[idrios]

I agree with the parent comment of this.

The bay area gets a lot of attention because it's the software capital of the world, and software has these crazy gross margins and rapid life cycles that allow companies to be born, experience explosive growth, make insane profits, (potentially) suffer radical declines, leading to a quick boom or bust. Software companies make great news stories, so the bay area gets a lot of attention, and many talented people who aren't sure where to go decide to move there.

I live there now and work out of coworking spaces where I've met a number of startup founders. Many of them are self-proclaimed visionaries hyped up by VR and AR or IoT. Few of them are as smart as my friends who are getting their Masters and PhD degrees at Duke, Wash U, or Case Western. The most impressive startup I saw in the last year was being made by a self-taught programmer/entrepreneur building his own company out of Colorado Springs.

Beyond just my anecdotal evidence, where do MIT and Harvard graduates go? Where do Georgia Tech, Rice U, John's Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon graduates go? Silicon Valley doesn't take all of their students nor just the top in their class. Some people move to DC, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Austin, NYC, or Denver because they have family or friends there, or because the kind of work in these other cities is more appealing than The Bay.

Apologies for the rant. I realized after writing it that your 'Not really' comment was probably in response to the parent's assertion that companies should hire from outside the bay area, while I took it as 'Not really' in that there are no engineers of the same calibre outside SV.

Regardless, the amount of hubris and hype over the Bay Area is staggering when there are so many equally talented engineers all over the US.

[charlesdm]

Why do you talk about ivy league graduates? Honestly, the degree is completely irrelevant. If you're a good developer living in Europe and/or the US, you can command $200k-400k a year (often as a consultant) doing specialised work. Plenty of companies are comfortable paying a day rate of $2000-5000 for someone who can deliver results. Not always super easy to get the work, but doable.

[disgruntledphd2]

I think that the common US conception of education value and pedigree is a function of the high sticker costs and some romantic notion of meritocracy.

Seriously, I work for a US company in Europe, and am massively surprised (and disconcerted) by the fixation on where someone went to school.

We had an awesome candidate a few months back, did 4 interviews with us, aced them all, and one of the final interviewers (US-based) was obsessed with where they got their university education, whereas I don't think anyone else had even noticed it (being more focused on their skills).

Turns out she'd gone to Oxford though, so it was all good :/

[p4wnc6]

Some businesses extract value from an employee based on how impressive-seeming that person is on paper. This happens a lot in consulting, finance, law, arts, academia, corporate business administration and politics. In these domains, status and affiliation are very important, generally vastly more important than actual productivity. Since these fields are also associated with things like wealth, elite status, access to private clubs and opportunities, being a sought after relationship partner, etc., it glamorizes them and by extension glamorizes the path necessary to get to them -- typically either happening to come from a well-connected family or else attending an "elite" school and succeeding in networking there.

Effects like this snowball. So once a school is known for producing graduates that others are desperate to affiliate with in a certain field, like say art or law, then impressive people from other fields may be drawn to work there, like an excellent professor of computer science who thereby actually does elevate the level of education granted to computer science graduates, making graduates into the sorts of people that tech companies want to get on-paper for acqui-hires because acquirers will want to affiliate with them.

One general trend I see in humanity is that the more that we advance a sort of scientific and rational understanding of the world -- something that should supplant most of these systems of credential -- the more that human politics is used to build Dutch book-like circumstances in which, no matter what the outcome, impressive-seeming-ness and competition to affiliate with "fancy" people will continue to be the dominant manner of achieving wealth and autonomy.

To be clear, even though I attended an Ivy school, I find this lamentable. I did not enjoy my time there and feel basically how Mike Reiss feels. But at the same time, I also see all the banter on Hacker News about how the degree doesn't matter and I just roll my eyes. What is it that people think? That something like HackerRank or TripleByte are going to democratize tech hiring? Please. They will be (and already are being) used as just additional tools in the political toolbox to allow people to make up whatever arbitrary standards they desire for the sake of favoring candidates based on political reasons.

[p4wnc6]

My comment was solely about the desire or ability to pay top non-Bay Area devs far less than Bay Area devs.

I agree about the hubris. And for as much hubris as there is about the coveted "SV developer" it's at least 10x worse hubris regarding the coveted SV startup as employment destination.