Having worked in everything from backend systems for sleepy banks to hedge funds to the hottest pre-IPO valley darlings, anecdotally you are dead wrong.
If there is any correlation at all it’s that the venture backed startups have a lower than average skill level.
Is that surprising? You can cook up an electron app after a few tutorials and two weeks time. All you have to do is sell a product, the product can be junk if you can convince your buyers otherwise. Charisma gets more funding than technical expertise, because consumers buy on charisma.
Consumers are not buying iPhones because of charisma. They are not using Gmail because of charisma.
Some VC pump and dump companies get by and make some headlines by being a fad electron app, but I am referring to those that stick around for years and develop products that require R&D. I have a hard time believing that people who work at companies that have transformed the way we live over the past few decades are "lower than average skill".
So, I wasn’t thinking Apple or Google when I wrote this because those are giant companies that hire globally. Most of Apples profit comes from products produced far from the valley. That said, I’ve worked with lots of veterans of Apple and Google and there quite literally is no correlation between having worked at those companies and being good. I believe that the current hiring environment in software is so broken that being hired by someone is effectively arbitrary.
Similarly Microsoft and Amazon are not valley creations but are giant profitable companies that hire tech workers from a wide variety of regions.
When you hire as much of the industry as those companies do its not at all surprising that the talent in them runs the gamut. They represent so much of the industry it would be near impossible not to have a big distribution of talent within them.
But when you get into the rest of the ecosystem is when it gets pretty ugly pretty fast. So far as I can see the biggest correlative factor with engineers in the valley is a capacity to move there. That filter does not trend towards being good at the job. And I’ll stand by my anecdotal opinion.
I think the more amazing thing that some firms are able to overcome this talent problem is that it took a global pandemic for the opinion it being an issue to change.
I would say my claim is that offering more money or the chance to make more money does make it possible to end up with a workforce of people with a higher than average skill level.
And if certain geographical locations are known for being places where the chances of making a lot more money are significantly higher, then I would say the skill level of people there is probably higher on average. The proof would be the numerous leading companies and products coming out of these places.
Of course, those locations can change, and maybe widespread access to broadband will cause that to change that or reduce benefits of agglomeration. But it remains to be seen.
That presumes a) that hiring good developers is a driver for that success b) the valley offers more money relatively c) there is actual proof that those firms are producing outsized returns.
I for one have made more money in finance than valley style tech. That may change one day but there _also_ was no correlation in the finance firms for quality.
c) is pretty clear based on 10-Ks and performance of tech companies relative to others in the market.
And while I personally do not know people’s financial histories, I can say that the part of my college class that went to tech seem to work far less than the part that went to finance. Even if gross income is similar, I doubt that $/hour worked, or the risk was better in finance than in tech over the past 15 to 20 years.
That isn’t to knock finance, it’s just my interpretation of the reality of how much access to broadband and advancements in certain technologies have underlined much of our economic growth.
Surely effort is a very big part of success, but I would attribute at least some of the magic that makes the tech companies hum to above average technical expertise.
If there is any correlation at all it’s that the venture backed startups have a lower than average skill level.