@projectmoon @alda I have no certifications or licenses beyond that of a college degree. People self-select into these sorts of high integrity regulated careers - frauds get found out really fast due to the work process, it's a small industry, and unless you're a high-up exec there's not enough money here to make it worth the effort. Tech-wise it's no more or less demanding than software but the work is substantially more consequential. Why go through all that abuse just to spend your days gluing together frameworks to build yet another pointless and disposable website?

@alison @inthehands I'm going to say this as a Texan - why should you do the work? Why are we who are tolerant and compassionate burdened with catering to the bullshit of loud bigots, bending over backwards to get them to behave like decent folk and see us as people?

If this was some random grumpy ignorant individual, IMO conventional rules of compassion would be appropriate - I'm totally with your approach. Unfortunately we are up against well-funded organized hatred. IMO, there should be a social cost to being an aggressive dickhead, not necessarily tit-for-tat "Well, Texas is a shithole Mr. All-Hat-And-No-Cattle" abuse - but refusing to interact with them in any way that gives them satisfaction. No agreement, no argument, just quietly locking them out. Make them feel small and alone and ignored and make it real fucking clear it's because of the attitude they chose to walk in with.

By and large, Texans are surprisingly friendly and gregarious. But "don't start none and there won't be none" is a well-understood concept here. You want to walk in with performative cruelty and get treated with gracious hospitality? Think again, hoss. Sort your shit out or turn around and don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya...

@alda As a nuclear engineer, I have never been asked to show my portfolio of reactor designs I maintain in my free time, I have never been asked to derive the six-factor formula, the quantization of angular momentum, Brehmsstrahlung, or to whiteboard gas centrifuge isotopic separation, water hammer, hydrogen detonation, or cross-section resonance integrals.

There's something deeply wrong with an industry that presumes you're a fraud unless repeatedly and performatively demonstrated otherwise and treats the hiring process as a demented form of 80s-era fraternity hazing.