Calling it "proper software engineering" is little pretentious at best, but there is some distinction to be made between software engineering in the bay area an

Calling it "proper software engineering" is little pretentious at best, but there is some distinction to be made between software engineering in the bay area and most software engineering elsewhere. When we think of SF software, we think of software created by a company whose core product is the software itself, especially when the end-users are individuals or other software companies. This is quite a bit different than most software developed outside of the bay area. Most of it is either in-house stuff or industry-specific B2B stuff. In these situations, the software doesn't have to be pretty, it doesn't have to use cutting-edge tech to woo investors, resource utilization is much less important, and hell - it usually doesn't even have to scale. It just has to work. It just has to make someone's job incrementally better, and it'll be a success. This software can be tremendously valuable, and creating it has its own unique challenges, but the job is indeed a bit different than software engineering in the bay, and the compensation is different as well.