I've noticed the same thing. It's wild right now. I was discussing this withand he made an interesting point. Thanks to a lot of progress in the world of development (which is not my area of expertise but frameworks like Rails and Django spring to mind), it takes a much smaller number of engineers to build a great product. Consequently, startups are smaller and getting to minimum viable product faster.On another track, there's a much larger appreciation for the role designers play, and an increased awareness of design in general. I think this is both due to gigantic successes of design-first products (think Apple), famous design-last failures (think Wave, Cuil, etc.), and a new culture of design appreciation by non-designers fostered largely by design blogs.So, designers are being brought on much earlier in the process than they used to be, and the ratio of designers to engineers is starting to shift a bit. I still personally think it needs to (and will) shift more, if the answers/votes onare any indication.With both an increase in projectsa larger demand for designers per-project, there's just nobody left in the area. I personally don't know any UI/UX designers in the Bay Area who aren't at something close to their personal dream job. Many are founders or first employees, which is just fantastic.I would love to hear if anyone has any data on the number of startups in the area right now, and if it (or the number of products) is increasing, as I am perceiving from conversations.I also believe that nobody has truly nailed the process of finding a good designer. So the search for a designer is often very public, and very localized to the area of the searching company. Most startups I've talked to avoid remote designers as much as possible. It's an intimate process. This probably exacerbates, or at leasts makes visible, the problem.