This is something I am learning as a late bloomer in life, as I didnt have too many friends more so business acquaintances growing up

The hardest lessons I hace learned though is during major life transitions - sometimes you are off on your own, you have to manage that transition yourself and cannot rely on anyone in particular through it

Friendships require work but sometimes they arent on equal terms either, and when things shift away that created that strong bond to begin with, people drift apart. Thats something that is hard to cope with, that sense of loss in wanting that nostaglic connection again

But I'm basically semi-retired to a degree in my field. I'm doing the bare minimal to get by at this point. I ultimately would love to quit some day, and pivot into a different career, not entirely related to coding. I'm not at that point yet financially though, and am spending energy elsewhere

I would love to start a non-coding related business one day though.

People are definitely community oriented there - theres alot of polish community events, open friendliness towards sports outings and open pickups (basketball volleyball etc)

I will say though I think in Chicago it tends to be a bit more like clique-y though - culturally and sportswise comparitvely to something like NYC.

Like in NYC theres alot more international / individualism though, in Chicago the city itself enforces a good number of rules on what you should and shouldnt be (example is the pride colors painted in boys town)

Going to the west coast - it is weird. People arent genuinely empathetic or rather, its a foreign concept to them. Empathy is always done through some indirect means, through hobbies for instance. I do feel people on the west coast and midwest arent really used to community collaboration either near as much as the east coast either. Also they are not used to openly expressing themselves, I suspect this has to do with fear of being negatively judged

I also just went to LA. It is such a foreign concept to me how black and white everything is. A lot of people will believe there are truly evil or good people - its such a weird thing for me to hear coming from the east coast - we just think of people as like people.

I think at least on the west coast, alot of this artificial niceness has to do with rising CoL, asian influence, and homeless problems

Mid west is more so like less exposure to international culture compared to east coast

Conformity is like rewarded a lot more in the midwest and west coast, people imo struggle to be individualistic and most resort to some sort of pseudonym to express themselves

I do feel people on the east coast are just in general, simpler people used to simpler things and overall just happier people

I have some friends that moved from seattle, they do tend to express themselves better in text then verbally

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I think the more important question is whether or not the person you are hiring can do the given job and task, regardless of years of experience

Anytime SSR or any of its derivatives comes into the conversation I always ask myself if things are becoming unnecessarily more complex. React server rendered components sounds like it's taking things too far - it goes against the natural developer experience DX order

If your complexity on the app is doubled and it slows and confuses all the developers with increased coding footguns for only a measly gain in performance, is it worth it?

Good old php sites and rails app with no SPAs have worked fine over the years

Board management models generally only work if it the restaurant was individually owned at one point and then that owner left

Starting a worker owned restaurant from the ground up is a terrible idea because the end customer doesn't really care and your artificially creating additional managerial barriers to entry when you have to move fast early on

If someone has the capability of leading a worker owned restaurant (there is always a leader even in these models - e.g. a board chair), they are also equally capable of running a simpler ran benign dictatorship with less red tape.

The other issue with board management runned operations is if you want to expand operations (e.g. opening up a second restaurant). It will get political very fast and not work because there will be disagreements on how money should be spent and allocated

A worker owned business is just a more complicated business. It can work but it needs very specific conditions and it's prone to political issues

I have seen though however a benign dictatorship take on funds from investors to expand operations, but that only works if there is a well established culture (e.g. usually the restaurant has built a few successful stores on their own). It's not very that far off from startups taking investor funding

There's a reason we call restaurant entrepreneur as restauranteurs

I run my own nonprofit currently (board management) and have done startup consulting for the restaurant space for over a decade. Restaurants and startups operates on similar principles

And I learned something about this type of culture, especially having read these comments in this thread:

Canonical sounds like a tech fraternity. Just imagine a traditional fraternity or sorority - the hazing (the boss eating food during your interview), the induction processes (hiring asking for high school background, the unnecsesary long essay prompts, unnecessary long interview process, the ghosting, etc)

They are filtering for a very specific person. Someone who is a "Yes" person to the point that they will demolish their morale values and respect on themselves. They sound like there looking for more younger & naiive, but brilliant engineers, that can be basically exploited to build great things. Asking for so much personal information about why they want to work there, there high school background, is basically from the HR perspective "Can I exploit this person if they work there, by leveraging their past against them?" It's a power play dynamic - it's easier to manipulate and gaslight someone you know more about

I have people on both sides of these spectrums.

On the applicant side, we sometimes call them 10x genius engineers that make everyone's life miserable because their code is way too complex for no particular reason. There also underpaid usually and promised promotions and payraises, but those are just empty promises to keep them on the leash. They say their coworkers code is dogshit but don't realize how many unnecessary abstractions that made in their own code. They also don't take advice from friends telling them they are being exploited either, and they usually have an addiction problem to compensate the exploitation (weed,drugs, alchohol generally speaking). They also do amazing work and build amazing things though on the other end, and usually invent very novel solutions that aren't easy for others to inherit or work on

On the business/HR/CEO side - these are the same people that never mature out of the applicant side, and continue the hazing process ritual. Usually the boss on the outside sounds very down to earth, respectable, but deep down inside he likes to have raging parties and feels like he/she missed out on the frat lifestyle growing up. It's externalized validation for them

Having a particularly confusing hiring process is actually a form of gatekeeping from keeping people that respect their boundaries from applying. It's the same level of logic as scammers who will intentionally misspell their emails to filter for people who aren't as grammatical or tech savvy - for instance, since it's easier to target more gullible or less-informed audiences

Not saying that Canonical is that case. But it definitely does sound like a tech fraternity. And the hiring process sounds like a hazing process at a fraternity. But, at the time I actually really wanted that tech fraternity life style and appreciated it for what it was. Most small / tech consulting agencies are more likely to have this cultural mindset, because working with new clientelle usually is an emotional rollercoaster. You do learn a lot in these environments - and it is stressful - and you do get treated like dogshit without you realizing it (someone outside the company has to tell you) - but you also learn to appreciate a more mature better work/life balance afterwards.

It's not terrible for a first job if your young single and have no kids, sometimes you have to learn things the hard way

The author does come across more as a business/operations person first, developer second. Most developers would not consider tools like ahrefs or intercom or even realize that marketing is generally more difficult/important than the develpment work itself

Relatively speaking even at all these costs I would consider this to be frugal. If your a skilled developer you would easily be worth at least $100/hr

Taking off the shelf solutions with easy scalability of services for adding additional people operationally is important

time saved is time earned, time is money, and money saved is money earned