Comment by markus_zhang

I'm a little older but I have found it strange how well economic crisis has been almost wiped from our collective memories

it was a horrible period and I have many friends who are in the same boat especially those not in software

Class of 2008 here. A couple years ago a 26 year old colleague whined he made only $130,000 a year. At his age I made $17 an hour photographing tennis rackets. My sympathies were limited…

sorry your math seems strange. You graduated from college in ‘08 - 17 years ago. You’re nearing 40. So let’s say you graduated at 23 … you’ve only had a college level job for five years?

The economy has been moving upward since 2013 - 12 years ago. What were you doing from 2013 to 2020?

I ask because I also graduated around ‘08. I’ve been a software developer since 2016. I’m currently a senior dev with almost a decade of experience.

There were really crappy years to start with, but I feel I’ve made up for it substantially.

My own parents graduated in the late 70s during a terrible economic recession.

It seems weathering economic recessions have been a tradition for several generations.

I still remember articles almost identical to the ones I see now; “this generation is screwed and there is no possible salvation.”

It’s getting old.

> I'm just now at a point in my career, nearing 40, where I should have been at 28.

What or who is the standard for where you “should have been at 28?”

Career progression is not everything, I'm approaching 40 and I'm doing the opposite, pivoting towards what I should have been doing at 28.

I'm literally one of these people. My only work experience is a GSoC internship in 2021. I have yet to get hired and I've been looking for 4 years, graduated in 2022 right before ChatGPT came out. I've had no choice but to become a generalist as a consequence, and over the last year or two my interviews have dropped to zero and absolutely none of the advice I've gotten from anybody has helped. Just my personal experience.

That list should surely had to prepend "pay off debt, live within your means"

Listening to Dave Ramsey on YT gets me amazed on how some people can be so irresponsible and accumulate debt on credit cards and cars they can't afford.

> turning in 1000's of job apps struggling to find a job

This is the entire problem. It's called job hunting, not job fishing. I.e. you should be seeking out specific exact positions that you know are worthwhile and tailoring yourself for them, not casting a net and hoping.

At some point you are going to have to grow up and take matters into your own hands instead of blaming everyone for your situation.

I’m not old. Just wise.

This is so condescending and infantilizing of young people. Of course many of them have it hard. They’re not the first, and they won’t be the last, but they’ll figure it out.

I graduated right before the collapse in 2008, and I’ve spent the last 17 years hustling, scraping, and clawing to make, save, and invest every dollar I could. It wasn’t easy, and after a divorce and a recent layoff, it’s still not. Particularly in one of the most expensive cities in the world, with kids and child support.

I worry a lot about my kids and their future economic prospects. I don’t want them to suffer, but the reality is that suffering comes for all of us, and saving and investing has been good advice for millennia. Blaming others and refusing to take responsibility for your own life and predicament has never been good advice. I hope my kids have the strength of character to resist the learned helplessness you’re offering here.

FI is more valuable than RE. After three years or so I got the itch again and decided to self fund my own thing. Also looking back on around 10 years ago more fondly..

Being FI helped me out greatly in December 2020 when My company laid off half of my team and expected me to take on double the load, including lots of extra after hours on-call support. I had a pretty great time not working for ~3 years during Covid. However, I am back to work after an old friend and boss offered me a WFH job that I couldn't refuse. He has since retired so I will stick around until current management pisses me off again, they downsize me or I just get sick of logging into teams/outlook at 7AM every morning.

>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.

Except the 401k is so tax advantaged that you are foolish to not use it as your basis for financial security. Pre-tax money + employer contributions mean 401k is far and away the fastest method of building up a significant chunk of capital to protect yourself from hardship. Yes there are penalties for early withdraw, but they come out far less than what you would alternately be able to build up with just post-tax savings from your paycheck.

And how are those who are not saving, affording to put down money for down payment and closing costs?

Saving for retirement doesn’t necessarily mean 401k but you can borrow from your 401k for down payment assistance so you really should be saving for your eventual retirement from day 1.

Only if you bid on the same houses. Bid on a smaller house.

Don't forget too that inflation works for you! If you save and get in a nice house early and the STAY THERE (I can't emphasize enough how important this is - sometimes life forces you to move, but avoid it), your payments measured against inflation will go down - just put that difference into a 401k (that is don't do a cash out refinance along the way as so many do) and in 30 years the house is paid off and your have a great retirement account.

When you are in the early years the above plan looks impossible, but time is your friend.

As an "Old" who was a kid in the late 70s to early 90s, I'm telling young folks that there is no first world poverty like there was then. Not just because "we" were poor, but because you couldn't get "stuff" anyway. Like, the biggest TV I ever saw back them was 25". Nobody had a computer. Unemployment across the board was high. I saw my first kiwi fruit or avocado when I was 10. Clothes were expensive (even thrift / store brand). "Stuff" of any kind was expensive or non existent.

Yesterday my BIL threw a perfectly working tower PC in the recycling because he couldn't find anyone (not even a charity shop) to take it. Last time I was at e-waste I saw half a dozen 42 inch TVs that I'm willing to bet we're working.

However we were wealthy in one way: we had a stable home, and optimism. I may have had old clothes, one pair of worn shoes and a 4th-hand uncool bicycle, but there was no question of ever losing the roof over my head. And there was a future that looked like it was full of possibilities. "Stuff" was getting cheaper and more available. I remember our family being able to afford our first microwave oven. Our first VCR (1991). We didn't get rich, things got cheaper.

