Other western governments take care of healthcare costs, unemployment benefits, maternity/paternity leave, holidays, education costs and retirement. For example, in France or Germany, tuition fees for your kids are minimal while it's a fortune in the US. Or the governments in Europe mandate companies to pay 4 or 5 weeks of holidays. If an employee in the US wants to take 5 weeks, he/she has to pay 3 weeks out of their own pocket.
If you are working in SV for one of the MAFANGs or tech unicorns, you will have: healthcare covered by employer, generous severance package, 99 weeks unemployment benefits from California govt, parental leaves, 401k benefits. You will not have great public education in most of SV, but the salary differential will more than make up for the cost of private schools.
If you are upper middle class or higher in the US (which a SV software engineer most certainly is), life here is better than most other places in the world.
>If you are upper middle class or higher in the US...life here is better than most other places in the world
Please change to: your purchasing power is better than most places in the world.
Do not confuse purchasing power with better life. 13% of Americans are on anti-depressants. I know many "successful" people in my very affluent suburb of a major US city, who have an addiction problem ( prescription drugs, mostly).
Add growing social isolation, caused by constant uprooting (moving from place to place to advance one's career).
If you want to quote stats about anti-depressants, please do so for other competing places as well. I do not have those stats, but stats about suicide rate[1] show that other supposedly better places with free healthcare, social bonds and no guns (Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Japan) have higher suicide rates than the US.
Wading into social indicators is a tricky business without the full context of a place, so I will speak only about SV - great climate, progressive policies like enthusiastic adoption of Obamacare, unemployment benefits, good employers provide health/401k/parental leave benefits, non-racist environment (though certainly classist) etc.
Finally, my point was about "a software engineer in SV working at MAFANG or unicorns", who should not have to constantly uproot. A new job should be across the street for such a person.
