> "white-washed asians and indians"

I am pretty sure a lot of Asian and Indian people will find that racist and offensive. I certainly do, and I'm neither.

As to New York, per my comment NY might be but Wall Street sucks the oxygen out of the talent room, similarly London where the City takes all the tech talent and starves startups of top-tier talent.

Bullshit.

Most startups are boring ass websites with none viable business ideas. They do not need baller engineers. If they have a working business eventually, they're competing to hire the smart folks based upon the mix of compensation, work and colleagues. If you can't build a biz that can sustain a compelling mix of those three hiring ingredients, you aren't allowed to successfully hire good engineers.

People: you aren't allowed to blame your crap hiring strategy on NYC finance firms scooping up all the smart engineers that wanted to work in finance. There are so many smart engineers who do / want live in NYC and Not work in finance. If you're failing to hire people it's because you have at least one of the following: a work environment that isn't a sane/pleasant place to spend 40 hours a week, crap compensation, or your biz is a CRUD website with the personality of a heavily used smelly sponge.

No particular category of business "deserves" smart people, they work hard to get those folks. And frankly, most startups are just crud websites. Additionally, the vast majority of interesting engineering challenges only happen at larger organizations. (That said, there are many small tech businesses that have really cool tech challenges, but that's the exception rather than the rule).

Let me restate that: most startups have boring work, terrible hours and crap pay.

Tl;dr to quote a favorite phrase of an awesome friend / software engineer: "fuck you, pay me money [if you want me to work with you]"

New York is a lovely place to live, one of the most truely urban and actually diverse locales one the planet. Certainly the only city in the US with subways that work 24/7 and good food at all hours. Not having to drive is a beautiful healthy thing.

Have you ever hired any technology talent in London? I have. It's exactly as I describe it. The city can afford to suck a huge amount of talent into is orbit by outbidding any startups - or most other businesses. It's not a factor if whether you have a great hiring strategy or not. It's the fact that you're competing against hiring managers with a good as unlimited budgets. This makes it hard to build a solid technology team without equally large budgets - whether you're a startup or a huge multinational corporation which just doesn't have the pockets of the City. This in turn makes startups in those places less competitive. Your rant notwithstanding this is something which makes it harder for those locations to create their own versions of Silicon Valley.

In my experience SV is more dominated by tech than NYC is by finance. Fashion, marketing, publishing, etc, are also huge here which means the yuppie hangouts aren't just filled with people in one industry. Not to mention you can walk down a street and hear three different languages in the same hour.

San Jose is the main city in Silicon Valley and is the most diverse city in the country.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2012/11/13/finding-divers...

> New York is far and away the most diverse place in the country, and only a few places in the world can compare (e.g. London).

"The Houston region is now the most racially and ethnically diverse large metropolitan area in the United States, surpassing the New York metro area, acccording to a new analysis of Census data." [1]

(Granted, the study was done by folks at Rice University here in Houston ....)

[1] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012...

That seems to be based just on looking at the percentages of the four major ethnic groups (white, hispanic, black, asian). The study doesn't look at other axes of diversity, like nationality, language, etc.

I lived in Atlanta for a long time, which is very "diverse" in the sense that there are large numbers of each of whites, blacks, and hispanics. But it was nothing like New York where you had viable communities of say Trinidadians versus Jamaicans, etc.

Anecdote: On our wedding anniversary a few years ago, my wife and I had dinner at a new French restaurant not far from our house. The server looked vaguely Asian, but she spoke English with what sounded a bit like a French accent. I asked if she was Vietnamese. She said she was from Kazakhstan. Surprised, I said I didn't realize we had Kazakhs in Houston. To my shock, she said, "there are about 5,000 of us here."