Comment by cal_dent

> So you read nothing about how graduates during 2008 pretty much had forever stunted careers?

Myself included. Graduated in '08, had to work various minimum wage jobs in retail for several years because no one was hiring. I'm just now at a point in my career, nearing 40, where I should have been at 28.

Degree doesn't matter much when your only work experience is 5 years of working at Starbucks, and you barely have personal projects because you're too busy working 2 jobs to just to survive.

Those of us who suffered through that time period barely recovered, and many didn't recover at all. It shaped an entire generation.

Here's the study on that:

https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/77/4/78...

>> Across a generation’s life course, early-life advantages are magnified through disparate occupational and social trajectories that lead to wide late-life disparities in financial and health resources, in a process first termed by Crystal and Shea as one of “cumulative advantage and disadvantage” (CAD; Crystal, 1982, 1986, 2020; Crystal et al., 1992, 2017; Crystal & Shea, 1990b; Dannefer, 1987, 1988). Dannefer (1987) described the trend of increasing inequality over the life course as the “Matthew effect,” applying a biblical dictum first used by Merton (1968), stating that “to he who has much, more is given, and to he who has little, even that is taken.” This ongoing process has also been described as an “obdurate tendency” for increasing inequality over the life course (Dannefer, 2020).

I mean, it caused me to emigrate to a growth economy. If I stayed in the West, I don't think I would have been OK.

You telling someone with 50k in debt, turning in 1000's or job apps struggling to find a job they studied 4+ years for and not being able to even pay rent to "just save"... is exactly how we got into this situation to begin with.

I'm gonna have to hold your hand when I tell you this: when you tell the younger generation to "save" or "invest" they are going to walk away from that conversation knowing they were just speaking with one of the most mind-numbingly naive Olds they're going to encounter in probably the next several months.

Please, if you ever want any respect from anyone younger than you ever again in your entire life, do not say those words again.

I'm a bit over 40, not liking parts of my FAANG job, worried I'll lose it, and worried no where in the industry is as fun as 12 years ago, but being on the low end of Fat FIRE makes it a lot easier.

That advice isn't correct for someone who is just finishing school now. They need to stay alive in a down ecconomy where they can't find a job.

In a couple years when things recover (or at least they find a job) it starts to be good advice. Even then I question max 401k - time works for the young and so a maxed 401k makes for too much money in retirement and not enough to enjoy now. Save for retirement yes, but max is too much when you are young - and if you keep saving will always be too much. Max 401k is good for the rich, or those who didn't start young and so their accounts are way behind.

If you save for retirement, you will be outbid for housing by those who are not saving.

Others are criticizing you but the reality is that people usually spend more and save less than they could. There are plenty of people with modest income who manage to build a decent retirement. But it takes discipline. You have to be okay with sacrificing for the future.

> I tell the younger generation the same thing. Save, invest, max 401k, before you go off and party. Your older self will thank you.

401k max is $24,500. How much do you expect a person to earn to be able to max it out? And what percentile income is that at the bottom and top of the age range you consider “young”?

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-age-calculator/

Tldr: you are telling almost every 20 to 30 year old to not party.

Nah. It's not different. Money in the tech industry has always chased the hype cycle. We're approaching the peak of inflated expectations for LLMs and then in a few years the AI industry will crash into the trough of disillusionment. That doesn't mean that LLMs are useless but in many sectors of the real economy they will have only a slow and limited impact.

https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...

New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree.

Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management.

If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.

It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI.

None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat.

Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower.

The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment.

Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away.

Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.

We gotta gather ourselves and remind companies why they once paid handsomely to not let potential disruptiors run rampant on the market. Long term new teams will form once productivity is valued again and not this giant incestuous GDP-maxmizing scheme.

The comparison to greenhouse gases doesn’t make sense. Corps pay a lot for developers right now because they get more value out of them than they cost. As long as that remains true, devs will be fine.

> I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed

I never understood this sentiment. We don't have a massive manual weaving industry anymore, 95%+ of people used to be farmers in 1900. Tech comes and replaces humans, and the transition can be extremely painful especially for the people replaced, but ultimately it's better than keeping people artificially employed in obsolete jobs.

(I don't think SWE will be obsolete, but even in this case I'd rather switch careers)

Depends on your definition of “compete”. Compete for VC funding and continually increasing growth? You’re right. Compete as in stay profitable and have a future? Less clear-cut.

It's easier to lower standards than to raise them.

There's always a race to the bottom. I don't think it's a big leap to suggest that what's considered the "minimum viable product" has decreased over the years. It's also no secret that software is getting worse.

As to salaries, I think you forgot how things worked before. The reason companies like Google introduced free food and all the incentives was because increasing salaries was not a better way to attract better talent, since salaries were already high. So either now something has changed where better talent cares more about money or we're attracting talent that cares more about money. As in either the same people changed or we're attracting a different type of person. Personally, regardless of age, regardless of field, I've seen a strong correlation with the best people not caring as much about money. Once the salary is good then they care more about how interesting the work is or how they can reduce stress in their life. Money matters, but it has decreasing utility as it grows.

