3rd-tier (considered nationally, not regionally) city in the Midwest checking in, here. For one thing, starting salaries around here were already pushing that for mid-level and better devs before the pandemic. There are definitely small, crappy shops in tech stacks that tend to pay worse (ahem, PHP) shooting well under that, but starting salaries for new grads at places that actually both
have and
make money (mostly bigger companies or hotshot startups) were creeping to around 6-figures even before the pandemic. Anyone offering much lower than that was already bidding on the bottom-of-the-barrel, especially if their benefits suck (bad benefits and low pay tend to go hand-in-hand, so...). Local firms have been bidding up local talent
fast since, oh, 2012 I'd say, as there were more seats to be filled than there were good local developers.
Remote work has definitely been a factor. A half-decent experienced developer can easily land jobs that outbid the local market, and I'm not even talking major West Coast places with interview processes resembling torture. A lot of local devs have been slow to realize just how much money they're leaving on the table without even needing to move or practice leetcode for six months and submit to multiple day-long grueling interviews, but I have to assume that's changing fast with the pandemic pushing remote work into the zeitgeist. I'd imagine local firms are seeing some serious remote competition for their best developers, and losing a lot of them. That's going to mean rising salaries, or that their dev teams get somewhat worse.
Basically I think the only thing keeping salaries as low as they were was that a high percentage of local developers weren't looking for new opportunities often enough, local or remote. Now that everyone's been prompted to pop their heads up and take a look around, it'd be very surprising to me if salaries didn't shoot way up. There's been a plain market mis-match locally, to begin with, suppressed only by not enough developers realizing how much more they could make by switching jobs, and add remote work competition to that, and there's going to be a lot of upward pressure on salaries.