Honestly my bigger issue (and I'm not a twenty-something engineer) is that it's such an isolated campus. I might not mind working in the suburbs, but even the suburbs are moving towards walk-able interesting places, rather than these weird isolated complexes you drive between. There are areas in the suburbs that have apartments, restaurants, stores, and offices. I'd much prefer to work in one of those mixed-use environments. I would definitely consider not working for a company that took 15 minutes just to get from the building back to a road.
Selenium is awesome. I'm using it in Java and PHP. I had a run in with it in its 1.x days and it was too unreliable to maintain the tests. Now it's fantastic.
I think this goes back to the fact that start-ups are not get rich quick schemes. I was at a successful start-up that was acquired by a fortune 500 company. I got north of $500. From talking to many other software engineers, that is a pretty fantastic payout. Most people will never be in a start-up that yields much of value. You've got to do it because you love it.
It's actually easier than that. Techies are more likely to be atheists or not attend church. That's where most of the "charitable" giving in the US goes. A replacement for that would be fantastic, but there just isn't anything pounding into techies week after week that they should put 10% of their income towards charities.
I'm in Texas and we have at-will employment. You want super-easy hiring and firing, that's great. But because you can fire me at the drop of a hat, I cannot take the risk in tipping my hand. Feeding my family is more important to me than the health of your company. I'm not going to rage quit, and I'm going to try to change jobs when we're in a slow part of a cycle, but I cannot discuss it before hand.
Sorry. That's just the reality of the situation. We could move back to employment contracts and you would have a much more stable employee base. I would openly discuss my plans for the end of my contract ahead of time. But that would probably be too stable and rigid.
The economist would say that this would be most likely to get you C and D players. People who are having trouble finding or holding onto a job and are truly desperate would be the only ones an economist would expect to answer 'yes' to that question.
But I realize for a lot of companies having a guy who looks busy is still more important than getting work done.
Heritage.org is a conservative think tank. I suppose they're saying economic freedom isn't that important for a strong economy? Because you'd think if it were important it would correlate more strongly with economic size and growth.
I think this is the heart of the matter. Why are people disengaging?
I have the same experience as you in central Austin which, while not NYC, is still one the biggest cities in the US. I encounter people I know everywhere I go. The grocery store, theater, bar, etc. But I'm engaged in my community.
I think there's something else at play here. I suspect many people aren't interested in engagement and are seeking out ways to retreat. Clearly in your rural Texas town someone could still buy a house miles away from anyone and not engage at all. I wonder if people aren't doing so, or if they do so in such small numbers that you don't really notice.
Towns aren't free market. We fund roads millions of times more than public transportation. We let developers build infrastructure and then hand it over to towns which get to maintain it. So the free market basically has no responsibility for anything they build.
A lot of these issues are really going to come to a head in 8 years when boomers start dying in huge numbers.
It's probably more fair to compare this to WWI. With US gun owners being the equivalent of the cavalry, and the US military being the machine gun.
But go on discussing the relative merits of your horse breeds...
The Middle East does not argue against it. Guns haven't been the thorn in the US military's side. It has been improvised explosive devices. Guns require a person to pull the trigger and have a single point of failure. They're not that effective since they still require a 1:1 ratio of warrior to weapon.
It us bizarre to me since the most in demand employees are basically high tech liberal arts. A mix of engineering, art, psychology, and performance is pretty much the killer skill set right now (and I'd imagine in the future.
My BA in theater and dance mixed with programming and troubleshooting skills has always been an easy sell when interviewing.
It correlates with a massive decrease in crime. It's interesting, but I live in a fairly mixed-income and higher crime area and guns are very unpopular here. I think ultimately it's some sort of weird reaction to extreme safety. Our brains start creating fake risk when we don't have any in our lives.
Don't mess with the narrative. If hard work isn't the only thing that contributes to success you're going to destroy a lot of people's entire world view.
But yes he was lucky. Just like the fact I'm a programmer right now has a lot to do with being lucky that my accountant father brought home an IBM PC from work in 1980. The choice to actually spend time learning how the computer worked, while an important choice, was secondary to the luck in being one of a fairly small number of people with a personal computer in 1980.
Remember it's an amendment. Which means it can be repealed. We also at one point had an amendment outlawing all liquor and then another that repealed it. The inverse could be done easily with the 2nd.
I'd imagine it's something that won't be out of the question in about 20-40 years. Gun owners are overwhelmingly white, male and older. A demographic that is dying of old age.
You forget the other side, though. There are tons of people like my in-laws who used to get all sorts of malware thanks to IE, and once they switched to Firefox or Chrome no longer do. There's a pretty large group of non-technical people out there who have found not using IE makes their life more pleasant.
I find I'm actually more productive now that I have a wife and 2 kids. When I have an hour to work on writing a play, programming, or even playing video games I'm much more focused. When I had tons of free time I spent a lot more time getting a whole lot of nothing done.
Limited amounts of time can make you incredibly productive.