You have bigger talent pools in the tech hubs, at the very least. And recent college graduates from top-tier institutions are most likely to either stay put (depending on the source, I saw 40-60%) or move to a hub, so you have a lot of untapped potential.

Talent being "better" is too subjective to really quantify, though.

Something like 15% of devs worldwide are in the US, so if you don't want to play ball, you're losing a nontrivial chunk of the total talent pool (even without accounting for timezone affinity or English fluency).

If you think paying market rate for a Bay Area dev is overpaying, are you exclusively hiring devs in Argentina (with the rapidly-devaluing peso)? You can get 10 devs for the price of one person based in SF! Even paying Amsterdam's market rate is drastically overpaying in comparison to the areas with the lowest cost of labor.

My experience is from a fully remote unicorn startup that hires globally. Not Gitlab. Have continued equity exposure and strongly believe in the remote first model as a differentiator. There is exceptional talent globally, but you must be intentional about finding it.

>Is there data showing the talent in those tech hubs is better than what you can find elsewhere?

There are great engineers everywhere, but this line of reasoning misses why talent hubs exist in the first place. It's more likely a qualified individual will line near a talent hub along side other companies that demand those skills. A better question to ask is how much time & effort will a company put in finding a qualified candidate outside of the talent hub.

For example, Apple has a similar problem with regards to manufacturing in China.[1] Do talented tooling engineers exist in the US? Of course. Is Apple going to spend 5 years trying to hire 100 tooling engineers in the US, or spend 6 months hiring the engineers it needs in China?

[1] https://twitter.com/mariocavolo/status/1747599350438437364