Top talent has freedom and flexibility b/c they can land a remote gig anywhere. Leave for better housing, lower taxes, etc. Bottom talent is stuck in low-productivity old-school employers in the Bay, many probably locked into an office.
Simpson's paradox requires that you be looking at averages. An example would be if you compared average salaries of SF vs. Austin, and both tech and non-tech salaries were rising in both places, but tech workers were moving from SF to Austin so the average includes relatively fewer tech workers in SF and relatively more in Austin. The article is comparing specifically tech salaries, so it's free from this sort of bias.
It could have a similar bias by virtue of all being collected from Hired, though. Top tech companies do not use Hired. Hot startups generally do not use Hired. Mid- and low-tier tech companies that want to outsource their interview processes use Hired. If these are also primarily the companies that are going remote-first or moving their engineers to Austin or SD, you would expect to see tech salaries rise in those locations and fall in HCOL regions like the Bay Area. It's a real effect, but not necessarily reflective of the whole industry, which includes a number of large and very high-paying employees that aren't in the dataset because they don't use Hired.
I didn't read the report by Hired that this article was based on (because it's useless blogspam) but I did search for the word "control" to see if they were controlling for these sorts of confounding variables, and I came up empty-handed.
The Bay Area is the world's epicenter of tech talent. It's got the biggest software companies in the world, and recruits talent from around the world with its extremely high salaries.
People working for FAANG, or Oracle, or Adobe, or a thousand other companies are some of the best devs around.
I actually work better in an office, so I drive in nearly every day. (But it's probably just the free food.)
> Exceptions included San Francisco and New York City from 2020 to 2021 due to increased demand for junior talent.
so maybe junior talent is replacing the more senior level talent in SF / NY and depressing wages.
https://hired.com/blog/highlights/state-of-tech-salaries-in-...
Both cities hired very few people from colleges, etc last year. In my experience from the alumni association of my college both cities have added more new graduates from our college than any year before, which may reflect some pent up demand.