetings to start. People have more autonomy to block off their day and there aren’t the distractions present in a normal open office.
If I were to informally poll all of the product development organizations I work with, I would expect to see at least 90% of folks want to maintain the remote workplace going forward. They’ll still probably go back to some level of in-person work later this year, but the difference is that remote will still probably be the default for most folks. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to a model that assumes all or even most of the team is located in the same room — it’s just too much better to do things this way.
Trying to get things done properly is very hard if we could have even kickoff meetings with every one in the room and have printed designs stuck to the wall
And frankly most of the dev projects I work on are globally distributed anyway, so you’re never getting everyone in the same room to begin with.
The situation in the valley developed in the 90s and 00s, so that companies could be located close to their investors. That was a time when remote work tools sucked and work practices forced people to be in the same office as the founders, so it made lots of sense that the proximity to capital spiked rents and comp to match.
But now, post-pandemic, remote work is the norm. The founders can relocate to the valley because investment finance is largely a relationship game and those are still way better done in person, but there’s no longer any reason the technical team needs to be located near the founders or even each other.
There is huge disparity in engineering salaries — if you work for a smallish company in a rural area you’re probably making $80k/yr for doing the same job someone in the bay gets $175+ for. Ideally it will work the other way around though — the folks making $80k are much more likely to jump ship for a remote job that pays $125k than the folks making $175k are to jump to the same job.
Of course, if organize via collective bargaining we can likely push that even higher, so listen to your union organizers.