That is complete BS. Certainly it is among the tech people I know. Furthermore, even those tech offices that are in the orbit of certain cities often aren't in those cities and are located in, not cheap, but pretty reasonably priced areas outside.
Tech has enabled us to live anywhere and do our jobs.
Bosses definitely pick their successors based on the "one of us" metric, much more than actual merit or job performance, and this usually means one has to live in the same expensive neighborhoods and send one's kids to the same expensive schools as theirs. Is it possible to succeed, without playing that game? Yes, of course. However, it's unlikely, and so I wouldn't bet my life on it.
This is often stated on HN and Reddit, but simply not true. At no time in US history has there been less internal migration. It's actually one of the major problems we have with inequality - people are demonstratively not moving to where the economic opportunity is compared to generations past.
> This is often stated on HN and Reddit, but simply not true. At no time in US history has there been less internal migration.
That's a pretty big claim. Do you have any data to support that? This [0] seems to tell a different story.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/net-domestic-...
I'm not talking about 2019 to 2020/21 pandemic migration that your article covers. Those years will obviously be an outlier. I'm talking about long-term demographic trends over the past 100+ years.
Edit: A very quick google before a series of calls today: https://www.brookings.edu/research/despite-the-pandemic-narr...
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.173
It's more difficult to find stats going back 150 years quickly, but the visualized data I've seen on that is pretty striking.
They might be related, though. The ruling class has deliberately destroyed local communities and forced people to become an on-demand proletariat that will move (often at personal expense!) "where the jobs are". If you want to have a career in tech, for example, you pretty much to live in one of 5 or 6 highly expensive cities, because you won't be taken seriously if you live anywhere else. It's not necessarily pathological that Americans move so much; what is pathological is that they have to do so, just to survive.