It's very easy to explain. Even very weak companies that are located in "hot" cities have chance to catch really experienced and knowledgable talent. One good guy employed for 6 months can be an amazing catalyst of great changes, you can very quickly modernize process and technologies if you have passionate people on board. It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. The "less popular" places are the polar opposite of this mindset. If talent is not easily available, you will find companies with no proper culture, stupidly old technologies and "old guard" not wanting to change much if anything.
I'm a lifelong gamer (since 1996), currently have PC that only has weak integrated GPU so I cant play much, but super speedy 500mbs fiber internet connection and 80mbs LTE on the phone. I look like ideal Stadia client, right? Well, no. I'm not interested in slightest, I'm waiting passionately for PS5. Current internet technology (latency) is not enough to make cloud gaming possible, you can instantly feel this 140+ ms of delay. Other than that, Google don't know jack shit about games, you can clearly see it in Stadia announcment conference. Good luck, I give it 1.5 year and nobody will remember what "Stadia" is.
Hey! I'm in Krakow, personally I'm React/C# guy, buy have couple Java friends that would love to work fully remotely. Can give you my contact www if ur willing to network
I just don't buy this idea that there is some kind of separation between React library and React as a platform. I'm building SPAs since 2008, been to too many front-end meetups, have friends in so many different companies its hard to count. NOBODY is using React as a library. Banks, shops, news sites, you name it, everyone is using React+Redux+Typescript+bazilion-libs. Graphql is not a standard yet but it is already very popular, basically every new hired Dev adds new libs or switches to something else. It's a mess.
I am huge React fan, but when I see how complicated are some of the modern React codebases in some "leading" companies I have a strong feeling that we will soon need to go back to drawing board and hit some kind of reset button. As I said, I love React ecosystem, but there is something fundamentally wrong with most front-end developers today. They build bigger and bigger SPAs because they are confident that React ecosystem makes it maintainable, well good luck maintaing React/Redux/Graphql/hooks/bazillion-libs after 5 years. Abstraction is good, but it has its limits.
It's easy. Its the same in all major cities in Europe. Entertainment is almost free, healthy food is cheap, medical care is mostly free, education is free, sports are cheap, traveling is super cheap. Everyone puts all of their money in real estate, supply is extremely restricted, demand is bigger every month, prices skyrocket.
Same thing happens in Poland. There are only 4-5 rather small cities with good jobs + shitload of skilled and unskilled Ukrainian immigrants (like really, there are days when I walk through town and 80% people I pass by speak Ukrainian) + Airbnb craziness + no regulations + shitty politicians = it became impossible to rent or buy even small apartment if you are not highly skilled or not willing to share room with someone you don't know. It all happend in last 4-5 years. I was born in one of these towns (Krakow) and it just hurts me to see huge division in society, clearly there are lots of rich people that are getting richer every month, buying multiple houses and renting, and there are shitload of (some of them university educated) people living in tiny old Soviet era apartments (imagine whole family and dog in 400-450sqft). Actually many people don't even dream about own place. Both my parents and my grandparents were able to buy apartment without having any sort of education, today if I wasn't Software Dev I would be homeless. We are talking Poland here, can't imagine how much worse it must be in other actually real countries.
USA is just slowly rotting away. From what I read here about how modern life in US looks like I seriously suspect that there will be some kind of massive epidemic mind deseases outburst there in 15-30 years.
I have friends working as senior developers for GE in Poland. Basically US branch outsource project to Polish brand because they are paid peanuts in comparison, then part of the work is outsourced to India branch which is paid even less. I have ZERO respect for American mega-corps.
Dunno how it looks in US but in Europe traveling became unbelievably cheap. I live in Poland, we have shit earnings and yet I don't think I that know many people that are NOT traveling heavily because it's super easy to find cheap flights and cheap Arbnb everywhere, even some exitic places like Cambodia. I was in Rome couple days with my girlfriend in March this year, I don't think I paid more than 100€ for flight and housing combined for 2 people.