> who exactly are these people? I went from making 60k (annualized) for the last 9 months doing customer service with a side order of sales with a high school

> who exactly are these people? I went from making 60k (annualized) for the last 9 months doing customer service with a side order of sales with a high school diploma and half an associates degree in computer programming working from home and recently got laid off along with all my colleagues. Now most of the similar jobs I'm looking at are paying closer to 40k and require me to move from $small-city to Seattle to do a job I'm not terribly excited about for less money than it costs to live very well in Seattle. I was looking forward to getting out of the apartment where I have twice had to fight lunatics one who attacked my wife in the course of breaking in and another the drug dealer who assaulted a neighbor who is probably the same fellow who tried to burn the apartment building down twice by setting fires at the top of the interior stairwell when we all lost our jobs. Now I'm going through a programming boot camp and looking forward to the fun of competing with a horde of people with actual degrees and trying to formulate a tenable fallback position. Meanwhile I'm fighting the unemployment folks for the privilege of actually getting unemployment during training as is allowed by law on the basis that since my position is considered "in demand" I ought to be required to look for work that probably wont pay enough to live and wait to be replaced by some combination of chatGPT and automation. If experience holds true they will hopefully withhold everything for months then pay out refilling my small savings partially. More generally by any measure every workplace has people with a range of effectiveness. Every workplace has a bottom 50% in terms of actual ability or in terms of being able to sell themselves. You might have someone in the top 20% who is in the bottom 20% in ability to sell themselves and negotiate. Nobody not in a moderate to high percentile of both is thinking of such a situation as an opportunity they are shitting themselves. Furthermore once you leave the rarefied of the well paid professional it becomes increasingly unlikely that people have a sufficient cushion to cover taking the time to find yourself an optimal environment. People are in fact going to scramble for options and the things at the forefront of their mind is going to be generalized anxiety and every bad job they've ever had and the worry about ending up stuck in a similar situation because they have to take something soon in order to keep paying rent.