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Comment by lvice | Hacker News Reader

> but they can hire smart developers anywhere in the world

Sure they can, but the Silicon Valley has an immense human capital in skills, talent and knowledge that you can't find easily in the rest of the world. The type of complexity, the scale of the systems and the engineering culture that you can find in SF is not common around the world. My experience as a developer in an European country is that it is really difficult to encounter engineers with a real experience in developing truly complex systems and companies with true engineering cultures. This is simply due to the fact that the majority of the companies that need that high quality of engineering and are willing/capable to pay for it are based in the Bay area, therefore creating an ecosystem that is unique in the world. Of course there are a lot of exceptions, but I don't think the "they can hire smart developers anywhere in the world" is as easy at it may look.

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These high-quality engineers and researchers have moved from all around the world to be in SV, it's not like they love to live in SF, LA, NYC or even in the US. They would easily work from their homes and close to their families in their countries, even with half of their current compensation.

The effects of such decisions are going to be immense; people in the developed countries still live in a bubble thinking they are not going to be affected, but things will probably change dramatically the next couple of years.

> They would easily work from their homes and close to their families in their countries

But what if they wouldn't? For people from some countries, getting to live in the West is a major benefit on its own. (I have to say I'm a bit afraid that the WFH shift will make immigration way more difficult than it is now.)

Moving to the west might be a dream for a lot of people but also requires sacrifices. Removing the "immigrate to work" factor from the list of sacrifices will make a lot of people to return to their roots and still work remote to their dream jobs and companies with a great compensation which is probably 2x the local one, unless they have already created a family there. I can't say this will be definite for every country worldwide, i am more biased from the crisis-hit European countries, e.g. Greece, Italy, Spain, which faced tremendous talent migration to richer countries during the last 10 years and i can say that most of them would easily return back home if they could work remotely to top-notch US companies.

I don't agree with your Europe observation. Shopify could have easily been a European company (in fact, it's Canadian). Scaling is hard but is a very known problem. What Europe is missing is VC money and entrepreneurs. Many many European entrepreneurs flock to the U.S due to no VC money, not lack of engineering. And even if you think the U.S has a tremendous engineering advantage over Europe, it's still unclear to me why U.S tech companies have to set base in Silicon Valley and not Anywhere else in the US?

It all comes from a large concentration of excellent CS programs, not just in the bay area but also all up and down the west coast. It is nearly impossible to replicate that research output anywhere else in the world, and it's what drives every technology.

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