From the submitted article: "'The best people are already working,' said Bhoopathy, who said he pays 'above-market' rates for the right people"

In light of the quotation from the submitted article in the first reply here, "The University of Michigan graduates 8,000 engineers a year," how does any one graduate from a state university engineering program show that he or she is one of the "right people" who is worth "above-market rates" to bring on board a start-up's team? The one hiring heuristic mentioned here is hiring someone who already has a job. Is there more to look for? What do people with the best talent do to show their talent? What characteristics are tech start-ups looking for to make sure they hire really talented developers?

Edit to respond to a reply below. I'm glad to hear from one of the interview subjects for the submitted story. I'm not a dev myself, and I am still learning about this industry as a matter of curiosity, having an immediate family member who IS a dev. Sure enough, he has an active personal project in development that he contributes to on GitHub and is deeply interested in learning and education. I was drawn to HN because of Paul Graham's essays on education, and my own work is in the content-development aspect of gifted education in mathematics. I rely on my other family member (also an HN participant) for technical advice when he can cram it into his busy schedule.

He is hopeful, though, that as more VCs consider other parts of the country to seed their ventures, the problem may take care of itself.

"The University of Michigan graduates 8,000 engineers a year," he (Steve Blank) said. "Why don't we fund these companies cheaply in Ann Arbor?"

Why not indeed. But then some of those VCs might have to travel outside the Bay Area.

It's a self-perpetuating cycle - everyone's there because everyone's there, and I don't see that network effect going away any time soon. Everyone was on Windows because everyone else was on Windows. Everyone moves to iPod/iPhone, and the network effect brings everyone over to iPhone (yes, exaggerating a bit, but not much).

Things that are extremely, trivially easy to do:

1. Throw wads of money at something.

2. Pay off politicians.

3. Shmoozing.

4. I'm the sales and idea guy.

Things that are very hard to do:

1. Design a product that people find useful and are willing to use.

2. Design a product that people are willing to spend money on.

There's an enormous glut of VC backed companies filled with and powered by the easy trivial stuff. These folks tend not to respect engineering design and inventing skills, which they see as commodities they should be able to buy for a pittance. Then they complain that there is stiff competition for talent when designers don't choose to work for their useless startup.

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In other news, HR still has no idea what it's doing, but is convinced that arbitrary heuristics which eliminate candidates implicitly lead to optimal hiring, business managers still don't understand tech work, and Wikipedia is widely believed to trend toward accuracy.

(in other words, hiring people is hard work, really hard work, but we pretend that employing arbitrary requirements [e.g. must be employed, must have exact experience in variant x of library y on platform z] equals the necessary hard work)