I would add "Substantially improve hiring technology such that many engineers who are adequately trained as of 2020 successfully get job offers at tech companies", where "technology" is inclusive of practices, procedures, folk ways, etc. https://twitter.com/abarrallen/status/1343757118235496449

Somebody once remarked to me "The Valley is strip mining the Midwest for engineers!" and I said "Empirically false and also I disagree with that metaphor for all sorts of reasons but if we hypothetically accept it for argument's sake, we would engineer a strip mine *much* better"

Here's how you know it is empirically false: midwest insurance companies, mortgage originators, etc do not have to pay SFBA area wages to effective programmers, because they do not compete with SFBA companies for every programmer in their portfolio, which they would if serious.

"But midwest engineers are at a different and inferior skill level versus the typical employee of a SFBA startup or AppAmaGooBookSoft."

As someone with *substantial* experience on both sides of this question: DM, I disbelieve the illusion.

(If you did not grow up playing Dungeons and Dragons, this particular sentence is a bit of a mic drop if you ever drop it in a D&D game, and you'd darn well better be right or you're probably going to die.)

The canonical example, in a world which has both firebreathing dragons & also magic which is easily capable of conjuring an experience which is exactly like a firebreathing dragon in every respect *except* being real, is you have the implicit option to disbelieve dragon's breath.

To accept the reality of the dragon's breath is to feel burned and and act you're burned, whether it is real or not, and to disbelieve the illusion is to be either utterly unharmed or burned to a charred cinder as you fail to take sensible precautions against dragon's breath.

The fundamental conceit of many people, that Silicon Valley has a talent pool which is just disjoint from the talent pool available elsewhere, is a fiction. It's an *underexamined* fiction. It hides a very real pile of loot for anyone willing to disbelieve it.

(We took a stab at this opportunity with Starfighter, and did not succeed, but it was not due to the dragonfire. That was exactly as illusory as we believed it to be. And indeed a lot of the candidates who read as not-worth-a-call-to-SFBA-recruiters now work for tech companies.)

("Are you sure?" Given how many of them I can Slack, yep, am pretty sure about this.)