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Have you investigated the correlation between developer location and developer ability? Do you think developers who are very good want to work with the best, t

Have you investigated the correlation between developer location and developer ability? Do you think developers who are very good want to work with the best, thinking the best are in SV, then move to SV? Or perhaps they think they'll get the best return on their effort if they're working on software with big impact, and software with the biggest consumer impact is mostly written in SV?

riskable 9y ago
This is highly dependent on personality. As an anecdote, I know a developer that does not like working with "the best" because they make him look bad (even though he's not a terrible developer). Given, he works at a company with stack ranking so I guess that company is self-selecting for developers like him.
- barrkel 9y ago
  Relevant to your username - people who don't challenge themselves are self-limiting. To grow, you need to go outside your comfort zone, you need to take some risks. And "not terrible" certainly doesn't sound like top 1-5% material.
bjourne 9y ago
I didn't know the United States had unrestricted immigration. :) You're probably right that Silicon Valley developers on average are a little bit sharper than most everyone else. But not by that much. People have other priorities than getting the best colleagues, such as living close to family and in places that feel like home.
- barrkel 9y ago
  > People have other priorities than getting the best colleagues, such as living close to family and in places that feel like home. Yes: people who don't prioritize excellence in development. And it does require compromises in your life choices. You generally need to move to where the most interesting jobs are, where the cutting edge tech is being developed. It's a virtuous cycle: SV attracts the next generation of high quality developers because it's the place that already has the highest concentration of good developers. > I didn't know the United States had unrestricted immigration. FWIW, even though I got my H-1B visa, I stayed in London. It would definitely have been a better career move to follow through and emigrate. I have zero doubt it has cost me in career prospects and quality of opportunities. Living in London is already a compromise in my quality of life.
  - bjourne 9y ago
    For your dream scenario to become true, you not only have to live and work in the Silicon Valley. You also have to work on interesting problems at interesting companies. Google may employ 10k engineers, but only 100 or so work on the really interesting stuff. My passion is research and free software, so yes I do "prioritize excellence in development." I don't have to move to the Silicon Valley nor the United States to take part in that.
    - yazaddaruvala 9y ago
      It is not practical to compare research or open source development to working at Google. You can definitely prioritize excellence in development, but only within the scale of a few humans. You cannot research what it is like to work at scale. Scale of hosts, requests, code, people, money. It's an experience to itself. It's always funny to "break" open source tools people rave about. Most recently elasticsearch is barely coping with some of my teams volumes and we have to do some really tricky distributed computing stuff to workaround and keep it happy. Mind you, like a Honda Civic, it is an amazing tool, and works brilliantly for most almost all uses, but at certain scale you need a Ferrari and that isn't something you can get anywhere but big companies. And when you learn by designing and debugging a Ferrari, everything else becomes trivial very quickly.

riskable 9y ago

This is highly dependent on personality. As an anecdote, I know a developer that does not like working with "the best" because they make him look bad (even though he's not a terrible developer). Given, he works at a company with stack ranking so I guess that company is self-selecting for developers like him.

barrkel 9y ago
Relevant to your username - people who don't challenge themselves are self-limiting. To grow, you need to go outside your comfort zone, you need to take some risks. And "not terrible" certainly doesn't sound like top 1-5% material.

bjourne 9y ago

I didn't know the United States had unrestricted immigration. :) You're probably right that Silicon Valley developers on average are a little bit sharper than most everyone else. But not by that much. People have other priorities than getting the best colleagues, such as living close to family and in places that feel like home.

barrkel 9y ago
> People have other priorities than getting the best colleagues, such as living close to family and in places that feel like home. Yes: people who don't prioritize excellence in development. And it does require compromises in your life choices. You generally need to move to where the most interesting jobs are, where the cutting edge tech is being developed. It's a virtuous cycle: SV attracts the next generation of high quality developers because it's the place that already has the highest concentration of good developers. > I didn't know the United States had unrestricted immigration. FWIW, even though I got my H-1B visa, I stayed in London. It would definitely have been a better career move to follow through and emigrate. I have zero doubt it has cost me in career prospects and quality of opportunities. Living in London is already a compromise in my quality of life.
- bjourne 9y ago
  For your dream scenario to become true, you not only have to live and work in the Silicon Valley. You also have to work on interesting problems at interesting companies. Google may employ 10k engineers, but only 100 or so work on the really interesting stuff. My passion is research and free software, so yes I do "prioritize excellence in development." I don't have to move to the Silicon Valley nor the United States to take part in that.
  - yazaddaruvala 9y ago
    It is not practical to compare research or open source development to working at Google. You can definitely prioritize excellence in development, but only within the scale of a few humans. You cannot research what it is like to work at scale. Scale of hosts, requests, code, people, money. It's an experience to itself. It's always funny to "break" open source tools people rave about. Most recently elasticsearch is barely coping with some of my teams volumes and we have to do some really tricky distributed computing stuff to workaround and keep it happy. Mind you, like a Honda Civic, it is an amazing tool, and works brilliantly for most almost all uses, but at certain scale you need a Ferrari and that isn't something you can get anywhere but big companies. And when you learn by designing and debugging a Ferrari, everything else becomes trivial very quickly.