I lived in Howard County for a year. With the combination of county income tax and affluent property taxes, every service was exceptionally well funded.
Having lived in Mountain View & Sunnyvale, CA as well for a decade my experience was Howard County itself had quicker and better services than those cities.
It doesn't surprise me at all that their police department is competent and helpful.
This was my path, so it's possible. I dropped out after year two of my degree to join a startup and worked for 10 years in industry.
I converted 8 years of that experience to 2 years of a bachelor's degree to make the full 4 required, and had a University professor provide a letter of endorsement.
I was applying from Europe, and even then it was apparently a fairly expensive process for my sponsor.
Apologies if not the right place for this feedback, but the careers page does not work properly on Firefox 100/Linux - clicking any opening does nothing.
I work heavily with enterprise products. In my experience, when you're selling an enterprise-ready product it's a good idea to QA all public-facing code, even sections of a public website.
This is because I have found many enterprise customers are more interested in maintenance (which can be pre-assessed by looking at support and QA experiences) than they are the actual product.
Having lived in Mountain View & Sunnyvale, CA as well for a decade my experience was Howard County itself had quicker and better services than those cities.
It doesn't surprise me at all that their police department is competent and helpful.