Before I moved to a tech hub I lived in a flyover state. Whenever I interviewed at companies there, the developers would be so down. They seemed almost depres

Before I moved to a tech hub I lived in a flyover state. Whenever I interviewed at companies there, the developers would be so down. They seemed almost depressed like they had nowhere to go. Invariably the management was unsophisticated and not very experienced. Their thinking about software Dev management was decades behind. Do you want to know what development was like in the 70s or 80s when programming was a blue collar job? Go work in one of those states. At one point I realized the entire state and region had nothing for me and left. I still get job leads from that place from 80s era companies and I know following them means booting up dos from a floppy or doing COBOL work while being told what to do by a part time manager, part time truck driver. What is far worse though is the fear of being sucked into this microcosm of 'this is how we do it here'. There are no up to date companies out there, only companies that have found a local maxima of expertise that, though they don't know it, is five to ten years behind at best. You tend to get stuck being lectured by the so-called experts on some 10 year old technology that is state of the art in their minds.