It's 4981 years of hotel here (16.5€/night). There is no secret to discover in homelessness. They have housing and/or drug and/or mental disorder problem. They need to stop using drug, a good psy with a working treatment and a house. House is the simpler to fix. Let's start with that.
How does housing fix the drug or mental disorder problem? How do we pay for the housing or address the issues with supply and demand when providing free housing?
With engineering, very few engineers would start work on a design that only addresses a small part of the known problem space.
As someone who knows struggling addicts with good housing who would otherwise be homeless, yeah, housing does absolutely not fix the problem. It's so complicated.
Nihilism and a lack of a reason to care about getting better. Drugs offer a cheap escape from their grim view of reality. No friends who aren't addicts, so it's normalized.
A criminal record blocking gainful employment. Court mandated treatment programs that prevent people from moving away from their deadend town and self reinforcing social circle of addicts. Court mandated treatment that's forcing them to spend all of their time around other addicts, who only have drugs in common and thus have their relationships built on the shared interest in drugs, preventing them from participating in anything that would lead to a more productive social circle.
Their criminal record might mean that by an enormous margin the most lucrative thing they can do, and perhaps actually their only realistic hope of financial independence, freedom, and an escape from their miserable reality of barely scraping by spending most of their time doing things they hate, is to sell drugs, which is self reinforcing their environment.
If you're located near Paris, we are starting a new meetup about programming and startups. The first drink will be held the 6 november near Bastille (where the French Revolution started):
IRC is simple and efficient. It's a real pleasure for me to use it daily to talk to my fellow programmers. Yeah we don't have images but we have links and a pastebin (https://github.com/solusipse/fiche) to replace that.
I'm on #dailyprog at irc.rizon.net (https://dailyprog.org/). It's an irc-based programming community. We also share a server with ssh access.
We do small programming projects together. At the moment the idea is to make an exhausive list of all existing IRC servers with massscan and nmap (the output of the running massscan instance: https://dailyprog.org/~mabynogy/irc-servers.txt).
Coopting is the best alternative to any recruitment process. Best hiring are made like that. The cost is minimal. I know a bunch of people I can recommend. Just ask me (people in C++,JS,Go,CL and Python).
Is it right to invest so much time and energy in a company that isn't even yours?
I can't see the point of doing work demos dressed as pet projects unless you have a performance bonus or significant equity at stake.
Even then following blindly their "dogma" will make you look better, at least in the short and medium term.
Besides, they may even sue you for IP violation if you use any of their data/code/business rules for your datasets/program.
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Edit
I haven't read well the "inside" bit in inside your office hours in parent's post so my first point is moot and scarface74's remarks are on point. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Is it right to invest so much time and energy in a company that isn't even yours?
I can't see the point of doing work demos dressed as pet projects unless you have a performance bonus or significant equity at stake.
Yes it is right. A few different things will happen.
- They will see the error of thier ways, change direction, invest in your side project and give you a nice little raise/promotion/bonus for it (not likely)
- They will see the value of your idea, use it in thier business and give you a nice little pat on the head. You can use that on your resume and get another job making more money.
- They will not like your idea, but you still learned a lot and you can still leverage that to make more money somewhere else based on what you have learned.
Unless I have some great way of monetizing a side project (which I never do), I’d much rather do a side project for my employer. I get to see it out in the wild, I have a defined goal based on a real world use case, and it keeps me more disciplined from taking shortcuts because I know it will be reviewed by others and I can get thier opinions - even my managers.
