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Notes -
"Tech talent" isn't just one thing. There's the ability to glue together lego blocks on one hand, and there's the ability to make new blocks on the other. West coast tech has tipped decisively to the former.
Over the past 15 years in the bay area tech universe, we've seen a hollowing out of hard technical skill. The slop-shipping proudly-know-nothing React SaaS archetype has become predominant.
Even at the frontier labs, the talent pool is such that Chinese model architectural improvements often arrive as surprises and force rapid catch-up. The labs aren't interested in actual innovation: when they're not up their asses in "AI safety" power fantasies or practically orgasming on Slack about how they will allocate scarcity in the coming AI command economy, frontier lab people are mostly just scaling up what they know works and putting down weird ideas that they claim won't scale.
This is the part of the country that spawned Esalan. The grift has always been strong here. But lately, it's become next level and eroded meaningful expertise. When some TypeScript weenie who has no idea for a CPU cache works overrules the guy who does on the basis of some quoted Twitter pablum about software engineering being obsolete in six months, the industry is in trouble.
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