Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon
162 comments
·July 16, 2025declan_roberts
UncleOxidant
Hillsboro is pretty much a company town (well, there are some datacenters now, but those don't need a lot of employees). Actually the whole of Washington County is heavily dependent on Intel. There's also Nike, but it's also heading for significantly lower headcount than it's had in a while. So it's kind of a double-whammy here (Triple if you count federal government funding cuts hitting places like OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University)).
I was contracting out at Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro in 2004 and I'd walk around the (then) new neighborhood there by the campus and I distinctly recall thinking "What if something were to happen to Intel in, say 25 or 30 years? What would happen to these neighborhoods?" It was just kind of a thought experiment at the time, but now it seems like we're going to find out.
lelandbatey
> This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely.
I suspect most of those folks did not "come from" the bay area in the first place.
MinimalAction
I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
sashank_1509
Second hand knowledge, I have a cousin in Intel Oregon. Intel mass hires PhDs in Physics/ Chemistry or Biology etc, reasoning that a PhD is enough to learn whatever is needed for a process engineer. Assume 30-40 people hired every cohort and there is 12 or so cohorts a year. Another curious thing I noticed, was Intel had online multi correct tests for its engineers that they had to pass weekly, presumably to keep track whether they are actually learning on the job or not. The multi correct tests though just seem like rote memorization and easy to cheat.
Overall my 5000 ft view, was the culture was very different from FAANG or a Bay Area Tech company. If the Bay Area approach is high ownership and high accountability, Intel was much more process driven and low ownership. They even tracked hours worked for engineers in Oregon.
jordanb
I knew a guy who got a job with Intel's wearable division. Everything was chaotic, everyone was toxic, and Intel one day lost interest and fired the whole division.
The sad thing is they acquired the basis smartwatch and destroyed it, leaving only Garmin as developers of dedicated activity trackers. I considered getting a basis but was obviously glad I didn't.
josephg
I've been thinking of buying pixelmator pro recently for photo editing. It seems like a lovely photo editing application. And they have a lifetime license.
But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely.
I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.
malnourish
YouTube? Twitch? I don't use either but people sure flock to them.
There are many acquisitions that lead to better products.
LoganDark
I have Pixelmator Pro & Photomator. They haven't meaningfully changed since Apple's acquisition, and they don't rely on any subscription or online features that could be ruined after the fact. If a future update fucks things over, you don't have to update. Everything runs locally.
cjbgkagh
I hear it’s division dependent, but just about every time someone complained about things being toxic at Microsoft they would be told at least it is not Intel.
MostlyStable
I had the basis. It was fantastic. I still miss it.
skadamou
I know someone with a PhD in biochemistry who was hired at Intel from a cancer research lab... I'm sure he sold his chemistry background well but I always thought that was an odd hire. Maybe there are just so few qualified PhDs that they'll happily take folks from adjacent fields?
whatever1
Most of the senior leadership of Amazon in the early days were a bunch of randos from a formal credential standpoint. A car mechanic leading aws engineering, a musician running logistics, a chemical engineer optimizing the network etc .
Hedge funds also hire physicists and mechanical engineers
donavanm
Your phrasing _drastically_ undersells the actual relevant background and experience there:
James hamilton the “mechanic” … with EE & CS degrees and time at ibm and ms. Dave Clark the “musician” (undergrad) … and an MBA focused on logistics. Jeff wilke the “chemist” … who worked on process optimization at honeywell and supply chains at aderesen.
So sure, might as well say DeSantis is an SDE Intern figuring out software deployments, Vosshall is an amateur aircraft EE, or marc brooker is some foreign radar engineer.
Signed, some newpaper dude who was an AWS PE doing edge networking and operations.
dapperdrake
That sounds surprisingly non-random.
Graph theory originated in Chemistry. Not Computer Science.
Musicians know harmonics and indirectly lots of cyclical travel stuff. And waves.
The good car mechanics I know are scary smart.
fooker
Any good laboratory chemist can be trained to work in semiconductor research. The tools and jargon are largely similar.
dkdcio
in college I got a job offer from Intel without interviewing. I had applied, the hiring manager reached it and said they’d setup a loop, it never happened. then some weeks later I got an offer. super weird
also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
fuck_AI
By your description it sounds like layoffs should be at the management level for incompetence, not for employees.
Nifty3929
What would you do with all of the employees who are currently working in jobs or on projects or with skills not relevant to the company?
lmm
Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.
ungreased0675
Let them make cool stuff the company can sell, increasing revenue and reversing the decline.
kstrauser
Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.
airstrike
Managers are also employees. Nobody's arguing they should be spared and I'm not sure that you can argue top management at Intel hasn't been let go over the years.
Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people
coliveira
Who said they have the "wrong" people? They are doing exactly what they were hired to do.
saagarjha
I think management has historically argued as such.
vjvjvjvjghv
I would argue that should be done at a lot of companies.
immibis
What purpose would it serve? Remember, the purpose of a company is not to make good products.
dylan604
why would someone with a PhD apply for the position if that was the case? Were they hired and then re-tasked once employed?
MinimalAction
Because Intel pays well (mid six figures + bonus) and PhD doesn't pay a minimum wage in most places. They were expressly hired without an overarching goal.
dylan604
So in other words, that PhD was well worth the effort.
moopmoopmoop
Back in 2012-2014 intel hired a bunch of “futurists” which were liberal arts majors from the northeastern US. Needless to say they spewed a bunch of nonsense and were fired years later, but I knew a few and they were puzzled they were hired to begin with.
thijson
I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
It felt to me like the people at the top were clueless, and so were hoping these hires would help give them an idea which direction to steer the ship.
db48x
Xerox hired an anthropologist once, Julian E. Orr, and it resulted in a really good book called “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job”.
Of course, mostly he found was how out of touch the executives at Xerox were with what their employees were actually doing in practice. The executives thought of the technicians who repaired copiers almost as monkeys who were just supposed to follow a script prepared by the engineers. Meanwhile the technicians thought of themselves as engineers who needed to understand the machines in order to be successful, so they frequently spent hours reverse engineering the machines and the documentation to work out the underlying principles on which the machines worked. The most successful technicians had both soft skills for dealing with customers and selling upgrades and supplies as well as engineering skills for diagnosing broken hardware and actually getting it fixed correctly. It seems that none of the sales, engineering, or executives at Xerox liked hearing about any of it.
UncleOxidant
> I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
Yes, I remember contracting at Intel in 2006 and the Anthropologists were at one end of the building we were in. Their area was a lot different than the engineering areas. Lots of art, sitting around in circles, etc. I remember asking about what was up over there "Those are the anthropologists".
paxys
Intel has 108,000 employees.
In comparison:
Nvidia 36,000
AMD 28,000
Qualcomm 49,000
Texas Instruments 34,000
Broadcom 37,000
It is obvious that Intel is ridiculously overstaffed.
blinding-streak
I know it's apples to oranges but ASML has 44,000 employees, for reference.
thechao
TSMC has 83000 employees. If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?
paxys
The scale isn't really comparable. TSMC manufactures 5x more wafers than Intel, and the disparity is getting exponentially worse every year (see the chart at https://thecuberesearch.com/247-special-breaking-analysis-th...). In fact 30% of Intel's own production is outsourced to TSMC.
adrr
Intel runs their own fabs. NVidia, AMD, Qualcomm outsource chip manufacturing.
drjasonharrison
Intel has about as many salary employees (blue badge) as contract employees (green badge). Only the blue badges are included in the counts.
insane_dreamer
None of those companies have chip manufacturing.
The only true comparison is TSMC but in only does chip manufacturing and not chip design/development.
So Nvidia + TSMC would probably be a fair comparison.
denimnerd42
TI does
burner420042
It's hard for me to be specific about this but I've worked for 2 cloud FAANGs and whatever the management culture was like at Intel, whenever I work with ex-Intel management... their behavior and perspective just really rubbed me wrong. None went to work because they liked what they did. What was worse is you could feel it. They had a smell; not Tech, no imagination.
fsckboy
>Instead, Intel has embarked on an unprecedented and sustained campaign to shrink its business in response to a series of technical and financial crises.
it's not unprecedented, when companies' businesses contract, shrinking is exactly the right thing to do, not to mention that it's forced on them anyway.
jsemrau
It's not unprecedented, but I question if it is the right move while the industry is experiencing unprecedented growth.
"The Global Data Center Chip Market size is expected to be worth around USD 57.9 Billion by 2033, from USD 14.3 Billion in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 15.0% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2033."
mensetmanusman
With the premier US semiconductor fab dying, China will take the reigns in 2027 according to intelligence agencies.
