Some startups leave Boston, go west, and never look back. But this one is returning

When startup companies trade Boston for New York or San Francisco, they typically don’t look back.

But occasionally there’s the exception to that informal rule, like the Harvard-spawned payments startup Plastiq, which pulled up stakes and went west in 2014, after raising $10 million in venture capital money. Plastiq now has plans to open a Boston outpost in 2019, so that it can hire seasoned software developers — something that chief technology officer Trevor Brosnan says is an uphill battle in San Francisco right now.

Yes, the entire Bay Area is flooded with people who hope to sign on with the next Apple, Tesla, or Netflix, and then get rich from stock options. But when it comes to the software developers who craft the code underlying everything, many of them, Brosnan says, are fresh out of school: “Senior staff is more difficult to find.”