Lets speed run a doomsday:

2022: share price tanks, ceo booted, they shuffle but dont have a plan, no longer blue chip so finance is hard to come by. delisting. everyone booted. doors close.

2023/4: AMD only game in town. profits and volumes up. so are the faults and vulnerabilities. They spend most of their effort in fixes and not innovation.

2024: M1 chip available on dells/hps/thinkpads. AWS only use Graviton unless customer specifically buys another chip.

2025: Desktop ARM chip available on dells/hps/thinkpads. 2025: AWS makes a 'compile-to-anything' service. decompiler and recompiler on demand.

2026: AMD still suffering. Hires Jim Keller for the 20th time. makes a new ZEN generation that beats M1 and Arm. AMD goes into mobile CPUs.

cant wait to restart the browser when im in the middle of something important

I think some older devs would rather leave the corporate world because they can do better work and be happier on their own projects or freelancing.

you're studying to be a better employee to advance your career? or is just for a title (ceo or phd)? the startup gives you a shortcut to advance your career. you dont mention your age, if you're young, you can usually get away with making a career switch or two. the guy that goes for a startup wants to (probably) make a huge impact on the world in a short time. the guy that stays in big company will have more specialised impact but it probably wont be a headline maker of an impact.

we cant decide for you. but if you think of the two choices as those two extremes (big impact vs specialised impact) then maybe its easier for you to chose. good luck bossman

Thanks a lot. The big impact vs specialized impact does frame things well. I almost see the PhD as a necessary condition for my career path; akin to an MD for a doctor. There are no laws governing the work like an MD. However, when I look at the people who are in the positions I want, less than 5% have masters, the rest are all PhDs. I'm in my late 20s by the way.

banks and insurance company IT departments are littered with non-passionate devs. They probably started bright eyed and bushy tailed, but then they had to maintain 30yr old systems and make fixes for patches that fixed another patch. New projects and passion come together. you dont find any passion in maintenance.

Counterexample: I was more passionate about my last maintenance job, where I could shape the system through slow, but steady refactoring, compared to my current job, where I mostly string together buzzword-worthy components.

so crypto was on their roadmap but gifs weren't

yes. especially for marketing people. 1) client calls you in. 2) you write brief. 3) you play it back. 4) you fix brief 5) repeat 3 & 4 6) deliver.

most of this is necessary but filestage will make 5 go quick

technically feasible. multiple ways of proving your identity on a device and a combination of ways must be used. FB+bank or gplus+DMV or whatever. then you can SSL the connection up to the hilt. some fancy algorithms to copy your choice to independent systems to make sure redundancy or system.

but should it be done? i dont think so. with paper, you have many many eyes on whats going on. when something goes wrong, its not even 1% (maybe) of error. but on online, if something goes wrong, its can become a huge issue. it might be hard to convince the bulk of the population (court of public opinion) that the result is true/valid/reliable. because they cant see/touch/feel the raw parts that made up the sum.

another issue with high tech solutions, is that you end up targeting the high tech people. its hard for laggards and cavemen to adapt. but its easy for a tech-savvy chap to downgrade to a piece of paper. so it is possible that you dont get a true representative of the population in the results.

the last issue, governments suck. voting (almost) never makes things better.

Verifying someone's identity is certainly possible, but how do you deal with malware flipping votes before they leave the computer? You could design the most theoretically secure voting system in the world, but how do you truly secure it when you don't control the hardware and OS that it is running on?

1) Do away with "voting day". I cast my vote, and I get snail mailed a receipt. If its wrong, I can call in and cast my vote over the phone. If its right, do nothing.

2) Begin a publicity campaign to make the default vote a public vote. If you are worried about being fired, ostracized, or otherwise targeted because of who you vote for then walk your butt down to the polls and get in line with grandma and the guy in the tinfoil hat.

Meanwhile I'm going to roll my wheelchair over to the computer room and use my screen reader to cast my ballot publicly because IDGAF.