We've had quite a lot of articles on HN about how bad the filter of using certain University enrollments to select a companies job seeks is for diversity in general. Economic diversity is also problematic when you only hire from top 25 schools.
Ok, so their new hires go through a filter that has some serious diversity problems. This means that the culture of the company skews towards the demographic they are hiring.
> Once you have a decent résumé in the industry, it doesn't really matter where you went to school, or even if you did.
How exactly does one get that decent resume when the bigger players are off limits? How does the culture of the company favor more new hires from selected institutions versus these upstarts. Let's also remember that our industry has a rather large ageist streak. A person who starts at Google is going to have a lot better prospects than someone working their way through smaller, probably local to their state, players.
The Bay Area only represents 4.5% of US GDP, so the impact on employment is small so far, but as software eats the world and companies become less like Kodak and more like Google, that's going to put a lot of people out of work.
In the process, it is struggling with the area's incumbent zoning laws, not enough new construction, high cost of living, and, higher than average gap between the rich and the poor. They've concentrated so much capital and opportunity that it doesn't translate well to other places, despite attempts to incubate the same thing in Austin, Seattle, Raleigh, and the like. And if you were referring to "app-based" solutions as opposed to proven injection of capital, you're in uncharted waters.
Before Silicon Valley, the miracle non-extraction-based economic engine of the country was Detroit; before then it was Akron, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo, Rochester, and New York. If history is of any lesson, in the future we'll fondly remember Silicon Valley's "IT boom" of a couple decades, before the circumstances and realities of the situation changed and the next big thing after automobiles, rubber, steel, railroads and meatpacking, electricity, and shipping (respectively) came along.