Likely a combination of business-friendly policies (low tax, no employer payroll tax, etc.) and proximity to ports. Houston is the 6th [1] largest port in the USA.

[1] https://pangea-network.com/busiest-and-biggest-ports-in-the-...

I wasn't around for the .com bubble, but this is what I imagine it was like.

> The most important question is whether they make or lose money on each customer, independent of their fixed R&D costs.

The ZIRP era called and wants its business strategy back. Half the problem is as frontier models are released free as in free beer models with "good enough" performance pop up. Half the arguments about LLMs are "you're not holding it right", which borders on indicating that it's unable to distinguish between two sufficiently close LLMs.

> But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.

Note the 170k eur is in Spain -- not the bay area. I compared salaries of Google in Spain to the average salary of a senior SWE in Spain. The point isn't that the big tech pay more in the bay area compared to Spain. The point is the big tech companies pay more in Spain compared to other Spanish companies.

And 170k eur in Spain is much more than 80k eur in Spain.

I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's within the exact same country.