Because it is good for humans to have a thing to do. Not sure why this is not considered a valid reason. A lot of these 'it would be better to do X' assumes everyone has the same psychological profile as you. They don't. Many people are driven to explore and would go mad otherwise.
I mean there should be. But there's not. Despite the millions of CS grads produced many people could not reasonably be expected to produce many 'standard' parts of a software stack
No no no. Space will be colonized. At least our local solar system will see sustained human exploration and inhabitation. This requires physical presence. This is one of those black swans which seem silly when looking forward, but obvious in retrospective. The future belongs to those who do seemingly silly things today. The first industrialists often faced ridicule because they spent time designing machines instead of doing the task and making the immediate money. Set aside your need for immediate gratification. Hard things lead to good outcomes.
The evidence on car seats is extremely weak and they prevent only a handful of injuries. You'd be better off redesigning roads or having more collision protection systems in cars. As self-driving cars get better to the point where they can communicate and eliminate many human errors, there's probably no need for car seats at all. In many situations they make things more dangerous, not less.
Every safety measure faces a question of whether the resources allocated to it are an efficient means of achieving that reduction in risk.
To GP's point, we probably can't prevent people from crashing altogether, but we currently have a road system designed to sacrifice safety on the altar of throughput [0]. How many more or fewer kids (or just people) would die if governments allocated the resources to making roads safer that they currently mandate their citizens use on car seats?
> I don't need a guard on my table saw if I don't stick my thumb in it. Don't need a helmet if I don't fall off of my bike.
Do you think the guard on your table saw makes you safer than training and experience using the saw safely? There are always limited resources and multiple routes to safety, so we shouldn't assume any given safety measure is the best use of those resources (especially in consideration of second-order effects).
The role of for-profit companies and 'shareholder' value in explaining corporate bad behavior is highly overstated. The only profit that matters is the one at the individual level (i.e., compensation, which is a form of profit, for the individual).
A government employee or a private corporation doesn't matter. To the actual humans, they are the same, in that each provides a particular compensation, tied to their decisions.
Non-competes are almost always unenforceable. Never take money (although even then, they're still mostly useless), and just ignore them and no one is going to do anything. That was what my business law professor taught us. No court is going to enforce a non-compete if it means the person who cannot compete is going to be unable to support themselves. The only time it'll be enforced is if you're already independently wealthy.
In other words, a completely useless scare tactic.
The problem is it won't get as far as trial, if the old company gets wind of it early enough (and they often do). The old company will reach out to the new company and politely inform them they believe they have grounds for a noncompete suit. The new company will either indemnify the worker, or (far more often) drop them as not worth the hassle, and take their #2 choice.
The legislation needs to change. The situation as it stands is ripe for barratry and bullying.
You may not even get as far as an interview. More and more, I see job applications asking whether you are subject to non-competes, alongside asking about visa etc. I imagine answering yes will unceremoniously move your application to the reject pile.
It just means your start date is delayed. No different from interviewing a student whose graduation date is a year away or interviewing a foreigner who might require a few months of paperwork to get a work visa.
Most non-competes are at least 6 months but usually more than a year, and I have never worked in a company that was open to hiring someone with a start date that far in the future. Plus, the clock wouldn't even start running until they leave their job, so if you hire them for a start day in 12 months, they have to quit now and spend their savings. I have never met someone who was open to doing that. I am sure it could happen in very rare circumstances, but most jobs would be closed to most people with non-competes. I am glad that I live in a jurisdiction that doesn't allow them anymore.
That’s not at all my experience. I remember back in the college days every single company on campus was willing to interview students in fall knowing that they would graduate next summer. That’s at least 9 or 10 months of waiting. Because if a company waits until spring, all the best students already have offers and aren’t on the market any more.
> they have to quit now and spend their savings
Every single job offer I’ve seen with a non-compete is a paid non-compete. You get 100% of your base salary and zero bonus. In industries where non-competes are common, people know this. They have savings to deal with reduced income due to zero bonus. There’s a reason why the non-compete period is colloquially known as garden leave. You have enough savings so that you can literally work on your garden. Companies know they need to be patient and plan for hiring needs far in advance. It’s super predictable.
Same here in Canada. I have had three non-competes in my career, none of which were paid. All of them were probably unenforceable if it went to trial, but I would have never gotten that far in the hiring pipeline. I instead opted to switch industries and move to a jurisdiction that doesn't allow non-competes.
I know at least one person who joined a Michigan startup, moved over, got sued by non compete, and the new employer just didnt want any hassle and laid them off. This person had to leave country then.
The take home is dont take tech jobs in states where non-compete clauses are still legal.
Sue them back. Represent yourself. Get compensatory damages. They will lose unless you can support yourself. Do you think any state is going to let someone go on unemployment and withdraw from the public dole just because some private company wants to gain some competitive advantage. Lol
But I do agree in general, never take compensation upon leaving a company, for whatever reason. Then everything is certainly unenforceable.
As for leaving the country... even if a non-compete is found to be enforceable (due to you being self-sufficient, or sufficently compensated), then the scope cannot be country wide. It has to be limited to a particular reasonable geography and a particular reasonable field.
> No court is going to enforce a non-compete if it means the person who cannot compete is going to be unable to support themselves. The only time it'll be enforced is if you're already independently wealthy.
The first part is probably usually true, because places where non-competes are enforceable generally will not enforce them if they are overly broad.
But for tech workers there are almost always other jobs that the worker can qualify for and pay similarly to their old job but are not covered by the non-compete and then then non-competes do get enforced even though the worker is not independently wealthy.
You can sue the old company for that. You had a job that they are not allowing you to do. Courts don't like it when someone isn't allowed to support themselves, and so generally place narrow limits on what a non-compete tan cover. You should sue for the sake of the rest of us who might be next when this tactic is found to work.
Lawsuits take years and are very expensive in time and money. Years of litigation cost Epic billions in legal fees and lost revenue. It's much much worse if you don't start with millions.
Games really only usually rely on standardized libraries and APIs, whereas application software relies on system libraries to do things like paint their UI.
Games are one of the easier things to emulate since gaming mechanics are usually entirely a compute problem (and thus not super reliant on kernel APIs / system libraries). Most games contain the logic for their entire world and their UI. The main interface is via graphics APIs, which are better standardized and described, since they are attempting to expose GPU features.
I worked on many improvements to wine's Direct3d layers over a decade ago... it's shockingly "simple" to understand what's happening -- it's mostly a direct translation.
I spent my entire college career doing consulting for a company that worked on Wine since Wine was part of its commercial offering.
The work is not boring (it's fascinating!) but completely thankless. The documentation on MSDN was (and I'm guessing still is) complete shit, and most of the APIs are undocumented. Random fixes would have knock on effects. I contributed a bit to some cases on a bug open since the 90s, and since I'm still on the list, I still get messages about it!
I have been surprised by how many tech founders, currently funded by VC, have side gigs or are running the company knowing they wont' or can't scale it. I don't think this is a good thing for either the founders or the VC (who probably don't know)
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