UncleOxidant
What I don't get is that there are at least a couple of very large, very valuable US companies that need to have their CPUs/GPUs fabbed (Apple and NVidia) and are currently dependent on fabs in Taiwan, a geopolitically risky place to be that dependent on. Both are sitting on huge reserves of ca$h. Why not either outright buy or buy a large stake in Intel to recapitalize it and allow it to finish the new SOTA fabs it was building? The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding. If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing it would try to arrange some kind of shotgun wedding where Apple & Nvidia (and others) take a stake in Intel to keep it afloat. Perhaps some kind of a consortium where the investing companies get priority in getting their parts fabbed? There's really no other US alternative for advanced semiconductor fabrication unless you're going to start from scratch and that doesn't seem like a viable idea.
Yes, I understand the argument that Intel management screwed up for too long and this is the market at work, but that ignores the geopolitical risks of what we're going to end up with. Forming some kind of consortium to keep Intel fabs running (and new ones built) could also include completely changing the management of the company.
lmz
I suspect buying Intel could lead to them being the Boeing to Intel's McDonnell-Douglas.
rapsey
> The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding
Chips act was a whole lot of hot air. It passed in 22 and intel did not receive any money from it until end of 24.
osnium123
Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on. Besides, TSMC is expanding in Arizona and Samsung is expanding in Texas.
mensetmanusman
It’s business and policy. This business is winner take all due to economy’s of scale.
Ergo policy should have been that X percent of chips be made on US shores. Wups
UncleOxidant
> Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on.
I don't buy this. I think the primary problem was mismanagement especially in the 2008 to 2020 timeframe. Too many bean counter CEOs during that period who did not understand the need to constantly invest in SOTA fabs.
JKCalhoun
> Intel would sometimes cut jobs during fallow periods but it backfilled them almost immediately.
Smells like corporate bulimia.
When I worked/lived in the Bay Area there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. (Apropos of nothing really.)
legitster
> Smells like corporate bulimia.'
If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire? The alternatives are stock buybacks or just sitting on the cash.
Obviously every bet is not going to pan out, but hiring even on the margin is probably good.
lmm
> If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire?
No. Hiring should be a long-term strategic investment, not something you do whenever you have extra cash lying around. If you needed the extra people you should have been trying to hire them already, and if you don't then you shouldn't hire them now.
tjwebbnorfolk
Depends who "we" is.
If I'm a shareowner, if the company doesn't have any intelligent ideas on how to spend my money, they should send it back to me as a dividend, or buy me out (share buyback).
Please don't waste my money trying to build some immortal empire as a shrine to the CEO's ambition.
matthewdgreen
There’s an enormous amount of money being made by chipmakers, and Intel is rapidly losing access to it. That doesn’t mean hiring stupidly is good, but spending money to regain its momentum and save the company from bankruptcy is an obvious priority. Stock buybacks aren’t, unless the plan is to extract revenue and shut the place down.
mercutio2
No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money.
When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters.
Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.
matthewdgreen
On the other hand, the Shanghai stock index has been basically flat for years, despite Chinese companies rapidly growing and dominating industry after industry. Our companies have been very good at returning value to shareholders, while Chinese companies have been re-investing. There’s a very real possibility that we may come to deeply regret it.
screature2
Not entirely disagreeing, but Intel feels more like a poster child of buybacks that (in hindsight and in comparison with their peer group) would have been much better spent reinvested into the company https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...:
* they've done about $152B in stock buybacks since 1990 https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks. I think... ~$108B in the last decade.
* during the same time period they fell behind TSMC and SEC in semiconductor fab , missed the boat on mobile (couldn't really capture the market for either smartphone or tablet CPUs), and are missing the boat w/AI training https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/07/14/intel-officially-throws-i...
Discussion of Intel's buyback behavior as excessive and wasteful was also picked up on during all the discussion of CHIPs subsidies last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39849727 see also https://ips-dc.org/report-maximizing-the-benefits-of-the-chi...
BobaFloutist
Or even dividends, once they've set up a solid rainy-day fund. Anyone remember dividends?
piva00
No stock buybacks, pay dividends, that's why the instrument exists. Stock buybacks are an aberration of hyperfinancialisation, just pay the shareholders proportionally to what they own.
JKCalhoun
It's the disposable side of the practice that I disagree with. Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Just my opinion though.
I think we've become too complacent/accepting of corporations just laying off employees with what amounts to a shrug.
legitster
I'm kinda with you that in most situations corporations would probably be better off hiring slower and then riding out downturns on cash.
But big picture I disagree. We kind of need creative destruction in an economy - we need to be able to lay off people in horse buggey industries so that they can be hired to make Model T's. We're better off focusing on our social safety network and having a job market that encourages some amount of transit between careers.
zamadatix
I wish it weren't such a big deal in ones life they keep their current employer (from the perspective of things like health insurance plans, retirement plans, PTO balances, basic income). If it weren't so god damned painful to change jobs or have some gaps longer than a month or two then maybe we'd have a chance to just treat jobs as jobs we move between instead of a sacred vow for life lest we be thrown into chaos when broken.
tjwebbnorfolk
> Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business.
