There's at least one large tech company that has located themselves totally outside the typical tech hubs - Epic Systems, in Madison. I interviewed for them after graduation but ended up taking a job at Facebook in Seattle.
The offer was for half my current salary. They tried to argue that with the cost of living adjustment I could buy a house, but what 22-year-old wants to buy a house? Locating in Madison is kind of a physical manifestation of their business strategy - avoid any competition, pay sub-market rates and issue strict, possibly non-enforceable non-compete clauses.
It works for people who really want to live in the Midwest. I think there's a spectrum between "live to work" and "work to live", and I think most ambitious college grads actually want many opportunities, for a while at least.
It’s also part of their strategy to churn through 22-25 year olds by overworking them in their first jobs out of college when they likely don’t have as many family obligations or well calibrated expectations for what work-life balance entails. And it saves them money since they don’t have to promote that many people to senior positions.
There are plenty of other companies outside big tech hubs, you just don’t hear about them as much and they don’t recruit the same way a lot of other tech companies do. For example, Epic’s competitor Cerner is in Kansas City which many people on this post are using as an example of a cheap place with a small tech scene, despite Cerner employing over 10K
Quite frankly, I think Epic Systems realizes it can't compete with Facebook. But the value is much better in comparison to many non-FAANG Bay Area companies.
I was actually in a similar situation, where Capital One offered 90K for Richmond, VA and it seemed better than ~120k offer in the Bay Area. But then I got a Google offer and stopped considering both of the others.
The high-CoL companies really only make sense financially if you're in the upper tiers of pay (and/or on the path to reaching that level of pay).
The offer was for half my current salary. They tried to argue that with the cost of living adjustment I could buy a house, but what 22-year-old wants to buy a house? Locating in Madison is kind of a physical manifestation of their business strategy - avoid any competition, pay sub-market rates and issue strict, possibly non-enforceable non-compete clauses.
It works for people who really want to live in the Midwest. I think there's a spectrum between "live to work" and "work to live", and I think most ambitious college grads actually want many opportunities, for a while at least.