Top engineers move to best pay location. For example best engineers in europe etc. move to US or get similarly high salaries in Europe. And having more high talent people in a location creates a different culture.

There is ofc some difference but if you are taking averages you will have much better engineers in a company based in nyc vs berlin.

I’m not an expert but this has been very apparent in places I worked, US based companies just had a better work setup and everything moved faster and with higher quality.

As an example, just saying an engineer is quarter the price in Turkey so you can just outsource there is very foolish. It just doesn’t work that way, maybe in wet dreams of CEOs only.

Similar thing with LLMs, some people are salivating over how they won’t need developers but it just isn’t that way yet.

Seeing how hungry businesses are for outsourcing and hiring remote, and seeing how it isn’t really working that way should be concrete proof for this.