It was very much bimodal. If you were working in BigTech or adjacent, that was definitely true. If you were working in enterprise dev like most of the 2.5 million+ developers working in a tier 2 city outside of the west coast in the US, comp was definitely stagnating.

In 2016, I knew I had to do something when my (step)son graduated in 2020 and my wife was willing to move anywhere the money took us.

It just so happened that a job fell into my lap at AWS working (full time) in the consulting department. I am no longer there. I now work at a third party consulting firm as a staff consultant specializing in app dev.

Yeah someone joining a good company as a senior engineer in 2015 would retire with about 15M in assets now assuming smart investments (say... half on big tech stocks, half in market indices)

Someone joining now on the other hand, might have to resort to physical work at some point in the next ten years of things go south.

> Now, everybody knows enough of how to do it that it's assumed for many roles

Is it? I don't know anyone who can code proficiently outside of people who work tech jobs (or used to).

For me, I saw it happening around 2014. I was six years out of the long fog of my “expert beginner” phase and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I was considered a “senior” [1] full stack developer and no matter what I did - mobile, actually learn front end better, I was still going to top out at around $150K (and sadly enough, that is still what I’m seeing in Atlanta when I lurk on LinkedIn).

I knew I had to get into BigTech or adjacent after my son graduated as a software engineer.

Around 2016 I belatedly discovered cloud consulting where consultants would come in and “transform” organizations. I learned in hindsight that they were a bunch of old school net ops folks who only knew how to do bad lift and shifts that costs the company more money and treated AWS like a Colo.

I wanted to do the same but focus on what I learned the term for years later was “modernization”. Bringing in a software developers mindset on cloud consulting. By 2020, I was no longer thinking about BigTech and was focused on getting into consulting. I had never heard of AWS’s Professional Services department until a recruiter told me about it. Even then I didn’t know it was full time working for AWS directly until that was also explained to me.

[1] yes in hindsight I know that a title of “senior” to someone who pulls well defined tickets off a Jira board is laughable.

A common pattern is: people (I supposed I mean: investors) are somewhat worried that markets are over valued. They ponder, think, research, binge-watch Prof G videos... Then they travel to have Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of in-laws. Market gets discussed over cigars. If they get a confirmation signal from the brother in law attorney or sister in law dentist that they are worried too...then after mulling it over on the flight back to Denver...the market dumps on Monday.

Love that HODL optimism. Looking at the longer charts there seems to be support around $80k so maybe. This could just be holiday shopping. The timing of economics with this though has me worried the support will falter causing a sell off and Monday’s bell will be a bloodbath.

Even if you waste half your groceries its still cheaper than eating out. And wasting that much is difficult to do, most staples will last weeks to years without risk of spoilage.

There are some fresh fruits and vegetables that are exceptions because they dont take well to refrigeration or freezing but really not much.

This is just wrong. Beans and rice are more than an order of magnitude cheaper than McDonald's per calorie and they're non-perishable. Combine that with whatever fruit and veg is affordable fresh or frozen, a bit of cheap seasoning, and you're still coming out ahead.

You obviously need access to cooking and storage facilities to eat like this, but the target audience of McDonald's is the time-poor, the resource-constrained, or the depressed and disabled, rather than just the money-poor.

What hourly wage are you imputing to your cooking to get US$10 for a meal of asparagus, chicken, and rice? My estimate for the materials would be:

- 250g raw chicken wings: $375 ≈ 30¢ (I bought these on Saturday, so this is the current price)

- 200g asparagus: $1500 ≈ US$1 (this is a rough guess because I never buy it and the greengrocer doesn't have a web site)

- 100g dry long-grain rice: $100 ≈ 7¢ (just checked the price online, and I think this is rather high)

- water to drink and cook the rice is unmetered here

Total: US$1.37. But you could easily get it down to less than half that with a different vegetable. Salts, spices, and oils might add a few pennies.

Possibly if you are at McMurdo Base or something your ingredient prices might be unusual.

>cooking is about US$10/meal give or take (asparagus, chicken, rice, water to drink).

You must be eating an absolute TON to eat $10 worth of chicken, asparagus, and rice. I just checked the prices at Target and rice is $1.89 for 2 pounds, chicken thighs are $1.69 a pound. Asparagus is spendier at $5 for 1 pound.

How many pounds of chicken and asparagus are you eating? Even if you ate two pounds of chicken and the entire pound of asparagus you aren't hitting $10.

10/meal is very expensive, fyi. A rotisserie costco chicken is $5 for reference; rice and beans is essentially free. Cabbage nearly so.

...and add the time for preparation, cleaning up etc.: Thats one of the most frustrating things when cooking for one person - you invest 45min to eat 5min and the rest is "organisation & logistics"