the joy of craft

My friend linked to Craft is Culture which had a big emphasis on Working From Home as standard practice. (Oddly I think that's what is using the term "Digital by Default" for, which is a rather misleading way of putting it, IMHO.)

Danco writes

There are many reasons why the west coast won, but one of the most widely agreed-upon was the fact that California state law forbids non-compete clauses.

I only agree with the part of that before the comma. For my career since the mid 90s at least, they've always been thought of as probably not-enforceable and generally ignored, though obviously the same explicit-IP-protections apply.

I'm not sure of all the reasons for the coast migration. MIT + Harvard and then military contracts like Lincoln Labs and Raytheon were early anchors. But other companies like Intel, Microsoft, Atari, Apple, those were all West Coast, and the new anchors.

I think that there's a limited time when a techie is likely to make a big move to follow a job (though I guess I can think of more examples than I first realized if I try). But there's a big anchoring effect... you go to college, then you either stay in that area, return to your hometown, or maybe land a new job someplace new to you. Then there's about one period in your late 20s where you might relocate again.

The thing about follow your craft is... I think the majority of techies are rather bad at monetizing their craft. They really rely on businesses to make money. Many coders are as stupid about the very basics of how a business can scale up to afford salaries (and health care) and rent - as stupid about those basics as the non-techies are about a full website works. So the 40 hour grinds continue.

It follow from that that I think most techies are fairly risk averse. They might takes some swings w/ a low salary but uncertain high reward in a startup, but that's about it. Entrepreneurial crafters are not so common.

Danco brings up the Cathedral and the Bazaar - and indeed, Linux is amazingly impressive. But I think projects like that work by programmers "scratching itches" as they say. I think Linux was an usually fortuitous mix of some folks who wanted to take on the "big itch" of a whole damn OS, and a legion of people happy to work a bit smaller. Going back to my earlier point, folks coding for the love of craft are usually not working on something that will be as universally useful as Linux has been - or anything that they have a real hope of making a living off of.