Once upon a time I brought a team of star struck developers to the Valley. I reminded them that the people there were not wearing capes and flying to work. They were developers just like any others. It helped settle their minds and funny enough the flyover country developers produced code on par or better than what came out of the Valley.

> funny enough the flyover country developers produced code on par or better than what came out of the Valley

What would you attribute this to?

I live in Minnesota. My impression is that employee turnover is ~2-3x higher in coastal markets, which I'd expect to lead to (1) less willingness to obtain company-specific/business domain-specific expertise, (2) more fire drills/"we'll fix it later" syndrome as people leave at inopportune times, and (3) more resume-driven development, which in turn means more time spent working with unfamiliar and/or inappropriate frameworks. In terms of intelligence and coding ability there's probably about zero difference on average, but the environment here just seems more conducive to building quality stuff.

Ironically, a lot of the big employers around here still think dev salaries in Minnesota are too high and are increasingly squandering that advantage by bringing in contractors from H1B body shops instead of continuing to develop talent internally.

It's funny you mention it. When I went to visit the bay area folks I told them I'd been with the same employer for 10 years... they were a little shocked by that.

I've been with 3 different employers 10 years +/- 3 years. I expect many in the Valley would find that... odd.

Personally? Less stressful day to day.

> A few years later to save costs ... they skip Minnesota try disastrously to offshore to India.

That's funny, because I was following along thinking your point was geographic region doesn't predict performance. Do you find it hard to believe it's possible to have an Indian team with who were high performers in college with fancy degrees and such?

Generally, I don't see any insurmountable impediment to outsourcing to India. I don't know of any reason they couldn't have outsourced successfully.

The experience I had there was a disaster... because of the company they chose to use to outsource just couldn't keep capable people on staff for more than a month or two. The folks who stayed, were just terrible / couldn't troubleshoot their way out of a box and IMO had some perverse incentives. I suspect there was an incentive revolving around "closed cases" and like all metrics that got abused and it was costly for everyone.

My email was filled with "please assign this case to duxup" cases that were in the hands of our outsource partners (and sometimes the bay area..) because folks recognized the case wasn't going anywhere fast.

The company even tried hiring folks locally at an office they had but again they couldn't keep anyone (probably again paying poorly) who was good very long.

I don't know the job market in India (then or now) but I suspect they simply weren't paying well / had a very poor partner outsourcing company.

I've had some visibility to various outsourcing efforts and every time it seems that the companies they partner with just don't provide much in the way of stable talent. I would assume it is possible to find a company who does, but I just haven't had that experience. I suspect that is more random chance than anything else.

Personally I suspect that most companies just decide, "We're outsourcing and we're going to save X amount!" and without knowing or caring they priced their way into poorly done outsourcing ... and only that. Interesting enough, I heard we hadn't saved much of any money long term with the outsourcing effort. Largely hiring just didn't keep up with sales and any savings in support costs there were attributed to outsourced support.

It was somewhat amusing as many of the Bay area staff were from India (they weren't H1Bs, they were citizens), and man nobody hated the the outsourced support more than those guys ;)

Thanks for clarifying. I was taken aback since your terse summary of the failure gave me the impression that the failure was because they outsourced to India, which runs counter to what I believed was your narrative core on the subject of geographic exceptionalism.

> Do you find it hard to believe it's possible to have an Indian team with who were high performers in college with fancy degrees and such?

Do you think that's what they were saying? Possibly you can apply an iota of charity and come with a couple of reasons why Minnesota and India are not fungible locations?

> I traveled out there and everyone was very nice but I had things explained to me like I hadn't used a computer before, or couldn't follow a simple process.

This sounds eerily similar to the experience of being a woman in the same kind of circles. It’s actually kind of heartening to see a pattern across different groups, though, since that helps me know it probably isn’t personal in either case :)