Let's be clear what "Silicon Valley" is. It's not a few select folks making $600,000 year. The vast majority of tech workers are just run of the mill tech workers (e.g. QA Engineer, System Admin). They don't need MIT PhD's More on reddit.com

That's simply because they're not so much better than everything else. I used to work at Google. Google offers stable employment, competitive salary + benefits (not the best, but highly competitive), good work life balance, etc. The work I did was actually interesting too. It wasn't maintaining legacy code or working on stuff with no business logic. However, the thing is many other companies have the same features. It's pretty much only here and in competitive universities that you see people not "respect" companies that aren't thought of as top tier. I worked at multiple startups/small companies before Google as well and they were all great workplaces and had their own unique challenges. Working at companies like Google allow you to say you work at Google as well as work with many really smart people, but that's pretty much all that I can think of. I guess at Google you can also test upcoming products which was pretty cool, but pretty much everything else is standard. There's a lot of reasons why people would leave these companies and work at other ones: Working with friends/past coworkers Less stress/competitive environment if team was competitive (at big companies this is always team dependent) Better pay (yes, small companies may actually pay more) Higher position, more responsibilities or the opposite Working on preferred tech More on reddit.com

Good lord, 2019 is the war of the tech titans. I had no idea Microsoft and Amazon both had higher market caps than Google these days. More on reddit.com

Your experience an insights are interesting but what you did is have 3 years of relevant experience. I don't know a single dev with that experience who had problems finding a new job. At that experience level you're well into the level where recruiters start throwing themselves at you. For the people who come here for help, getting that first job is the biggest hurdle. More on reddit.com