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Do You Consider Your Social Life When You Choose A Career?
JordoCrouse writes "There has been an uproar in Salt Lake City, Utah over the comments of the new Iomega CEO, Bruce Albertson. Albertson attacked Utah's very annoying and confusing liquor laws as a reason why Utah has had a serious problem attracting engineers and other technology oriented folk, despite the low cost of living, high quality of firms, and access to excellent education. I didn't grow up here, but I went to college in Salt Lake City, so I was used to the various quirks of the local laws, but I am wondering: Do issues like liquor laws and social life really affect where engineers and programmers want to work? Does Mr. Albertson have a point, or was he just frustrated that he couldn't atract any good prospects?"
Seriously, maybe, just maybe the fact that there are millions of devout cultists (aka Mormons) in this state is the reason that everyone stays the hell away.
Some things they preach:
- The end of the world by fire and mass destruction is coming any day now! Really!
- If you are a righteous Mormon you will become a GOD! With your own worlds and people, and creating billions of spritual children with your many wives in heaven! (yes, they do believe that you can have multiple wives in heaven!)
- Their temples, like the endowment cerimony, are straight from the occult! They used to swear on their LIVES! that they would never tell what happened in their cerimonies lest their tongue be cut out, their guts spilled and so on! Crazy stuff...
and all sorts of other stuff. Having a majority of the population that beleives in things like this would be seriously discomforting to most people.
Not just a matter of your age. Software is a global profession, considering how easily people move across continents. Here's my impression, based on personal experience and what I've heard from others.
* Singapore : clean, excellent standard of living, everything you do is monitored. some people like it, some don't. YMMV. probably good for a short term contract, but I wouldn't live there.
* United States: The motherload. No other country offers so many opportunities or so many jobs. Cons - expect to chop off a solid chunk of your life and sacrifice it to the corporate god. If you're a citizen/resident, expect to get good payback. If you're a foreigner on a visa, possible the worst country to work in, because you don't have any freedom (ironic, considering the ideological brainwashing they subject the young kids to there, land of the free and all that). Permanent residency: 3-7 years. People who leave the US after their visa expires invariably end up wondering why they went there in the first place. Europe and Australia are much better alternatives.
* Australia/NZ : Excellent choice. Very safe, good standard of living, relaxed and friendly people, high shortage of tech. talent. Cons - not many choices. handful of cities to live in. not many companies. high level of govt. regulation, which means lower competition, suckass ISPs. Good beer, though. Easy to get a visa in a day or two. Permanent Residency - 6 months. Great place for families, low crime and no guns.
* Europe: Depends on the country. Lots of variety. Visa rules vary hugely. People working in UK have differing stories - the ones near london like it, the ones in the country towns are bored to death. Cultural, linguistic, and racial factors are a big deal in europe.
* Canada: Friendly, cleaner, nicer version of the US, with better cheese and the metric system. Getting a work visa is easy in terms of paperwork, but you won't find many companies willing to hire you on a work visa. Lots of bureaucracy at the company HR level, though the govt. does things speedily. Escape haven for programmers whose US visa is expiring - get Canadian residency (6 months) and then get a job. Good place to settle down for families.
You do, however, have to take a broad definition of the term "social life". For a 22 year old programmer, social life = bars, nightclubs, etc....or it equals hiking, biking and camping availability. For a 35 year old single worker, it probably equals the same thing..but for a married, 35 year old father of two, "social life" is really churches, youth football leagues and PTO meetings.
Whoever you are though, quality of life (which, to a large part, is defined by extra-curricular social interactions) plays a large role in a career selection.
Werd.
I'm certain that LDS folks would not approve of how I live my life, and I'm not confident of their ability to keep their noses out of it.
-=Maggie Leber=-
I'm a non-drinker (never even been drunk), and the drinking laws would have nothing to do with me not seeking work in Utah. The overall backward, exclusionary, racist, and conservative attitudes that prevail there, and in southern Idaho, make it impossible for me to consider work there.
An example: my wife (who's not white) and I are travelling through the area (on honeymoon, actually). At restaurants, she's stared at, and there's lots of behind-the-back gossip. When we stayed at a business-class hotel, the hotel came around at 7am, knocking on all the doors, to wake us for service. The front desk folks were positively horrified that we were checking out when we should have been at service (with lots of whispering and finger pointing by the other staff). When I went to fill the tank on our car, the P.A. system at the gas station was playing loud, bad, religious music.
The whole message was, "You're not us, so go away." I'm wondering now how Utah is going to deal with the Olympics when they realize that many of the competitors are [gasp] foreigners and [gasp] not white.
A virgin Mormon porn czar?? [Are they kidding?!]
SALT LAKE CITY, UT -- Utah's new porn czar is an acknowledged virgin who rarely watches R-rated movies and has prosecuted a scant five pornography cases in her 15-year legal career. But Paula Houston asserts she knows smut when she sees it.
