Don't move here. Trust me. Stay in California. You think it's bad but you have no idea what happens here. Your children may be kidnapped by Sasquatch.

Did you know that meat might even be illegal in Portland by 2019? And they still listen to rock music, cassettes, and guitars. Don't move to Portland.

Disgraceful anarchists. Car hating thugs. Dirty homeless people. It's terrible. The author has no idea how bad it is.

They don't fluoridate water. You can't pump your own gas. They shut down roads for cars and only allow bikes. It's going to be illegal to drive your own car. You can't do anything to your property if there's trees in it.

And there's hippies. Real smelly granola types. They all smoke pot all the time.

Don't move to Portland. It'll ruin your life. The homeless are everywhere.

Wanna move to Portland? By all means come on up! But leave your dot-com privilege and your "live to impress VC's" mentality back home. Come to Oregon and be an Oregonian.

Also- if you're attached to your car, Portland is not for you. The commutes from the 'burbs are as nasty as the Bay Area, and the inner city is made for biking and walking. Your car is good for the weekends- getting to the Coast and the Mountains- but not for your work week. Change your perspective on commuting. This ain't CAr-ifornia

Note- I said "weekends", meaning Saturday and Sunday when you are not working. If that is a foreign concept to you, Oregon is not for you.

I'm still writing Java to make money to buy music. Just like the 90's.

There is no such thing as perfect, bug-free software.

Once you start getting into any sort of maintenance, bug-fixing, feature creep- you lose all of the economies of scale of perfect software and replace that with the expenses the author discusses in the article.

Upward mobility is not completely a myth, but it's a dream akin in actual probability to making it in professional sports, at least here in the USA (in my case, growing up just across the Bay from Silicon Valley).

"Trickle down economics"- aka "Reaganomics"- the great dream of the Republicans- has exacerbated the situation over the last 35 years. I wonder how I was lucky enough to get out.

The rich don't need to keep the poor down, sadly. The poor do a good enough job of keeping one another down.

Software is still made by people, and people have basic needs, and if you don't come from a family with sufficient wealth to support you, you have to work your way through.

In the USA, you have to do that in a nation that does not open doors for you based on birth, despite the myth the feudalist-owned media perpetuates. This is a feudalist society, the most feudalist society ever known to man (at least in the preserved history).

Uh, in the USA 2015, you do. Or you need to be a very lucky lottery winner. Living-wage jobs are not available to all, and you need a modicum of education to secure one.

That education is no longer free.

And we'd still know how to get to the moon, too.

I've been doing all that in Java for 20 years. Break out the flannel and turn on the Oasis CD... The dream of the 90's lives on in this Portland coder's trendy world!

If most people had realized what they were signing up for when they first slipped in a phone in their pocket- that every greedhead who could figure out an HTML tag would eventually be able to use that phone to interrupt any part of their lives- I think most consumers would have thought twice. Now, they're all addicted to the endorphin buzz of "likes" and are quickly losing the ability to seek for themselves.

And of course Idiots Rule. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUUd-30Bzw

My hypothesis for US companies is that the number of non-techies supported by each US citizen engineer is going up at an even greater rate.

Your comment is based on the assumption that engineers cannot do any of the non-technical tasks a company has, and as an English major who is also an engineer, I think that's a false conception being perpetuated by people outside of engineering.