I live in the Midwest, and have traveled frequently to Silicon Valley for work. It's a nice enough area in most ways, but I get a really nice view of it through travel-expensed meals and hotel accomodations where the commute to the office is 10 minutes of pleasent traffic. The experience the locals have involves more traffic and rather fewer trips to modestly nice restaurants. I don't hate the area by any means, but it certainly isn't so much better than where I live that I would want the commute or to buy 5 or 6 fairly nice houses just to live there... which is a rough approximation of the housing costs vs. where I live now.
To be clear, I'll say again it's not like I hate the Valley, but the reality is that day-to-day life between my Valley coworkers and mine just isn't that different, but sure is more expensive. If you find a Silicon Valley job from a SV company in a remote office... and there are rather a lot of them, just not all in one place... there's not that much advantage left, unless you really love something about SV specifically, which is of course a totally reasonable and sensible thing.
It's a mecca for programmers. I can go to talks on various technical topics every day of the week if I wanted to. I have spoken to the creator of Scala, the Symfony PHP framework and Optimizely. It's just really exciting (to me) to have that level of access.
Whereas my friends in Houston get to go to one conference a year (if that). But I totally agree if you want a house with land to raise kids personally I think it sucks to live here.
To be clear, I'll say again it's not like I hate the Valley, but the reality is that day-to-day life between my Valley coworkers and mine just isn't that different, but sure is more expensive. If you find a Silicon Valley job from a SV company in a remote office... and there are rather a lot of them, just not all in one place... there's not that much advantage left, unless you really love something about SV specifically, which is of course a totally reasonable and sensible thing.