> There's some class-bias going on, in that companies in the Valley somehow justify subsidizing home prices with salary and stock despite Valley programmers bei

> There's some class-bias going on, in that companies in the Valley somehow justify subsidizing home prices with salary and stock despite Valley programmers being no better than any other programmer. This isn’t true. My first job out of college was working for an old tech company that had decades of experience writing decent software. The vast majority of programmers there were mediocre at best. There were a few stars that were pulling most of the weight of the teams I knew about. The original programmers that wrote the older software had long since moved on. At my job now, working for a similarly sized company whose headquarters are in the Valley, the average programmer that I work with is quite good. They are much better than programmers I’ve worked with in other parts of the country over the last several decades. The few exceptions now also work at the company I’m at or our competitors. This idea that all programmers are equally good is nonsense. Can you find good programmers outside of Silicon Valley? Yes, it’s possible, but it’s much harder than in the Valley. Talent flocks there.