Funny, but those of us not living in the Bay Area do mingle with non coders a lot. It's actually hard to find coders to mingle with. When I visited Palo Alto for example it felt weird. On one hand it seemed great at first, hearing discussion on databases or JavaScript on the street from total strangers. On the other hand it felt like a bubble, like an echo chamber. I actually heard this guy saying he liked some girl and wanting to ask her out with the pretext of raising money for his startup. I was like "on what planet am I?"
It's one of the reason why I left Silicon Valley. I love what I do, and I love to meet with other developers, but I was tired of only meeting people similar to me.
Now it feels good to be in a real city with many different people, doing different stuff. It's much more fulfilling than living in a bubble with clones of myself.
I left the valley in 1991, right before the "web 1.0" bubble burst. I moved to Boulder, Colorado. It's wonderful here. There's tech companies--including an active startup scene--but people are far more balanced, even the nerds.
Most large metros will have at least a halfway-decent number of software jobs available. NYC, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Minneapolis, St. Louis, etc. all have decent markets. It won't be like SV where there are a million startups, but they also won't be 100% corporate, either. Check out LinkedIn or Dice or something to check a specific area.
Eh, Dallas is about 80% corporate, with the majority being non-software companies. It's really depressing since I don't have any interest in that kind of work beyond the money. There is some small to midsize web/mobile work to be had, though.
Of course they won't be. If anyplace else in the country had the volume of jobs that SV had, it would have equivalent salaries. But it'd also have roughly equivalent cost of living. It's almost a certainty that you will make less (cue anecdata), but cost of living will almost certainly bring you out on top.
In my area unless you want to be one of maybe two "IT guys" in an office, there's really only 8-10 employers within a half hour commute. There is no shortage of turnover or people bouncing around between them as positions open up. Sure it's not like SV where you can probably swing a dead cat and hit someone looking to hire a Go ninja rockstar, but there are plenty of coding jobs, especially if you're familiar with Java or C#.
My interactions were mostly with colleagues/employees I selected and hired myself; hardcore geeks. It gave me social-ish interaction without having to talk about scary non-coding things. I have always lived in Europe and outside my group of friends and/or colleagues I didn't really interact much. And my friends were obviously mostly techie.
Edit: it sounds a bit more negative than it was; I was always happy but now that I discovered this whole new thing I am more assured that the happiness will stay as I have a broader base now both emotionally and business wise if that makes sense
