There are ways to work high-salary jobs in low-cost-of-living areas if you’re willing to deliberately seek them out.
That’s not true in a more than trivial sense. Nobody literally means that the low-cost-of-living area has no high-salary jobs; what they mean is that the distribution of jobs in that area is more weighted against the high—salary jobs. There will always be individual high-salary jobs in that area—but there will be fewer of them. The reason that you can only get those jobs if you spend a lot of effort finding them out is that since there are fewer such jobs, the easy-to-find ones have all been taken already.
Pointing out “I found one” doesn’t generalize. There aren’t enough for everyone to find one, and if everyone did try to find one, they’d end up having to make even more effort than you (since you probably took one of the hard to find but not hardest to find ones), and the next even more, up to the point where there just won’t be any left at any difficulty level.
That’s a very good point; I should give a more specific recommendation. I’ve found that the monthly Hacker News job postings often contain a fairly decent number of companies offering to pay high salaries for remote work. It’s not going to give you the Bay Area lifestyle if you work outside that area via internet, of course, but if your actual intention is to live frugally so you can donate to charityworld optimization efforts, you were probably avoiding the Bay Area Lifestyle anyway.
That’s not true in a more than trivial sense. Nobody literally means that the low-cost-of-living area has no high-salary jobs; what they mean is that the distribution of jobs in that area is more weighted against the high—salary jobs. There will always be individual high-salary jobs in that area—but there will be fewer of them. The reason that you can only get those jobs if you spend a lot of effort finding them out is that since there are fewer such jobs, the easy-to-find ones have all been taken already.
Pointing out “I found one” doesn’t generalize. There aren’t enough for everyone to find one, and if everyone did try to find one, they’d end up having to make even more effort than you (since you probably took one of the hard to find but not hardest to find ones), and the next even more, up to the point where there just won’t be any left at any difficulty level.
That’s a very good point; I should give a more specific recommendation. I’ve found that the monthly Hacker News job postings often contain a fairly decent number of companies offering to pay high salaries for remote work. It’s not going to give you the Bay Area lifestyle if you work outside that area via internet, of course, but if your actual intention is to live frugally so you can donate to charityworld optimization efforts, you were probably avoiding the Bay Area Lifestyle anyway.