"Now that I'm a programmer I can theoretically get a job in pretty much any American city I choose, and probably negotiate a starting/moving bonus"
Try getting a job in Athens Georgia with equal or greater salary than you are earning now in SF
Try getting a job in Athens Georgia with equal or greater salary than you are earning now in SF
There is a major set of blinders techies in the big centers have with respect to how good the market is...anywhere else. It might be easy to walk across the street and land another $120k/year (low for SF, but still respectable enough especially for a single person) job in one of these markets and be doing something a bit more interesting than simple CRUD, but not elsewhere.
The fact is most technology jobs outside these hotspots pay poorly (usually not more than a small premium over other professions in the area) and are just not common anyway. They also are much closer to "grunt worker on the line" than "build your resume by being able to work with lots of technologies". A typical software developer job isn't at a software company in these places. It's in the IT Department as a low-class cost-center line item, working on basic CRUD with little or no say in the infrastructure or even product development, or else a fixed specification project in which you're more or less tinkering around the edges of a pre-existing system.
A good real-estate agent makes way more money than a programmer in many areas of the US.
Not only do lots of those jobs pay better than tech jobs in most places you can also live more easily in cheap, nice places where a nice house can be had for less than 300K.
And their jobs are much, much harder to offshore.
It's interesting how there is this great push to get people to code, pushed by politicians who are almost all lawyers.
You don't see a push for more lawyers or doctors to drop costs. They don't import H1Bs. Try getting a medical or legal licence from another country.
And I'm in Santa Monica now, and my salary has been $0 for the last several months! Will finally be able to run payroll for myself next month though so that's exciting.