Any homeless person who's not completely bonkers knows that harassing a lone child on public transit is just about the worst possible way of attracting the attention of law enforcement, since other adults might ignore harassment of other adults who seem to be dealing with the situation but will step in to protect a child. In all of my life living in large cities, I have never seen something like this happen, nor came across any news of something like that.
This seems to be in the same category as not letting a child walk alone to school, in a Western country, because of fear of Islamic terrorists -- possible, but so unlikely it is statistically improbable.
Cities are likely to be much safer today than they were when you were growing up. It's the adults' attitudes to seeing kids alone and unsupervised that changed.
> I am saddened that the dream we all shared of allowing small towns to once again flourish, because knowledge workers could be located anywhere on the planet, are being quickly forgotten in favor of ultra-dense citiscapes.
It was always a futile dream, mostly propagated by people who themselves enjoy small towns and certainly not "shared by all". It turns out that many knowledge workers actually like big cities for the leisure options, health services, people and neighbourhood diversity, much bigger selection of potential life partners, and high availability of jobs.
Rockstars are lone wolves, write unmaintainable code that works quickly for demos but gives the company pain for years to come as nobody can figure out how to make it stable or maintain it. A rockstar's reputation is self reinforcing because it's easy to get a lot of shit done when one doesn't have to worry about maintainability, communication with the rest of the team members or the company at large, and service.
Senior devs balance development work and "service", a term I'll borrow from academia - hiring, mentoring, speaking, writing docs, etc. They either find fun in these tasks as well (I legit enjoy interviewing and mentoring), or understand this is a necessary part of being a well functioning team player at a senior level.
> Really, the problem is that online services (startups that are shutting down are the worst offenders) are allowed to destroy user data with reckless abandon.
How much are you paying them, per month, to safeguard your data?
> I've been interviewed by clearly hostile engineers... is a superb data point in an interview.
I agree, having someone be clearly hostile to you during an interview (which is often the first impression of what the culture at a particular company is like) is a great data point for the decision on whether to continue with the process of interviewing there.
This seems to be in the same category as not letting a child walk alone to school, in a Western country, because of fear of Islamic terrorists -- possible, but so unlikely it is statistically improbable.