The reason this guy declined a job offer from Amazon is the same reason I’d never live in a “hub” American city again: Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC, or any place like that.
Right now, I make a fairly high salary in a pretty cheap area. Not as inexpensive as most of Florida, but my salary here is much larger than any I could earn in FL and here I could find a new job in a week (real recruiters contact me nearly every day with actual interviews and offers).
In Seattle (where I once lived), I’d need to make about $300,000 a year to have the same standard of living as I do here. Think anyone is going to pay me $300,000 a year?
Of course not.
And on the flip side, if I said “screw it” and decided I wanted to work much less or do something else, here I could live on almost nothing. In Seattle or LA or San Diego, to have any sort of decent middle-class-ish standard of living (ok housing, food, etc) you need to earn at least $60,000 a year.
Here, I could get by on 1/3 of that and not suffer.
What’s the reason for moving to a hub city, then? The housing stock is worse and is also ridiculously expensive. The jobs don’t pay enough to remunerate one for all the inconveniences and expense of living in such a place. And they are only getting worse and more untenable for anyone not making well above six figures, so your standard of living will decline over time.
a) You’re never out of work. I could walk out my employer’s front door today and have another job here in the Silicon Valley. Everywhere else I’ve lived, I was pretty much stuck with whatever employer hired me, because nobody else in town was doing the kinds of things that are in my skill set and interesting to me.
b) You get to do interesting things. In most places, you’re stuck doing routine stuff that can’t be outsourced overseas, but nothing that’s intellectually stimulating. I was doing a database application to manage student attendance and grades in a way compliant with one state’s regulations at one employer, for example. I was okay doing that for a couple of years, but after that I had to move to another city because I was literally going insane doing nothing but attendance and grades for this one state month after month, year after year…
3) You get to meet lots of very smart and interesting people. If you’re a very smart and interesting person yourself, having similarly sharp people to interact with is a lot more intellectually stimulating than dealing with inbred cousins who are about as sharp as bowling balls who still regularly drop the N-word and whine about how they had to move out of the projects into a trailer house with holes in the floor because there were too many N-words in the projects, and hey, isn’t that Donald Trump guy great? Ugh. Save me.
Other than that, as you point out, the cost of living is stupid and you have a better quality of life outside “hub” cities. I already know I’m not sticking around once I’ve made my nut here in the Silicon Valley. But then, I don’t have family to hold me anywhere, so (shrug).