Especially considering what Boeing goes through right now, I would say the best aircraft engineers right now are located in Europe and they work in the Airbus headquarters.
But other than that: most recent innovative payment providers are coming mostly from Europe these days. Transferwise or Revolut comes to my mind as two such examples. Out of which Revolut reached a total valuation $1.7 billion not so long ago.
Also let's take a look at the online music streaming landscape: Tidal, Deezer and Spotify are all European companies.
There are whole industries (or segments at least) where SV is lagging behind.
So this environment argument doesn't hold any water.
Maybe there was a very narrow time period, let's say 10 years or so, when SV was really ahead of the pack in terms of technical skills, but those times are over.
And BTW, I didn't even mention machine learning and AI, where China is basically becoming the world leader right now.
Didn't airbus have issues of their own way back? Besides, airbus bought the a220 from bombardier, which makes it canadian rather than european. which just goes to show you, the products come from where the talent exists. silicon valley is a big part of it, but not the only game in town.
saying "environment doesn't matter," is ridiculous. but I agree—there is plenty of good engineering where elsewhere, but it is more likely to exist where there is a mass of other engineers :)
My point is that communities form where an industry is at its peak and it’s those communities that attract top talent in that industry.
Like if you want to work at the forefront of private space industry right now you’d probably go to LA. Because that’s where SpaceX lives.
k8s came from where ?
Containers ( cgroups ) came from where ?
Hashicorp is the standard for devops
Elon and Tesla took a curve out of IT but guess where they started ?
Your few startups are nice but the technology they run on is built in SV and that continues to be the place of innovation regardless of VCs trying to spark it elsewhere.
Yes other areas are innovating but SV does remain one of the most innovative area if not the main one. Everything else pales in comparison
Source: I worked there from “early” until “mid” stage.
Is great work done elsewhere? Of course!
But for better or for worse, the bay is where the most ambitious webdevs go righ now.
Just like I bet the best aircraft engineers are in Chicago and Bethesda because that’s where Boeing and Lockheed are.
It’s not the talent that lags behind, it’s the environment.