Two things 1) you mostly need your money now, to pay rent or mortgage, food, activities. In that cyclic markets like this are bad for devs. In choosing between

Two things 1) you mostly need your money now, to pay rent or mortgage, food, activities. In that cyclic markets like this are bad for devs. In choosing between a higher salary that comes with a non negligible chance that you won't have a salary at all for a sustained period, or lesser compensation but higher stability, I choose the latter. 2) The crazy increase of salaries was the result of the raise of demand, and got matched by a raise of offer. Offer is by nature much less elastic than demand: it takes years to make a good dev, but we turned from the hottest market ever to layoffs in under 6 months. The problem is that the offer creation machine (education) is not elastic as well. You can't recycle your CS degree into a construction degree very easily. This means that while the market is slow over the next few years, we will see waves of devs freshly minted out of college, in proportions that correspond to a hot market. Assuming that the demand was generated by actual value creation, and that it restarts in a frw years, it will be a long time until we get back to job safety and prosperity