To an extent, I agree. At the same time, Karen may be in a similarly desperate situation. While the morally correct position would be to stand up to what is obviously wrong, Karen may need the paycheck to feed her kids. Karen herself is a row in a spreadsheet that the powers that be could replace in a heartbeat.
I'm not suggesting that this is any reason to support evil policies but I try to be sympathetic to struggles I may not be aware of.
https://www.openhab.org/ is a pretty established one (written in Java). Although if you're interested in one that isn't established and is very open to tweaking I've just refactored my home automation system and if other people were interested it would help my motivation to keep working on it (written in Go): https://github.com/alittlebrighter/igor
I'm mostly looking at remote jobs (There aren't a lot of openings at the smaller companies I'm applying to in Pittsburgh but of those I mostly haven't even gotten past the resume screen). I told them I was shooting for $120k/year although I was flexible. I've probably submitted 50ish applications so far.
My apologies, I'm in Pittsburgh in the USA and currently making 90k just for front-end work. According to the research I've done, 120k is on the low end for senior devs across the nation and perhaps just right, maybe a tad high for my local area.
This, I've gotten pretty fed up with my current company because management just hands out work with no real explanation. Even more frustrating is that any significant technical design work is done in closed door meetings where the only people invited are development and product managers.
I've stopped giving feedback and I'm nearly at a point where I've stopped being interested. It frees up my mind and motivates me to work on my own projects on nights and weekends so I can actually have a say.
I've had this happen to me and seen it happen as a third party. It's a cultural issue and whilst I can see that difficult to change in large companies, startups with this mentality often demoralise developers quickly IME.
This is often how waterfall projects are/were run in large companies historically but now companies want agile everywhere but they don't implement the right processes to facilitate it. You end up with behind closed door decisions, promises made by PO that it will be done in the next sprint, and at no point has anyone with either the courage or technical know-how stepped in to point out that it's not feasible.
I've found that most people are friendly enough to engage in light conversation. I agree that going any deeper than that has become much more difficult due to people becoming used to the barriers social media provides. In my experience though, I have to be willing to be authentic, and in a way vulnerable, before anybody else will open up. That is the only way to create real relationships IMO.
Good education should teach fundamental principles and theories that apply to every real world scenario within a domain. Unfortunately the push for "real world" education seems to have won in a lot of places. So you get people educated in how to solve very specific problems and are completely lost when any of the parameters are changed.
You can always start floating out your resume. Replace #2 with "transfer companies."
Honestly, smaller companies are not the best places to get into management because there aren't that many people to manage.
The key point is that you create a conversation between two people about your management potential. That way it becomes a social fact, as opposed to just a thought in one person's head, who may or may not act on it depending on how much they like you or want do to you a favor.
I'm not suggesting that this is any reason to support evil policies but I try to be sympathetic to struggles I may not be aware of.