sakky

Yeah, but I've said it before and I'll say it again. The reason why California is expensive is because it is desirable. Landlords wouldn't be able to charge 2k a month for a small apartment if nobody wanted to live there.

I think one benefit to working in California that has been vastly ignored is the issue of noncompete agreements. They are completely illegal in California (except for a tiny exception for trade secrets), but legal in most other states. What that means is that while you are completely free to work for a competitor firm or start your own company immediately after you leave your previous employer if you are in California, that often times isn't true in other states. Since most non-competes are industry-specific, you may be forced to work in another industry for which you have no previous working experience and hence are forced to take lower pay. Or in extreme cases, you may even end up not really being able to work at all, i.e. if your skills are so specific that they aren't applicable in other industries.

In fact, it gets even worse. Employers may ex-ante not even dare to even consider taking a better job at a competitor firm for fear that they will be sued for violating their non-compete. What that also means is that some (evil) bosses will use their power as a hammer on you: i.e. they will simply refuse to give you the raises or promotions you deserve, or even reduce your pay, knowing that you can't easily go anywhere else because of your noncompete.

I'll give you an example. During colloquium, I heard about a guy who got a PhD from MIT, specializing in speech recognition, had published a number of papers on the topic, and was widely regarded as a rising star in the field. But then he made the fateful mistake of joining a speech recognition company that made him sign a noncompete. Then after he quit the job (or was fired from the job, depending on who you ask), he basically found that he could no longer get another job in speech-recognition because he feared being sued for violating his noncompete. So - just like that - he found he could no longer work for two years (the length of the noncompete) in the industry that he had spent years studying for and building experience within.

Granted, maybe that's an exaggeration, for maybe he could have beaten the noncompete in court for being too onerous, but he couldn't afford to take that chance, because what if he lost? Then he would have been completely bankrupted. Heck, even if he had won, he still would have had to pay a small fortune in legal fees, just for the right to get a job in his own area of expertise.