Comment by fnid2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnid2 | Hacker News Reader

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More like division into zero right? If it was by zero, then there'd be no engineers and an undefined supply of jobs.

But more to the point, there are lots of ways to be technically engaged. Elance, guru.com, hireacoder kind of places need technical people and they don't care where you are.

The startup phase into a life style like that (this), can be long and arduous, but also something you can do in your spare time. Point is, if you want to be in a rural area and still have your fingers in technical stuff, there are avenues to that -- the internet.

That's the beauty of the internet. You can do almost anything technical from anywhere, like the main post to this thread... Lots of people, myself included, do. When I talk to my clients/customers, they're always like, "Where are you now?" It's awesome.

I was calculating number of engineering job applicants divided by the number of places to work. That is, supposing there were 100 people and 10 companies, or 20 people and 2 companies, that's still the same ratio of 10 engineers employed per company as you think smaller. But when you scale down far enough, you reach a point where there are zero companies in the sector, yet there are still non-zero number of people wishing to have that kind of job if they could. So you're dividing a nonzero number of people across zero opportunities, and the result is undefined.

In theory, I could do almost anything technical from anywhere, and that's what gives me hope. But society doesn't always change as fast as technology could enable it to - I have yet to find a company actually willing to let me work completely remotely, even though programming or circuit design work could be done that way.

But that's why I am involved in a startup as a side job, and I hope one day we'll be able to employ 100% of our workforce 100% remotely, because there are many capable people living in backwater places. That's the interesting thing about dividing by zero - introducing an undefined result breaks the rules of the system.

Arg. It's not division by zero, it's zero work divided by a finite number of workers. Nor is it an undefined supply of jobs-- should you need the quantity "workers per unit work", then, finally, you'd have an undefined quantity.

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