I think this is all too common for these “numbers” moves. It’s not really about innovation or the founders making a legacy play…

Anyhow, another reason to move companies out of CA is that people who studied in Austin or Texas Universities may want to stay near their college town where they all went to school so the labor is there and it’ll be very hard to convince a decent/good programmer from another state to come to CA with our extreme housing costs and other taxes/fees…

Unless you are the superstar performer, you’re just not going to get that relocation package or salary.

I think companies actually don’t care if you move or not since they are doing it to save money…Saw this back 10-15 years ago with India as well.

I actually think “most” engineers are pretty replaceable. The tough thing as some of the coders here will relate to is that not a lot of work is done by people who need to be truly creative/innovative. Correct me if I’m off though since I was more on the backend side (data centers/IT/servers/networks/security).