California's non-compete ban (see jhallenworld's post on the issue) is huge. California also bans "we own your side projects" clauses, which is major. Even if, on technicalities, the states may not be very different, the perception is strong enough to scare people into California, a state that otherwise wouldn't have more than weather and inertia. One of my posts is already linked here, by mwhite, and my perception h…
I think you'd be surprised at the scale of demand for good programming talent in Cambridge, regardless of degree. The vast majority of those PhDs still can't practically build apps, and the universities around there simply don't graduate very many of those people.
In my experience, practical development talent is immediately obvious to HBS graduates. You instantly become a partner everyone wants. I've had no trouble while an unknown student to work on essentially anything I want, whether its biotech or nonfiction interactive media or e-commerce or whatever. Everyone knows programmers are useful.
The difference is that Boston folks don't understand how to compensate these people. They get that developers are useful, but not that they're valuable.
The cliche in Boston (and for that matter, LA) is, "Make everything that's valuable in exchange for 7% of the business, while I celebrate my fundraising in Vegas." Twitter understands how to give its Director of Engineering the second largest options grant after the CEO. Some random co. in Boston does not.
The Boston business culture just does not reward technical or practical business talent. In actuality, LA and Boston have whole businesses dedicated around arbitraging talent. That could be talent agencies in Los Angeles or finance firms in Boston.
Arbitrage is rampant in Boston tech. Boston's tech scene is the most eager to take desperate international grad students, give them H1Bs and grind them to making pharmaceuticals or making back office finance code, paying them exceedingly nothing and enriching real partners. This is just as true with Valley public companies, but how many trendy young people like me or you have first hand experience with places like Intuit or Intel? Or put another way, public Valley companies get taken over by "fratty Young Republicans" and transfer that culture.
I think if Boston or LA's tech scene actually paid people commensurate to their value, those tech scenes wouldn't exist with their current levels of funding.
Sometimes I start reading the comment, and I read something too real, like "fratty Young Republican types who get funded", and I look in the upper right corner and, of course!