You lived in all of these places but apparently it didn’t affect your development. Living in a place doesn’t need mean you let it change or affect you, I’ve lived in Ghana, Canada, various Western European countries and a few states, and the important part has always been being open to the culture of a place, not just being there (at a young enough age you don’t control that, but you don’t have to be that old to become more of a passive observer of your surrounding culture than an active participant)
I say that because you’re just doubling down on my point. Why do FAANG employees come into recruiting an average tech worker? In a sentence... “who needs them?”.
You seem to be in this, again, somewhat conceited, line of thought that the rest of the US combined does so little that the SV microcosm is the average of US tech and to change that you need to include the whole world (foreign nationals).
It screams this “oh what they do doesn’t count” or “you need that stereotypical FAANG guy” mentality that I see so much in trendy tech.
The average recruits don’t have to change to come to places like NC, or really places that aren’t don’t have Sillicon in their name (Sillicon Alley, Sillicon Mountsin, etc. included). All they need is an open mind.
Not the “Open to everyone in my hive mind, everyone else is not even worth communicating with” mind that I’ve seen grow strong in “trendy tech”
The recruits who think they’re being asked to change only think so because of closed minded thoughts almost all of the time.
They become so attached to this idea of an “open monoculture” that anything that isn’t their existing culture is an attack on it instead.
“How dare you try and make it change which monoculture I follow”.
NC would be a terrible place if it worked like SV because everyone would be the people who support the guy want Jews to accept Christ and repel anyone who felt differently and try and change you for not agreeing. That would be a close race, it’d be a won race.
And people who are in that “open monoculture” mindset immediately try and apply their lens to NC and see that.
At the end of the day people are coming to NC, and NC has accepted them. It’s not the place these people would project it as
(Replace NC with literally any “off the beaten path but somewhat up and coming locale that’s not a traditional ultraliberal playground)