Personally, I love it. I have a very cheap cost of living (paying $1 per sq. ft. means you're being gouged here), a spacious home in an area with no noise, and a short commute all at the same time. Also, since we have so much tech industry here bringing a lot of H1-B workers and other diverse employees (plus a major tech university that hosts a large number of international students), there's been a huge boom in good ethnic food here. Dallas is kinda the opposite of most other cities: where other cities have white flight suburbs and a diverse urban core, Dallas has huge concentrations of Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese people (among many, many other ethnicities) in the suburbs, while the city is full of white hipsters who think living in a tiny loft is cool. As such, you find the best food in the suburbs.
Apart from AMD (when it was on the brink) moving it's HQ to Austin from Sunnyvale, I can't think of any other "tech" company moving major operations from SV to elsewhere.
1) People who work remotely are clustered in companies that allow remote working. If you don't work for a company that will let you work remotely then you probably don't work with any remote workers.
2) Remote workers can often choose their location so they cluster in more desirable locations which, statistically speaking, you probably do not live in.
I worked remotely for 2011-2015 within a company that had approximately 1/3 of its workforce working remotely. As I could go where I wanted I spent most of my time overseas. Spent a lot of time in SE Asia. Places like Chiang Mai in Thailand and Bali in Indonesia have no shortage of people working remotely either as an employee, freelancing or starting a business.
If you can convince your influential engineering employees to move, that can work. But if they don't want to move, your hands are tied.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Tech-pipeline-to...
The Dallas area is filled with companies that make nothing but B2B telecom and UC solutions.