> to operate as engineers we have to work for these companies
Surely you don't mean software engineers. There's a whole big wide world outside the ongoing bubble, and in entire honesty I've never quite found "move to the Valley, work for a startup" to be the no-brainer it's so often been represented. In particular, the quality of life really doesn't seem to be there, at least not reliably; we hear horror stories all the time from people who've gotten hosed in what seem to be the same relatively small set of ways, at a rate that suggests there's more going on than random chance or sour grapes.
And the cost of living in that part of the country is no joke, too. Remote working would solve that, but very few companies take it at all seriously - many fewer than want to be perceived as doing so. It's understandable why they don't, but the transparent duplicity is a bad look. Without remote? Sure, the pay's probably better than you'll find almost anywhere else, but you either plow three quarters of it into cost of living, or spend four hours a day commuting.
Meanwhile, in the "enterprise" companies at which Valley biens-pensants smirk and sneer, one finds often enough that among the various fiefdoms, there's one or two with a savvy director and a team full of smart, capable people who have everything they need for the asking, and whose job is to solve problems the organization would otherwise find entirely intractable - sort of 18F or USDS, if you like, except in an industry context and with less politics to worry about, and as well or better paid. The trick is knowing where to look and how to bring value.
And unicorn valuation isn't the only startup bubble, either. From where I sit, comfortably outside it, the whole tech entrepreneurship scene has gotten amazingly up itself in the last few years, just like it did in the run-up to the last bust. Buying into the mythos might feel nice, but unless you're a founder it also makes you easier to exploit than you might otherwise be, and even if you are, it ties you to a sector that's itself beholden to more or less every vagary of financial fortune. Sure, engineering is a profit center in a company like that, whereas in the enterprise world it's usually a cost center. But next time the market takes a nosedive, who's in better shape? Someone in a profit center of a company that found its runway suddenly shortened to negligibility and collapsed for want of money? Or someone in a cost center of a company with the cash reserves and ample profitability to get through lean times effectively intact?