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Warning: totally subjective opinions to follow... The PHX community is "much better" in my opinion because the people I meet at various Dev groups aren't doing

Warning: totally subjective opinions to follow... The PHX community is "much better" in my opinion because the people I meet at various Dev groups aren't doing it because they want to be "software-developer famous"...if you know what I mean. When I was in SV I went to tons of meetups where it seemed like the devs were just trying to create something to get themselves "likes/favs/PRs/followers/etc" on HN/GitHub/Twitter. It was a weird kind of in-group celebrity that I detest. Here in PHX, I don't really see any of that. I went to a Linux Users Meetup and it was pretty chill, nobody was pushing their GitHub repo/blog/Twitter on the audience, it was just a laid back discussion on the latest happenings, but not the software-developer-gossip nonsense. When I go to a .NET developer group meetup, we discuss .NET Core and Azure...just the facts. We don't discuss the latest thing Scott Hanselman said on Twitter, or what so-and-so said about the latest <insert topic>. The discussion tend to be about the tech, how to use it, and what the new features allow us to do, that's it. Some of us don't want to be famous for our GitHub, we want to work with nice teammates on cool engineering problems that matter. I found my current employment (working on electrical grid software for a major SW utility company) to fit perfectly with my interests and background.

bluetwo 9y ago
Thanks for the insight.
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago
  No problem, glad I could provide some insight. Also... The whole "diversity-in-tech" is less of an issue here (from my anecdotal experience). My current team is 70/30 men/women and while we'll occasionally talk about the larger tech community, rarely does it devolve into talks about diversity/gender representation/social issues. My team cares about technology, solving problems related to the electric grid, and maintaining our systems so the operators can ensure power is restored quickly and promptly to our customers. Its a pretty good gig in that respect. My lead is a Mexican-American female that if you asked her about it, she'd say she is an professional Electrical Engineer first and foremost. I like that kind of environment, as opposed to when I worked for Google and it was a constant barrage of "women/diversity candidate/veteran in tech." My wife is a software engineer as well and she likes the fact that her current company doesn't treat her as the token female developer, something that she experience all too much in SV.

bluetwo 9y ago

Thanks for the insight.

Caveman_Coder 9y ago
No problem, glad I could provide some insight. Also... The whole "diversity-in-tech" is less of an issue here (from my anecdotal experience). My current team is 70/30 men/women and while we'll occasionally talk about the larger tech community, rarely does it devolve into talks about diversity/gender representation/social issues. My team cares about technology, solving problems related to the electric grid, and maintaining our systems so the operators can ensure power is restored quickly and promptly to our customers. Its a pretty good gig in that respect. My lead is a Mexican-American female that if you asked her about it, she'd say she is an professional Electrical Engineer first and foremost. I like that kind of environment, as opposed to when I worked for Google and it was a constant barrage of "women/diversity candidate/veteran in tech." My wife is a software engineer as well and she likes the fact that her current company doesn't treat her as the token female developer, something that she experience all too much in SV.