Okay, this was a valuable and interesting rant, and I'm not knocking its general observations.
But as a specific reply to the questions literally asked in Raganwald's post, it's wrong. Maybe it's connecting with the spirit of the question, I'm not sure, but it's failing on the letter of the question.
Raganwald asked about Google, Facebook, Apple, and people "trying to remix the same five or six tired 'social' ideas in the hope of being acqui-hired". Those people mostly work in Silicon Valley. And almost all of them are immigrants to the Bay area.
Case study: On my team of 30, I think there are half a dozen people from the Bay Area, if that. And then there are Canadians, Australians, Germans, Indians, Chinese, and more (and I mean people who lived and worked in those places until a few years ago, not people whose parents were from those places). There are a lot of Ohioans, there are folks from Florida and some Carolina and Texas. Anywhere at Google, "where are you from" is a reasonable conversational gambit, because it's not here.
So, uh, no. Geography is not the reason "the greatest minds of our generation toiling away in the Googleplex [and elsewhere in Silicon Valley] ... trying to figure out how to get Scott Hanselman to click on ads [and whatever other allegedly low-value things we're doing]".
But as a specific reply to the questions literally asked in Raganwald's post, it's wrong. Maybe it's connecting with the spirit of the question, I'm not sure, but it's failing on the letter of the question.
Raganwald asked about Google, Facebook, Apple, and people "trying to remix the same five or six tired 'social' ideas in the hope of being acqui-hired". Those people mostly work in Silicon Valley. And almost all of them are immigrants to the Bay area.
Case study: On my team of 30, I think there are half a dozen people from the Bay Area, if that. And then there are Canadians, Australians, Germans, Indians, Chinese, and more (and I mean people who lived and worked in those places until a few years ago, not people whose parents were from those places). There are a lot of Ohioans, there are folks from Florida and some Carolina and Texas. Anywhere at Google, "where are you from" is a reasonable conversational gambit, because it's not here.
So, uh, no. Geography is not the reason "the greatest minds of our generation toiling away in the Googleplex [and elsewhere in Silicon Valley] ... trying to figure out how to get Scott Hanselman to click on ads [and whatever other allegedly low-value things we're doing]".