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Comment by Grzegrzolka | Hacker News Reader

It's very easy to explain. Even very weak companies that are located in "hot" cities have chance to catch really experienced and knowledgable talent. One good guy employed for 6 months can be an amazing catalyst of great changes, you can very quickly modernize process and technologies if you have passionate people on board. It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. The "less popular" places are the polar opposite of this mindset. If talent is not easily available, you will find companies with no proper culture, stupidly old technologies and "old guard" not wanting to change much if anything.

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> It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay.

How about no. I think there is a big divide between people who do project maintenance and those tornadoes. Most new hotness people want to put on their resume will bite you in the ass 2 or 3 years down the line. But the super hero tornado will already be 4 companies out of sight so they'll never see what the things they started ended being. And when they stumble upon an old project started by another different team of tornadoes they'll complain.

There is resume driven introduction of new technologies and then there is introducing modern source control, a CI pipeline, a modern compiler toolchain with activated warnings, a usable bugtracker... all of which is often missing in small companies that only do software on the side, or live in a slow moving market.

I work in defense contracting and version control is either non existent or dated at most companies. I've gotten very good at selling git to management.

2 months to introduce those kind of changes usually mean it will still be in the "people don't want to change their way of doing things" phase. With most of the infrastructure half deployed, the process ready to be cargo-culted and a lot of things directly copied from stack-overflow into critical parts of this process. The know-how never got shared and won't appear to fill the void.

That our hypothetical tornado managed to start introducing change during just 6 months is imho a strong sign that at least some people want to change. In my experience introducing changes takes years.

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