Getty Images The work-from-anywhere trend has toppled geographic barriers to hiring, and now tech companies from the coasts are driving up the price of talent here. Chicago has one of the largest pools of tech workers, and it's among the most affordable, compared with San Francisco, Seattle, Boston or New York. Tech companies from the coasts have long recruited here. But for the most part, workers had to leave town for the jobs, unless the companies had opened local offices. Even then, many jobs remained on the coasts. That's no longer true, thanks to the COVID pandemic, which turned most techies into remote workers.