Doesn't make sense. The big 4 have campuses across the country.
Instead of telling people to move to SV I would recommend making sure to get into the right (big 4 or not) team and role for your career. Just fixing bugs at big SV company will not help much. You want to make sure you have a chance to contribute something to show your skills on an innovative or leading team.
- I promise you that's only true as far as your project's priority. For example if Google Maps in Colorado is more important to the company, at the moment, than some other project at HQ, then working on that project at HQ is not better for your career.
- Remember a recruiter is a sales person. Some are honest, some will tell you what serves their own interest.
Yes, but a disproportionate number of their positions are in the bay area. Also, it's much easier to job hop between high-paying companies in the bay area, and this is particularly true if you have a specialization more specific/less common than "web dev" or "iOS dev".
They're called "incidents" at some (enterprise software) bigcos, BTW :) - and tend to be called "defects" in software services companies using software engineering standards like ISO 9000 or SEI CMM.
Juniors or freshers tend to get assigned those for a while. Nothing wrong per se, it helps them learn the codebase, and in some bigcos, the codebases can be pretty big. The same practice is followed in some smallcos too.