> For example a start up gains a lot more benefit from being in Silicon Valley than a company with 10,000 developers.
No, I'd say they have about equal value. Consider, Google has tens of thousands of tech workers in the bay area. How many other metros could they feasibly relocate their HQ to? Even if you assume that only, say, a third of their employees decline to relocate with them, you're possibly looking at ~10,000 job openings you'd need to staff up on within a year or two to not be absolutely crippling.
> You can still do the latter in a research center that you can keep in the hub and move a lot of the other code to the periphery, which will be most of your employees.
This completely glosses over how companies work. Google doesn't have two tiers of software engineer types, where one gets more exciting stuff and better pay/benefits, while the other languishes on boring things with mediocre pay. Trying to split up the company that way, "we'll just hire crappier engineers in [cheap place] now and treat them worse because they're dumber" would be a total disaster.
> you have housing markets that are so insane that the majority of your developers will not be able to buy a house, which means they are going to leave you or demand really high wages -- wages that a company with 20K devs can't afford.
While this is absolutely a problem, and I applaud efforts to increase affordability either in the areas where tech HQ's already are, or by distributing more offices elsewhere, you're missing the obvious fact that these major tech companies already do this, and it already works. Yes, some people leave. The strongest, and probably most valuable employees largely don't, because they make enough to offset the increased cost of housing: a T6 at Google may make 400-500k/year.
No, I'd say they have about equal value. Consider, Google has tens of thousands of tech workers in the bay area. How many other metros could they feasibly relocate their HQ to? Even if you assume that only, say, a third of their employees decline to relocate with them, you're possibly looking at ~10,000 job openings you'd need to staff up on within a year or two to not be absolutely crippling.
> You can still do the latter in a research center that you can keep in the hub and move a lot of the other code to the periphery, which will be most of your employees.
This completely glosses over how companies work. Google doesn't have two tiers of software engineer types, where one gets more exciting stuff and better pay/benefits, while the other languishes on boring things with mediocre pay. Trying to split up the company that way, "we'll just hire crappier engineers in [cheap place] now and treat them worse because they're dumber" would be a total disaster.
> you have housing markets that are so insane that the majority of your developers will not be able to buy a house, which means they are going to leave you or demand really high wages -- wages that a company with 20K devs can't afford.
While this is absolutely a problem, and I applaud efforts to increase affordability either in the areas where tech HQ's already are, or by distributing more offices elsewhere, you're missing the obvious fact that these major tech companies already do this, and it already works. Yes, some people leave. The strongest, and probably most valuable employees largely don't, because they make enough to offset the increased cost of housing: a T6 at Google may make 400-500k/year.