Moving to a more employer-friendly place is a losing startegy if you're good enough to get offers in SF. Good engineers will by and large figure out that being in SF is better for them in pay and mobility, and so will not follow you to the middle of nowhere.
On the other hand, I would like to see development of "minor" tech hubs in other more livable cities. I'd give anything to have access to SF-type employment in Chicago, as long as it didn't turn the Chicago housing market into SF's.
> pay and mobility, and so will not follow you to the middle of nowhere.
I've never seen pay properly compensate for the harsh (tangible) expenses of living in SF/CA.
Seattle, Austin, Boulder, in my experience, have all had far better value props.
> Chicago housing market into SF's
As much as I dislike Chicago (political reasons): SF-style-housing-market can't happen there. The city has massive amounts of sprawl, vehicular commuting is common, real estate is plentiful and inexpensive. It's not a peninsula full of NIMBYs.
You can always put housing further from the center, but the radius of not-insane commute times is much harder to expand. Wider highways encourage further-flung suburbs, resulting in at best the same level of congestion, often more.
Fortunately Chicago already has the CTA and Metra infrastructure, and we could presumably make trains longer (and run them more frequently) for a reasonable price. Though at some point you hit the limits of safe separation between trains and the inefficiencies of block signaling. CTA rail doesn't have the physical infrastructure to run express services (there are very few places where a train on a specific line can bypass another) so building more stations doesn't necessarily help you either.
On the other hand, I would like to see development of "minor" tech hubs in other more livable cities. I'd give anything to have access to SF-type employment in Chicago, as long as it didn't turn the Chicago housing market into SF's.