Treating the employer/employee relationship like some life-long commitment sounds like pure hell. It is a transaction. I don't want it to be anything more than that.
dylan604
> Hiring should feel like a marriage
it does though doesn't it? divorce is so common that marriage no longer feels like it has any permanence like you imply it does
chasil
You have omitted shareholder dividends.
toast0
Stock buybacks are shareholder dividends with better tax consequences and less expectations.
hopelite
There is also a bit of strategic, defensive hiring that happens, i.e., hiring people so your competition cannot hire them, let alone at a lower salary if you were not hiring. It's a little talked about issue, because it is mostly expressed as a type of C-suite FOMO tied to their performance and stock option incentives, i.e., "we need to hire because X is hiring and we can't look like we are not growing/hiring because that will drive the stock price down and risks my stock options, even if we are doing massive buybacks to glaze the stock price".
It is another significant flaw in the "capitalist", i.e., publicly traded corporate system that incentivizes all the various financial shenanigans to generate false stock performance to enrich the c-suite.
yjftsjthsd-h
> there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley.
It's a different state and a 9-10 hour drive away; in what sense is it close?
mandevil
At least in the past, Intel owned a dozen 35-50 pax regional jets (https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Airc...) and had regular scheduled flights back and forth between their Santa Clara, Phoenix, and Portland offices. (They now seem to be down to two- rise of Zoom?)
Note that these were NOT executive jets for C-suite, these were for all employees who had meetings at other locations (at least according to people I've met since I moved to AZ a few years ago to be near my in-laws).
orangechairs
^^ Can corroborate. Intel had a fleet of airplanes for employee use commuting between sites. You did not have to be an exec or VP to fly.
nxobject
Same for Nike, I think to LA and back – although it might have been cut as well.
JKCalhoun
A lot of people "on the coast" were happy to relocate a bit further north where they still had beaches, mountains to romp around — only more affordable.
Definitely not close as in "commute close".
Maybe more like "close to feeling the same as the Bay Area"?
(You can believe Portlanders hated Californians that moved up there. Or so I've been told.)
nxobject
Another thing that would've sweetened the deal -- given certain priorities -- is how close nature is: Oregon's restrictive limits on urban area boundaries means that in 45 minutes you're out in nature, and in 1 1/2 hour you're skiing on Mt Hood.
Also, no sales tax!
PS – as someone who spent hundreds of hours on Glider PRO as a kid, thank you!
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
> (You can believe Portlanders hated Californians that moved up there. Or so I've been told.)
They still do, only it's not really Portlanders anymore, it's all the smaller cities that hate them. Why? A couple reasons: they came in and pay over asking price for housing, driving up prices across the board so those working for local non-conglomerates have a hard time affording housing. And then they vote contrary to how the locals do (locals, I might add, who didn't have any problem with how things were run before, even if their "betters" felt they were "backwards").
Basically, they end up burying the local culture and replacing it with California.
tracerbulletx
Culturally, also that is physically close in the west.
anon291
It is actually cheaper to rent in Portland and fly commercial daily to SJC than it is to live in the bay area. I did this commute regularly since my family is settled in Portland. End to end it is only slightly slower than Caltrain (sfo->SJC) as well... Actually one of my more pleasant commutes. I live close to the airport and with TSA precheck I would show up 15 minutes before boarding, be in air for 90 minutes and then to the office. If I leave at 7 then I'm perfectly on time for 9AM and then fly home at around 7:30 to be back in bed around 10. Even have time for dinner and drinks after work.
_carbyau_
I thought 9-5 + 1hr commuting was bad enough. What you just said is crazy.
Different strokes for different folks.
nxobject
You don't have to answer this question, but: do you live off the I-205? I'm always astounded (well, annoyed) at how, living in the inner east side, getting to Multnomah Falls via I-84 would sometimes be quicker than getting to PDX fir the 205.
kccqzy
> If I leave at 7 then I'm perfectly on time for 9AM
I don't doubt you but most people would not find a 2-hour one-way commute pleasant.
superconduct123
Did the employer know you didn't live there?
vachina
Lip Bu Tan is here for some spring cleaning.
cyberax
You misspelled: "Dismantle the company to sell it piecemeal"
georgeburdell
It’s a local piece, but are the layoffs even disproportionate with other sites?
orangechairs
In Oregon, the layoffs were 3x-4x more than in AZ. What's kicked both regions in the teeth is that the layoffs were 4x-5x more than what Intel had stated. OregonLive has been reporting for weeks that 500+ Oregon Intel jobs were going to be cut -- they cut 2500 jobs. This is also round 3 (?) of Intel's layoffs in the last 12 months. It's massive and devastating.
saelthavron
This sounds like sell the whole company type of cuts.
consumer451
What else could be the trajectory of Intel, when the CEO has admitted defeat in the current investment environment?
