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One common refrain from experienced engineers outside of Silicon Valley is that 'nothing SV cranks out requires any talent (arubin)'.  Seeing that I'm a engieneer (albiet junior) turning that very same SV crank, I immediately took offense.  What?!?  How could anyone say that these amazing new apps put together with generators, Bootstrap and the latest overhyped database....Alright, I'll concede that point.  As I've thought about this more, I've found some truth in the statement - but not as much as those who spout it might want.

Before going any further, let's define a few terms.  In the context of this article, I'll use 'skill' to mean 'Anything one can look up.'  For instance, the knowledge that `<button class="btn btn-success">` will give you a nice green button with Bootstrap is a skill.  Not impressive, but it certainly saves one the mental cache miss of going to http://getboostrap.com once again.  On the other side of the equation, we have 'talent', here losely defined as 'any technical knowledge that isn't a skill.  Running a profiler to find slow spots is a skill, while knowing how to start squeezing performance out of those spots requires talent [0].

Now, with those words in mind, does anything produced in the Bay Area require talent?

##Absolutely not

If there's one thing I've noticed while writing my wild array of scatterbrained projects, it's that the most tedious thing is getting it off of the ground.  Setting up a basic page, site structure and plan are all basic evils that must be addressed before any of the fun work can be done.  No wonder we have such a glut of frameworks and libraries offering to do the heavy lifting for us.  The Valley is *all about* starting new things, so of course we get really excited about the latest thingamajig for starting new projects.  Naturally, many of these fail.  As is the nature of the Valley, most of the team will either be acqui-hired or move on to other new projects, repeating the same cycles, building the same-but-just-different-enough CRUD applications to disrupt something or other.

If this is the endless cycle of no talent, where are all the 'talented' engineers?  Well, they're a little further south.

##Absolutely

Sometimes, those startups don't fail and start growing.  Scaling any product is a difficult task that can't be found in a blog somewhere, as each instance is different.  This requires something more than yet another web tutorial.  Instead, it requires years of practice finding edge cases, studying the core of a language and much more.  These guys are the ones pulling down the seemingly-obscene salaries - and yet they're worth it.  Every single IPO or massive acquisition involved these guys creating a massive amount of value.

In conclusion, playing Mary Had a Little Lamb a thousand times won't make you an excellent pianist.  It's easy to dismiss the Valley as a bunch of projects masqurading as startups but there is real value and talent going on.  You'll just have to look for it.

[0] Aside from the four million 'how to optimize X' blogs that really only discuss stuff you should have done in the first place.