May be an assumption on my part, but the language "people prefer to live in dense urban environment" is typical of urbanism-boosters - who definitely push a lot online that leads one to believe that anything less than inner Tokyo is unacceptable.
It's a very US-centric perspective to assume that density = cities.
Almost every town in the US, at one point, was dense enough to support a vibrant main street. Many (most?) of them even had tram lines and other forms of public transportation.
It's not an either or proposition. You can have cost-effective infrastructure through relative density without having to deal with all of the trappings - good and bad - that come from a city.
I’m a little suspicious of this because every startup says that they don’t hire the next engineer, they hire the next great engineer.
I think a lot of the value is taking the ordinary engineers (by hacker news) and letting them actually do something. Staying small helps this, because you are not thinking of the business ops burden of not building microservices. You’re building your single dockerized app.
Keep in mind “great engineer” will be a subjective term that means different things to everyone.
To Meta, it might mean cream of the crop, $1m+ engineer. To early Google, it might mean Stanford grad with deep CS knowledge. To a no-name startup, it might mean someone who accepts the job who takes initiative and knows how to crank out ugly code quickly on AWS and makes good prioritization decisions.
You need a mix - a team of only stars will fail, and a team of only mediocre members will fail.
You want one or two stars, chemistry among the whole team, and good fundamentals.
Good sports examples: the LA Dodgers, 90s Chicago Bulls (a few stars, a few normal players, good fundamentals, and great chemistry)
Bad sports examples: the 2023 Mets with Verlander and Scherzer (both overpaid divas with bad attitudes that hated each other), the current Yankees (a few stars, no fundamentals or discipline)
Sorry, I was talking about the previous iteration of the Dodgers that beat the Yankees. I haven’t been watching this year, other than Ohtani doing Ohtani stuff.
The previous Dodgers were stacked, but I meant that they had good chemistry and fundamentals. They beat the Yankees because the Yankees just made too many mistakes.
The Mets hired highly paid stars but couldn’t find chemistry, as nobody could get along. They did have some good eras with DeGrom, Syndegaard, etc, but if I remember, many of those stars started out small and grew into their stardom with the team.
Hiring great engineers is only part of the problem. Management and product needs enough vision and foresight to allow the great engineers to execute. It’s doesn’t matter how great your engineering team is if you keep redirecting them like a deaf stubborn dementia patient.
Management and product needing vision and foresight is an excellent call out. I can't help but think a lot of these self-proclaimed 9-9-6 startups are in reality 11-3-6 startups with a bunch of wasted time padding to 9-9-6.
"competent" is a bit of a word there, there are very few shops right now that are willing to hire actually junior rust devs. The jobs are out there but they're all for mid level at a minimum roles in the Rust ecosystem specifically.
Tons of people would jump ship to be able to use Rust, it has a lot of love in the community.
"Being totally unwilling to accept anyone junior, or who is new to the stack" is a disease in this industry, and it's really apparent when some 200 person+ company is only hiring principal level rust devs.
You see the same dynamics in London and Paris.
People do not "prefer to live in dense urban environments" by urbanist standards.
They prefer to live in dense urban environments by North American standards, which can still be far less dense than urbanists really want.
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