This does not correlate to my experience working in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. SV programmers get paid very well, as well as programmers working in L.A. for Google or Facebook. However, among those high paid programmers there were some really high performers and a lot of people who were good but really just like the people who were just getting paid much less somewhere else. One thing was always true, once someone got a really big pay check they were quite convinced that their work was very special.