- has experience working in the early stages of a venture-backed startup
- went to one of the top schools in the world, such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc
- has an extensive personal portfolio of software projects on which they contributed
My point is that Silicon Valley "works" because it has lots of people that meet 2 or 3 of these bullet points. There is no place in the world that really comes close.
Nobody is objecting that you can surely hire people cheaper in other countries, but for small companies the cheapest labor source is almost never the winner. It's far more important to have the very best engineers.
This has no effect on someone's ability.
- went to one of the top schools in the world, such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc
Those are not "top schools in the world". The only advantage they provide are great contacts and opportunities thans to those contacts. In terms of knowledge, many schools around the world (including many in the former Eastern bloc) provide excellent education.
> - has an extensive personal portfolio of software projects on which they contributed
Again, this has nothing to do with being in SV. Many bast-known open-source projects were started outside US (I'll leave it to someone else to list them, but I'm sure you can think of a few off the top of your head).
ADDENDUM - An example of your bullet points working just as badly more recently than 30 years ago:
Cevat Yerli when he started Crytek
According to the dictionary: outstanding, notable, superior. Seriously, though, take any reasonable definition. If you asked me a number I'd say 1% but yeah, you could say top 0.1%. I can't see how that gives any more precise information though, given that we don't have a practical, objective way of measuring programming skills.
> Because under my definition of the term, I would expect there to be very few engineers in Hungary that match that description.
Why? I'd expect any country with >10 million people, very high level of literacy, a couple of good universities and internet connectivity to be home to a good number of top-notch programmers. I can't see how that's particularly controversial.
In any case I'm not sure why you're taking issue with this. I never said that Hungary has proportionally as many top-notch programmers as in Silicon Valley. My point is simply: hiring people in Hungary is no more expensive than in California in terms of U$; if you have a company with 20 programmers in SF you could sure find 20 replacements in Hungary and save on payroll.