Utah - a state that regularly appoints teetotallers to its alcohol-regulatory board - is the nation's pioneer in creating an "obscenity and pornography complaints ombudsman."
Besides her experience as a city prosecutor, Houston, 40, unabashedly brings the values of her Mormon faith to an assignment that will include viewing XXX-rated movies, pornographic Internet sites and sexually explicit magazines. Houston's lack of personal sexual experience disqualifies her in the minds of some from passing judgment on just what constitutes pornography. Others say moral judgments are best made by those who are above reproach. For Houston, such arguments are entirely beside the point.
"My personal life is irrelevant," says Houston. [What personal life?]
From an article by Kevin Cantera & Michael Vigh, Salt Lake Tribune, 2/11/01
P.S., the "lameness filter" is a piece of crap! Just because Netscape inserts leading whitespace in copied material is no reason to reject comments!
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Just to be the devil's advocate (or the church's) -- church/state doesn't come into this much. If the voters happen to be church-folk who don't want drinking, that's the way a democracy works. If the majority did want drinking, the voting would work things out for them. One of the nice things about 'bible belts' or 'tech belts' if you will, is that people of a given persuation can enjoy each others' views together (the non-drinkers together, the tech-heads together). One of the problems is that you end up with a severed sense of a "United" country.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Indiana has had a law (ever since I can remember) that no alcohol of any sort will be sold from a store on Sunday.
BUT (and this is the part that kills me) a few years they modified that law to where you could go to a restaurant and buy it to drink while you're sitting there.
So in effect you can't buy it, take it home and drink safely. No no. If you want to drink on Sunday you have to go OUT and do it then drive home.
Way to support those drunk driving laws guys. Thanks buckets.
To stay on topic though.. I think it has a mild effect but not to the point this guy says. If the job has sufficient compensations (in your opinion) then these annoyances can be overcome.
For me it wasn't so much the nightlife as the general convenience and fun of living in SF. But the rule still applies - I like shopping on Haight St., others like good nightlife. Employers who locate in the middle of nowhere ignore these factors at their peril.
sulli
RTFJ.
I think that the point of the article is that the drinking laws are a highly visible component of life in Utah to outsiders (of which I am one). The point is that even if drinking is not a requirement of a social life, outsiders have to wonder what other ways the Mormons will stifle personal freedom for non-believers.
Life is just one damn thing after another- Mark Twain
In other news, the CEO of Iomega, the company that makes those unreliable drives that are warrentied till "the end of their life", bitched today that he could not get drunk while bribing senators to save his companies ass.
Burn Hollywood Burn
My wife used to work at a Walmart here in the Texas panhandle. For several months, she did the overnight shift.
Now, the way Texas's blue laws work, you cannot buy alcohol period after 2 A.M. After 12 A.M. you can only buy from a bar, and after 9 P.M. you cannot buy from liquor stores. This means no hard alcohol for mixers after 9 and 24 stores like Walmart and Albertsons have to refuse alcohol purchases after midnight and until noon on Sundays. This *really* makes sense in a state where the biggest pastime is sitting around the tube watching football all day sunday with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other.
As you can imagine, the Mrs. got some very angry customers who couldn't buy alcohol when they wanted to.
One day, a former Texas Representitive walked into the store at 4 A.M. Sunday morning. He picked up several bottles of wine, and a couple nice cases of beer. He was getting ready for an all day family get together, see?
So when my wife told him that no, he could *not* buy the booze, he slapped himself on the forehead and said, "I just had to sign on that renewal bill, didn't I?"
Most legislation is passed by people who aren't even paying attention to what they're doing.
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In my opinion, sure, things like alcohol laws and access to social activities (both of which are in short or just nasty supply in Utah) are very important to where I'd move for a job. When I'm done coding some large project for Iomega, I'm going to want to go out and ingest one or eight strong drinks to forget the workplace for a little while. Not only that, but these laws are indictive of other things such as the lines between church and state (and let's face it, when your state is definitely Mormon in the majority, these lines will be very blurred), government control, fellow citizen's attitudes, et cetera.
Know what I'd recommend? Head east about six hours to the beautiful state of Colorado. We are the microbrew capital of America (i.e., no "Captain Bastard's"-brand beer like in Utah -- no kidding), have an exponentially increasing tech corridor within short drives to the mountains, and dammit, it's FUN out here (also, per the concerns of this person, it's GREAT here. ;)
Utah is great to an extent, and I'll certainly head out there once a year to go backpacking, but living there? Nah. Iomega, move your operations out here and you'll get your engineers. We are also one of the more laid-back states, that's for sure. Stay out of Colorado Springs (home of Focus on the Family, which otherwise tarnishes a great city and my former hometown) and your religious, social, and living views won't matter much more than an iota, neither will anyone else's.
Ryan
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."