The Bay Area had a great run, spanning several decades, but the VC darlings and private equity carpetbaggers who never belonged in the tech scene, in their zeal to turn everything into a shitty New York knock-off, ruined it.
It's not the land of opportunity any more. You're not going to get rich on 0.05% "equity" (inequity?) in some hail-Mary startup, nor are you even going to get the implicitly promised (but rarely delivered) investor contact and the mentoring to be a founder in the next go; get real, the train has left the station. I don't know where the next emerging opportunities are, but if you're 22 right now and have no inherited connections, the VC-funded nonsense is far along in its decline process that, by the time you'll be positioned to take advantage of it, the opportunities will all be gone.
Bay Area VC-funded companies are now the conservative, boring choice. They don't involve much risk. There's almost no upside, because engineers aren't respected in that world any more. It's what you do if you're 22, intelligent, prestige-focused, and can't think of anything else. There's nothing wrong with it, as such-- most 22-year-olds have no clue what the fuck they want to do with their lives, that's nearly universal, and it's generally not a mark against the person-- but it'd be better to see more material pointing the young to something that still has real opportunities. VC-istan social climbing ain't it. It's become like the investment banking analyst program, but instead of getting a bonus every year, you get a get a bonus at "liquidity" if that ever happens-- and if you're an engineer, it's a mediocre one and you'd have done better at a hedge fund.
If I were just coming out of school, I'd move to Chicago or Austin before San Francisco, just to avoid the effective debt bondage of exorbitant rents. New York's also nice if you're into finance, although its tech scene is pretty pathetic.
The real goal should be to end the tyranny of location, because it hurts people on both sides. First, it forces people to move out to San Francisco who really don't want to be there; that's probably half the Bay Area tech industry-- people go for the opportunities that are there, not the place itself. Second, it drives up rents and ruins things for the natives who've lived there forever and love the city-- and it should be given back for them.