[marothisu]

Originally Posted by BonoboZilla

I'm enjoying reading all your comments on Amazon a lot. So many strong opinions and pretty solid arguments, especially ones pointing out how the writers seem to be using pretty horrible logic.

Personally, I have no clue what they might choose, because as you all point out, it seems like logic would not have Maryland, NoVA or DC in the top 20, but here we are with them being the clear front runners according to the media and betting sites. I hope they are wrong, but I guess I'll just keep being patient since I have no idea what might happen.

Nobody knows what's going to happen, except maybe the people at Amazon (and any consultants) who are privy to most of the details of this. I'd imagine that most employees of Amazon have been in the dark about this. A few months after HQ2 was announced, I asked my friend who was a manager there at the time where he thought it would go, and half of the places he mentioned didn't even make the top 20 (i.e. Houston).

The issue of the journalist really goes on peoples' misconceptions about the tech industry itself. So many different roles out there to support a large company making software of any kind as we've discussed.

Talent is also something that's kind of hard to truly measure. Many software developers are pretty full of themselves in reality about their abilities and a lot of people who don't really work in the industry just kind of buy into the hype blindly for a few geographical areas. There are a lot of talented engineers in the Bay Area, but it's basically like how people assume they're great actors once they get an LA address or a great chef once they get a NYC address.

The majority of software developers are doing work that's not necessarily hard to make functional (from the standpoint of actually knowing how to develop that is). Unfortunately - a lot of people mistake being able to make something functional with it being an actual good solution. It would be like thinking that everyone who can architect a 5 story building so someone can erect it is automatically a great and really talented architect. There's a million ways to create various parts of software - just because something works doesn't mean it's actually a good solution. A lot of software out there really isn't coded very well (some is, a lot isn't). It's kind of complicated to explain, but I'll just say that getting something to work doesn't mean you are good at what you're doing in terms of software development.

So with that being said, I think a lot of people who aren't in the industry relate something like the ability to get funding too much to true tech talent. Most of the stuff out there isn't really that hard to create. Like the average Facebook engineer isn't really doing anything groundbreaking on average that requires a degree from MIT or anything. There is some stuff like that at all of these companies, but truly it's only a very small percentage of people who actually designed and implemented it.

So I really find it funny how some of these articles try and rank talent. I honestly have no idea how they even do that. Just because an area has a bunch of startups doesn't mean that the average talent level is greater than a place with less startups and VC funding. It's really weird to me, personally, that they even have rankings for this thing alone. It's not something that you can really easily rank because it's just hard to rank, and also a bit subjective (i.e. I may have different parameters for thinking someone is talented versus somebody sitting right next to me).


Also, this blog post is hilarious but also pretty true:
https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Something like this is pretty damn true

Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it’s literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses.

Also very true:

All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people