N found a job opening in his field at a large company in St Louis. Then it turned out that they require COVID vaccination from all applicants. Obviously, he won’t apply because his job consists of sitting at home alone in front of a computer. This requirement isn’t about health. It’s about showing fealty.
The funny thing is that in order to do what he does, you need to have a very high IQ and be capable of extraordinarily high level of complex thinking. You simply can’t be an obedient lemming and do this job. The company in question will wait for a long time for anybody to apply. Our geographic area isn’t rich in this kind of specialist to begin with. N’s current job stood vacant for 7 years because they simply couldn’t find a specialist. And looking for people in other states isn’t easy either. In the places where quants tend to live, salary expectations are in a different galaxy because the cost of living is very different. Neither can the job be outsourced overseas because there is only half a dozen universities in the world which train these particular specialists, and they are all in the US.
These are very rare skills that require constant updating. N takes classes at MIT, Stanford, Princeton, etc all the time. There’s literally not been a single day in a decade when he didn’t sit with textbooks, lectures and instructional videos after work. The vaccine-loyal company is losing an opportunity to hire a unique specialist over something utterly unnecessary. This isn’t capitalism. This is a complete perversion of capitalist thinking where the guiding principle should be, as Kevin O’Leary aptly puts it “to make MMMONNNEY.”
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