There is a difference between wanting to make money and wanting to have money.
If you understand the difference, it is often painfully obvious that most of us are in the last boat.
If you want something, you would typically be doing it already. Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch, but you might be more interested in asking questions than in giving answers. In that case, just try to enjoy life as long as it is smiling to you.
I’m 51 and have had 10 jobs over 30 years. Those jobs have been everything from startups, to boring stable small and medium “lifestyle companies”, to boring big enterprise, to $BigTech and now I work in customer facing cloud consulting as a staff consultant.
And I’ve never seen a market this shitty. Even after the dot com bust if you were a regular old enterprise dev - and at the time I had 4 years of experience as a Windows developer in Atlanta - it was easy to find a job. 2009-2011 was a shit show but it wasn’t that bad.
While I did find a job quickly after being Amazon’ed in 2023 and again last year, things have gutted worse since then.
My only strategy is to keep our fixed living expenses way down (less than half my income and I’m the only one working by choice), stay out of debt, keep a years saving in the bank, keep my resume updated and a longer form career document [1], keep my skillset in line with the market (I lead a lot of “AI” related non chatbot projects) and keep a strong network.
I feel a tinge of FOMO knowing that an intern I mentored while they were an intern an a year after coming back makes a little more than I make. They are 25 and a mid level SA at AWS - similar to what I do. I have to think about the story of the “Mexican Fisherman”.
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
[1] A career document is a detailed list of all of your accomplishments in STAR format that you keep updated quarterly.
Some great points in there. Yeah, in the boat of "wanting to have money" while having a job, where two years there is a layoff or restructuring. Trying to find a balance as an engineer in mid 30s and optimising for everything as life passed by, With little bit of fomo here and there!