I've lived in the Seattle area most of my life and lived in San Francisco for a year.
SF embraces tech and in general (politics, etc) has a culture of being willing to try new things. Overall tech hostility is low, but the city becoming a testbed for projects like Waymo is possibly changing that. There is a continuous argument that their free-spirited culture has been cannibalized by tech.
Seattle feels like the complete opposite. Resistant to change, resistant to trying things, and if you say you work in tech you're now a "techbro" and met with eyerolls. This is in part because in Seattle if you are a "techbro" you work for one of the megacorps whereas in SF a "techbro" could be working for any number of cool startups.
As you mentioned, Seattle has also been taken over by said megacorps which has colored the impressions of everyone. When you have entire city blocks taken over by Microsoft/Amazon and the roads congested by them it definitely has some negative domino effects.
As an aside, on TV we in the Seattle area get ads about how much Amazon has been doing for the community. Definitely some PR campaign to keep local hostility low.
'how much they do for the community' like trying to buy elections so we won't tax them, same thing boeing and microsoft did. Anytime out local government gets a little uppity suddenly these big corps are looking to move like boeing largely did. Remember Amazon HQ2, at least part of the reasoning behind that disaster was seattlites asking, 'what the hell is amazon doing for us besides driving up rents and snarling traffic?'
(.. and exactly how is boeing doing since it was forced to move away from 'engineering culture' by moving out of the city where their workforce was trained and training the next generation. Oh yeah planes are falling out of the sky and their software is pushing planes into the ground.)
I'm sure the 5% employee tax in Seattle and the bill being introduced in Olympia will do more to smooth things over than some quirky blipvert will.
I think most people in Seattle know how economics works, logic follows:
while "techbro" don't work is true:
if "techbro" debt > income:
unless assets == 0:
sellgighustle
else
sellhousebeforeforeclosure
nomoreseattleforyou("techbro")
end
else
"gigbot" isn't summoned and people don't get paid.
"techbro" health-- due to high expense of COBRA.
[etc...]
end
end
It sounds like you need some friends in the maker space or something similar where tinkering in something temporary is normal. I'd say you're among friends in the HN space where tinkerers are more common!
Keep working on your trauma. Don't however think that your healing is a requirement to have friends, love, etc. We are all broken and hurt. We are broken together.
I've tried a couple times, but the interest in making physical things cycles through just like any other interest. Then it gets replaced by something like neurobiology or anthropology and I don't want to make things for awhile.
It seems like I really enjoy the beginnings of things, like if we run Pareto ratios twice, I like the 4% of the learning that gets me 64% of the understanding. And then it's enough and I'm done. It's enough to ask questions of the interesting people without sounding like a total n00b.
In the time it would take to master one thing, I become "barely proficient" in 25, but it's hard to build anything meaningful, including human connections, operating like that.
I know healing isn't a requirement to deserve the friendship of others. But if I keep operating like this because of it, it's definitely an impediment to building those friendships.
Ya, your situation is rough. Made many fold harder by today's isolating culture and technology.
Have you found any artists or creators to hang with?
Especially these days, artists have to be very tech savvy. I've always enjoyed helping others with their projects. (I possess the artistic talent of sea kelp rotting in the sun.)
In my experience, makerspaces have dabblers, not doers.
Hey there - professionally I'm a sr cloud engineer focused on Azure. I have an interest in quantum as a hobbyist and maybe a career focus in coming years/decades. Katas seems like a good place to learn things, but if you were to give a 5 year outlook, what specifically should I be looking into? Is there something as an administrator/architect of these quantum products that I should focus expertise on? Or something in the Azure/O365/etc ecosystem I should be looking at that leverages these technologies? If I was to become a consultant, what would be my focus as an Azure cloud engineer in relation to quantum technologies?
I'm unsure I am even asking the right questions. I'd appreciate any direction you can give me!
What do you hope to be doing in 5 years? Architecting quantum solutions? Reselling or consulting on cloud solutions? Building quantum applications?
I think the quantum space will have quite a bit of progress in 5 years, but I think most experts in the space (of which I'm NOT one) think we're still over 5 years out before there's broad adoption on running quantum programs with significant business value. (i.e, it'll still largely be researchers and bleeding edge adopters).
All enterprise productivity products are capable of spying on their users. It is up to the sysadmins, legal/ethics teams, and company culture to not allow for that surveillance to be used. And to be fair, most of the data that is being discussed isn't new and has been available to employers for ~10 years in one form or another. Not that that makes it better.
I run an O365 instance for my company. We have thousands of users. The only time the data that is referenced here is being used is for some rare troubleshooting or litigation reasons.
SF embraces tech and in general (politics, etc) has a culture of being willing to try new things. Overall tech hostility is low, but the city becoming a testbed for projects like Waymo is possibly changing that. There is a continuous argument that their free-spirited culture has been cannibalized by tech.
Seattle feels like the complete opposite. Resistant to change, resistant to trying things, and if you say you work in tech you're now a "techbro" and met with eyerolls. This is in part because in Seattle if you are a "techbro" you work for one of the megacorps whereas in SF a "techbro" could be working for any number of cool startups.
As you mentioned, Seattle has also been taken over by said megacorps which has colored the impressions of everyone. When you have entire city blocks taken over by Microsoft/Amazon and the roads congested by them it definitely has some negative domino effects.
As an aside, on TV we in the Seattle area get ads about how much Amazon has been doing for the community. Definitely some PR campaign to keep local hostility low.