Glad to see Boeing catching up :) The headlines in this space have been dominated by big names who are yet to demonstrate real capabilities, so it's good to see them taking baby steps.
Case in point: Our startup has been quietly flying a similar technology demonstrator since early 2018. While we don't get nearly as many headlines, occasionally something comes out: https://www.wired.com/story/beta-ava-flying-car-aviation/
PS: We're hiring :) If you are into hard software problems and want to join what could be the next Tesla but for aerospace, send me your resume: [email protected]
Obviously this is a very personal matter - i.e. if you don't enjoy managing people and prefer to tinker with, learn, and build things, pursuing a management career is the worst choice you can make from a happiness standpoint.
It's also not generally true that managers (even those with fancy titles) are more financially successful than engineers. By definition, there are far fewer VP/Director level positions than there are engineer positions, so everything else equal, as an engineer you have a lot more opportunities to pick and choose where you want to work, and that can be very financially rewarding.
I personally joined Twitter over a year before its IPO, and the financial reward there transformed my family's life. I am also incredibly proud of the products I've built over the years, whereas most work done by Directors/VPs at smaller companies wouldn't even come close to the reach and visibility of the work me and my fellow colleagues have done. (Take a look at my resume for added color: http://linkedin.com/in/arturadib).
One could easily imagine an opposite article written by someone who was a VP at several not-so-successful companies and never had anything to show.
Above all, choose what makes you happy. And if you're so fortunate as to have several equally fulfilling choices, and if financial reward matters to you, pick a company that is high-growth, hopefully pre-IPO, and negotiate at least a market-average stock compensation (glassdoor.com is your friend here).
Few know that Green Mountain Coffee (now Keurig Green Mountain) was started is still headquartered in Vermont. (GMC slowly acquired Keurig in the 90s, based in Massachusetts).
I have been living in VT for the last several years, and I'm pleasantly surprised by the sheer scale of unicorns this state has produced over the last 10 years: IDX (sold to GE Health for $1B+), Dealer.com (sold to Dealertrack for $1B+), and Keurig ($10B+).
Let this be an inspiration for entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs!
I've been using Meteor for months. It's such a pleasure to work with. It's what Rails should've been if it was written today.
They just keep on delivering on out-of-the-box functionality, compatibility with 3rd party libs, and more importantly - on a very solid architecture for real-time transport by guys who really know what they're doing.
This. We use it in our family mostly as a jukebox with occasional Siri-like fun (I'm now in the habit of asking for news updates from NPR every morning).
I still think we're missing the point; we're focusing on the wrong benchmarks. We're putting too much emphasis on JS speed, when in reality most web apps are behind native because of lack of (perceived) graphics performance.
The shortcut out of this requires a greater variety of GPU-accelerated CSS transitions/DOM changes, as well as easier computations and DOM manipulations off the main thread, which cause horribly noticeable UI hiccups. Web Workers are still too primitive (e.g. no DOM access whatsoever) and slow (e.g. no shared memory).
Not saying it's unimportant to improve JS's CPU performance; just saying that we're focusing too much on the wrong battle in the war against native.