Today, it's like we're looking at the future as if we're already post-peak, and it's all downhill from here. There's tons of stuff around but nobody wants it. People have also lost the positive attitude, optimism. It'll get you through a lot of bad times. Years and years of shit. Lose optimism, and it's all bleak no matter how big your TV is.

If I could choose a safe to be reborn in, I'd take "our" poverty of the past over this.

>the reality is that people usually spend more and save less than they could.

You can't save your way out of rent being 70, 80+% of your paycheck. For my area, minimum wage is $18 and your best hope for rent is sharing a $3k 2 bedroom apartment. quick napkin math suggests $2400 take home pay and ~$1800 eaten up between the rent split, utilities, gas, and the most basic rice and beans diet of "groceries". Not even including potential health insurance or car notes or student loans.

If you don't have the fortune of a family who'd house you for free/dirt cheap then you don't have much to save. You're already sacrificing for the present.

If you are offered a 401k, you have the means to max it out. People who make less than $60k aren’t usually offered 401k’s.

I’m not telling you to forgo partying. I’m telling you to pay yourself first, before you do. Don’t max out a credit card for a trip. Don’t cover the table’s check when you only have $200. Be responsible, but still have fun.

A younger person shouldn't max out their 401k unless they are rich. When you are young time works for you and so a maxed out 401k is a very large retirement in the future (which you might not even live to see!). The max is useful for older people who didn't start young.

Its just so weird how demonstrably insane the hype cycle this time around is. Everytime I think ChatGPT and Gemini are improving, it hits me with some monstrously stupid hallucinations. Here's how my conversation with GPT 5.1 went this afternoon:

>Can you please provide a reference for the assertion you just made

>Sure, here it is: <link>

> 404, please double check

> I apologize for the mistake, I have double checked, here is the corrected link: <link>

> Still 404, please always double check a link by actually visiting and reading it

x5 before I gave up.

I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.

My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out.

We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(

This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by

a) getting really good at clarifying requirements

b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.

This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.

Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood.

Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).

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

We've just hired a couple of graduates, with the expectation that they are going to take some time to grow.

What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out.

Others in the industry are seeing the same and it's quite likely that your resume is getting lost.

One practical advice for resume writers from me. PLEASE, just don't put stuff like "Improved the API responsiveness by 23.123897%". Unless it's a crazy number like 100x.

> 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.

What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well?

That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time.

Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.

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

I wouldn't be so sure about that, unless you mean $500K TC in 2019 dollars.

ZIRP might just come back, but it'll come with a higher price tag than the one from 2008.

On the long term, we're all dead.

I doubt things will recover to 2018 levels. Too many new software devs coming out each year, too much AI, too little big company growth once everyone already has an internet computer in their hands. The Wild West is over and now the digital economy has entered the boring phase.

Part of being a developer is innovating as rapidly as possible. We obsolete our own practices in a regular basis.

We should be the last occupation to be replaced by machines.

Maybe I’m stupid, but I’m stupidly optimistic.

Most deindustrialized regions in the West haven't recovered to full prosperity and are quite depressing to live in, sometimes even 30-40 years later: US Rust Belt, Wallonia in Belgium, the French North East, etc.

At a large enough scale, most people don't really move on, their lives are wrecked and they just suffer through them.

This is predicated on the myth that people can re-skill and move into new industries. Sure the former can happen and people can learn new things. But we're talking about an economy where there are no new industries. And an economy where you have to work in order to live.

What's a software developer in their 30s, 40s, and 50s supposed to re-skill into? Take on debt for the rest of their lives and re-skill into a profession (if they can even afford to take several years out of their lives to go back to school)? Into blue collar work along with the salary cut for which they might not have the physical capabilities for?

There's no social system for providing the necessities for living.

The other side of it is skill. Human societies have lost knowledge before. We've had to rediscover various aspects of metallurgy before. We could lose the ability to understand the technology we've made if we trust everything to the LLMs. There are already vibecoders who don't even be able to review the code that it generates for them because they're starting to lose the critical faculties and skills to understand it.

I feel this is more true in the sense that when they don't care about money you can get them below market value and not that they are better. I find the most valuable employees to be the financially literate ones. The ones who're constantly thinking about the money aspect.

'Will we get more customers?' 'Will they be more likely to stay with us?' 'Are we screwing ourselves out of sales by offering to host a server for remote control on the PC connected to the tool, even though it's cool and we can implement it in a week?'

I'm more on the 'do it because it's cool' side and have had to be wrangled a couple times with such questions since what makes interesting work for myself often doesn't align with client needs or hurts sales, as stupid as it might be.

This is very much tech bubble thinking.

Most developers in the US don’t work for tech companies and will never make ovdd $200K inflation adjusted. Developer salary is very much bimodal

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal

If you are working for boring old enterprise companies like banks, airlines, insurance companies or even most YC funded companies, “senior” developers will top out at around $160K-$170K inflation adjusted in tier 2 cities.

I spent my pure developer career [1] in Atlanta GA. Well known companies based there like Home Depot, Delta, Coke, and GE Transportation are paying their top developers around what entry level developers getting in BigTech.

But choose your non west coast city and you will see the same.

The thing is that there are enough people who are good enough enterprise CRUD developers - especially for remote roles and/or outsourced developers - that it’s hard to stand out from the crowd or command increasingly higher salaries. Gen AI has made the problem worse.

Even if you are targeting a major tech, if you are trying to differentiate yourself by how well you can reverse a btree on the white board, there are plenty of people who can do the same. It’s not a differentiator that you have previous experience in BigTech any more. So do thousands of others.