First, I'm not in the "cool crowd" here in the Valley, nor am I particularly interested in it. I actually enjoy writing C++ code, and developing in C++ code bases. It excites me to see compiler errors that break my terminal's scroll history almost as much as to see a successful build, I get a bit giddy whenever I have the opportunity to fire up gdb, and I enjoy the prospect of trying to design a system with a multithreaded or parallel execution model (although I wouldn't rate myself as being highly skilled at the latter). I think we share similar views with respect to SV's myopia regarding hiring practices.

That said, suffice to say that I view quality as mattering at least as much as quantity when it comes to making these comparisons.

The kinds of jobs you describe, with some exceptions of course, are analogous to Wal-Marts or Target jobs in retail. Sure, one might say that technically there is a "large retail industry" in an area filled with Targets and Wal-Marts, but one wouldn't say it's a very good industry that attracts the best retail talent, and admittedly I suppose that's something I implicitly include when I determine what constitutes "large" or not.

Yeah, I think we can definitely agree on that point. The offerings available for the average tech worker in a Nashville obviously aren't going to be as good as for SV.

But it wouldn't take too many companies hiring in these places either to create a reasonable ecosystem of high quality jobs. Airbnb, Getaround, Aerohive, Prosper and Palantir are all trying to fill hundreds of positions.

A "startup park" in Nashville and Austin, offering low rent or favorable taxes to SV and local startups would allow these companies to setup 10-50 person dev shops very quickly. People get to stay where they want to, companies fill their positions and local economies get to attract/retain high-end tech workers. Repeat for growth and eventually you'll hit a self-sustaining critical mass and now you have "the SV of Texas" or "the SV of Cumberland River" or whatever.

My point is not that there are sexy cool jobs in these areas, but there is a sufficiently trained labor pool that it's not hard for your sexy cool company to setup an office and hire a group of 10 developers and a manager and offload some of your CRUD work to be developed at 60-70% the original cost.

The problem is that SV startups keep acting like this is some kind of intractable problem, but it's honestly not all that hard (source: I've set up 3 remote offices in the past for just this kind of work).

It is something of a feedback loop.

I think my last comment may have implied a bit of disdain for the quality of talent in non-SV places. That isn't the case. I agree with you, I think, that the number and quality of talent outside of SV is sufficient to sustain almost any startup in theory. In practice, purely for artificial reasons, it doesn't hold.

There are two barriers to reaching the "critical mass" you note outside of the valley:

1. The "critical mass" in SV of "interesting," "good" (or whatever favorite positive adjective might apply) is just huge. Even the least interesting corporate-y jobs are strongly influenced by the culture here, and that is a big draw for talent from bottom to top. That's all I really meant, earlier: the density of "good" jobs here is very large.

2. SV is (over-?)run with people who--and this is another of my unpopular opinions around here--have huge egos. I mean spectacularly huge egos. I come from a background of academic research (very mathematical in nature). Yet I never saw such egos as I've seen in this industry. The barrier here is something of a self-imposed psychological one, I think: the fact is that the vast majority of startups don't need even a single person who has an advanced, in-depth, and broad understanding of mathematics, data structures, algorithms, or basically anything else in academic CS, but they seem to treat it as the minimum necessary element to hire. The armchair psychologist in me opines that the interview process in this industry is more about certain people trying to impress themselves or prop their own egos up instead of just accepting that working on some shopping cart, ad analytics platform, or generic-social-media-app-X just isn't that complicated (speaking academically/intellectually here). They don't want to think they're working on something that is academically trivial, and so they engage in employee selection processes that reinforce the view that everything they do is super intellectual and requires only the best minds from the CS world to succeed.