Your language is a bit too coarse to win many over, but your point is spot-on. Someone from the Valley used to making 220K at Facebook doing bespoke compiler work may not have the perceived usefulness to a lot of companies in Denver that are doing tech hiring now. Identifying and building technical business solutions requires a bit more than what you'd learn exclusively in a CS program and a lot of these guys (gals?) don't have those skills, or just have no desire to have that sort of career. The Front Range seems to favor hiring assertive, business-minded developers than overly-academic dorks... in my experience anyways.