> Intel CEO says it's "too late" for them to catch up with AI
UncleOxidant
Gelsinger was apparently Intel's last hope to avoid being sold off in pieces.
jeffbee
Hypothetically a glut of unemployed but highly skilled semiconductor people hanging around might kick off a wave of startup innovation.
ngokevin
As a PDX native that went to Oregon State and saw a lot of people go towards Intel, I don't feel the Oregon Intel crowd has strong aptitude for starting something up. They're at Intel in the first place because it was a secure job in their hometown they could coast at. I'm sure there are many of them that can do it, but I don't feel Portland has strong startup energy.
pquerna
it's happening?
"Ex-Intel executives raise $21.5 million for RISC-V chip startup":
https://www.aheadcomputing.com/
I believe the founding team is all in Oregon - and mostly all ex-Intel.
UncleOxidant
Yes, these folks came out of Intel Labs. But that's also a fabless startup. When you start talking about fabs you're talking about needing real money (in the multi billions of dollars). That kind of funding could only come from the likes of Apple and Nvidia.
anon291
This is basically correct. The culture in PDX is totally different.
brcmthrowaway
How does it compare to Silicon Valley?
jeffbee
You only need a sprinkling of people with the entrepreneurial spark to kick it off, right?
ngokevin
It helps there to be a strong community of founders, employees willing to take a risk to work at startup for less money, investors, capital, and general energy in the air. PNW tech scene is relatively low-key and apathetic to startups. Anyone with that type of ambition should have already migrated
anon291
There was a strong contingent of forward looking tech people and entrepreneurs a few years ago (pre COVID). They have left due to the large restrictions during COVID and the flight of capital and the general decline of Portland due to the riots and the lockdown measures.
UncleOxidant
You also need funding. That tends to be harder to come by in Oregon vs Silicon Valley.
RetiredRichard
It doesn't, unless there is cheap capital floating around
dylan604
Fabs aren't cheap, so you can't just start-up mentality you're way into this. This isn't a bunch of dudes living in the same house banging code on laptops. Serious investment would be needed. Even with bags of cash available, these are not available for 2-day delivery. There's a bit of lead time involved
rossdavidh
It sounds like a lot of the jobs are in manufacturing (fabs) or closely related. Once upon a time, innovative startups could be in that space (that's how "Silicon Valley" got the silicon part of its name). But, for several decades now, it requires billions of dollars to start up a semiconductor fab, and VC's don't seem to be all that into funding manufacturing.
I'm not saying it _should_ or _must_ be that way, just that it is.
hmmokidk
That or they’ll have to move to Shenzhen to find work
20after4
This is the reality. The US is cooked.
em3rgent0rdr
Surely Intel made them sign non-competes and will vigorously enforce Intel's troves of patents and trade-secrets.
ashdksnndck
Lucky for those people, California exists! Noncompetes can’t be enforced here, and amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California:
https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/california-reache...
JumpCrisscross
> amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California
Has this been tested? Why would an Oregon court care about what a California law says it can and cannot do?
anon291
In general you should ignore non competes but you should not divulge previous employers proprietary knowledge. No state will enforce a non compete if it means the person would be unemployed. The judge will laugh you out of the courtroom.
dyauspitr
Only if there are paradigm shifts on the horizon. Chip making is high barrier to entry, capital intensive. No small collective is going to be able to start something up.
orangechairs
I am rooting for this to be the case, and frankly it should be, but typically the massive startup boom comes from companies IPOing (PayPal mafia, Google mafia, etc.). So much talent has been locked up at Intel, I'm hoping this is a liberation of sorts.
takklz
I remember where I wanted an intel pentium 4 back in the day so bad!
> Many of those who lost their jobs worked in technical fields in an industry that pays an average wage of $180,000 a year. Those were great jobs and helped buoy the whole state, but most won’t find similar work locally.
This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely. You arbitrage the COL difference and come out ahead big time, but it might be very hard to make the same salary locally if you can't find a remote job.
Best to make some hay while the sun is shining.