If it's so easy to stop paying silicon valley salaries why didn't all these mastermind CEOs do it years ago? They just stumbled into this solution because of Corona?
Code quality / tech debt
We tried this. It just didn’t work. Based on my own experience, and opinions expressed by a few recruiters that I’ve talked to, the quality of the talent base in the valley is simply better. It’s why you see Chinese tech companies starting to set up shops here. It’s worth it. Then you compare the quality of the talent that you hire locally vs ones you relocate from elsewhere. There are still more qualified local ones than elsewhere. Those that do relocate from other places continues to improve and become better and tends to stay. This gradually improves the local talent pool. A person hire A person. A person hires and relocate A person to the valley. A people like to work with other A people too, so they are willing to relocate. More A people in the valley.
They did, and then they have to pay people in US to clean up
They did this when outsourcing was in vogue in 2002-2005 and it failed miserably. The quality (usually Indian or Chinese offices) was bad and the difference in culture and communication made things worse. Companies that hired local talent kicked ass. The res is history.... which might repeat itself. Any company that hires inferior talent will end up like Yahoo, or eBay. Still there in some form, but irrelevant overall.
You get what you pay for, I guess.