Because their family is in the Southeast, and because that $120k leads to a better overall living standard than $240k in Mountain View. Especially if one is raising/planning on raising children, proximity to family is a really important variable.

A process that systematically skips people who won't relocate to the West Coast is suboptimal in a world where we know remote work works.

> facetime is irrelevant, because of relocation. Very few will stay at MSFT in Atlanta for 100k if they can double pay + relo to CA/Seattle. Google does have office in atlanta, btw.

Reed Hastings and Tim Cook, among others, disagree with you. Google does have an Atlanta office, but most of FAANG does not have significant engineering presence there (Microsoft does). Notable that Google expects engineers in Atlanta to come to their office, even though their teams will likely be in other cities. This is the canonical definition of face-time.

And again, $100k in Atlanta or Dallas is roughly equivalent to $200k in the Bay or Seattle. Add in externalities like family and climate (everybody does not like the Bay climate!) and it's not as straightforward as you make it.

> because in Minneapolis metro is about 3.5M people and Target can tap from talent pool of 3.5M, while places like Bay Area can tap from global talent pool (7B people)

If you think everyone wants to move to the Bay, I probably can't convince you otherwise. But please consider that some people a) don't like the climate b) are married to people whose jobs are elsewhere c) prefer a lifestyle that includes homeownership.