That's true. Problem is a lot of the time Middle America is comfortable and doesn't want to move out to the valley or Seattle.

Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.

Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.