4 ms·

Cause the median developer is now someone who went into it for the money. It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities avail

Cause the median developer is now someone who went into it for the money. It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.

klooney 1y ago
Housing inflation also really cuts down on everyone's ability to not be mercenary
- varispeed 1y ago
  It's not just housing. Imagine you want to start a business. There is not much commercial property available and if there is something, it is too expensive and wildly taxed.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    I was once told a story by an Argentinian. They have a business tax rate above 106% of profit[]. That is it is illegal for a business to make a profit. Yet there is apparently a video out there of a black market cart seller selling wares right in front of the Argentine tax office, totally unbothered. It made me wonder if this was just an allegory of what's in store for us. [] https://archive.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/country/a/argentina/ARG.pdf https://archive.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/...
    - zipy124 1y ago
      That number is not tax as a percent of profit like corporation Tax, but includes all contributions. For example 23.5 from that number is just social security paid by the company. In other developed countries like the UK we also have those sort of taxes (at 15% of pay in the UK). It is misleading of the report to give this number as a % of profit since then if a company makes no profit, it technically has an infinite tax rate, despite the fact the tax owed does not depend on the profit.
- davidw 1y ago
  Oh, I am so here for "housing theory of everything" comments! That is, in my other comment on this post, precisely my "interest in local politics". Working on fixing our housing shortage has felt extremely meaningful to me. I'd like to find some of that idealism in software again.
  - gia_ferrari 1y ago
    There are current efforts along these lines! For example, permitting is a huge bottleneck - software could be part of the solution (carefully and thoughtfully integrated, of course). Disclosure: I work at govstream.ai - we work in this space [we're hiring!]
    - davidw 1y ago
      Sent you an email. Not sure you got it...
- taurath 1y ago
  This is the root of it all. 8-10 years of experience with an above average pay rate means you can just start to afford a starter home in any of the tech hubs.
  - varispeed 1y ago
    That sounds dystopian. If you are a chicken with 5 years of experience laying eggs, you can just start to afford your own cage on the farm.
    - davidw 1y ago
      It is super bleak: yeah, as a software person, you can think about what it would take to afford a home. As a teacher or many other professions? Forget about it. You need to either marry someone with a more lucrative career, or move somewhere more affordable.
      - taurath 1y ago
        Yes exactly. There is a huge amount of people going into software development so they can have the basic security of owning their own dwelling. Prices have gone up even in non tech hubs. Home pricing vs what people earn is the reason for so much destitution in this country, and so many people are locked in its a complete non-issue for them, or a benefit.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    Rent a shoebox in a tech hub, save enough for a house in flyover country, then become a plumber there or something if remote is dead.
- Hammershaft 1y ago
  The single biggest determinant of people's cost of living, and the single biggest driver of backsliding living standards in many of the most productive cities in the US.
- emporas 1y ago
  When math starts falling from the sky, generated by AI of course and proved with theorem provers, then everything will start falling from the sky. There will be a way to have more houses than anyone would ever need, for every person on the planet.
mupuff1234 1y ago
I think it's more the MBA-fication of the industry. There's no time for exploring and tinkering, it's all just chasing after the next ticket/okr.
- StableAlkyne 1y ago
  The best model I've seen is the 3M-style "10% Time" Under that model, 10% of your time is completely up to you (within reason) to work on things that aren't your main project or scope. Works out well for R&D or more open ended positions, since you can have the flexibility to explore hunches without having to justify a whole project around it.
- godelski 1y ago
  Funny thing being is that doing that exploring and tinkering is what makes them more money. Otherwise you're just stuck with trying to make a thinner iPhone and that doesn't seem to be going all that well...
candiddevmike 1y ago
The people who hated thinking about and writing code think everyone else does (or should) too. Unfortunately these folks manipulated their way into management.
Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
I would often say that learning to code is a shortcut to six-figure salaries and a middle-class lifestyle. Unfortunately this is the consequence.
- huffer 1y ago
  So if only you could have kept your mouth shut, this would have never happened.. Burn the witch!
- fuzzfactor 1y ago
  And it's all a consequence of the dollar being so worthless by now that you need a six-figure income and still may not be able to afford a middle-class lifestyle in a growing number of places any more :\
JustExAWS 1y ago
It always makes me groan when I see this sentiment like back in the olden times, people got into development for “passion”. Sure I was a hobbyist in the 80s programming in assembly language on four separate architectures by the time I graduated college in 1996 in CS. But absolutely no one in my graduating class did it for the “passion” we all did it because we needed to exchange money for food and shelter. The people jumping into tech during the first tech boom were definitely doing it for the money and the old heads I met back then programming on Dec Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes, clocked in, did their job and clocked out.
- taude 1y ago
  People doing it now for money aren't the same as you likely doing it for the money in the old day. When I went into comp-sci, it wasn't the cool path to riches it's been marketed as for the past 15 years. EDIT: you graduated around the same time as me. Sure everyone wanted jobs. But there were easier paths to getting a good job in '95/96 that cramming late night comp-sci work. Almost everyone in my class had grown up in the age of hacking around on Apple IIs, their first PCs, etc. No one just randomly ended up in the Comp Sci part of the university because they just wanted a job to make money.
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    It wasn’t for the “riches” and there has never been a time where 90% of the developers working weren’t doing boring old enterprise dev making middle class wages. And most of the people in my class had their first exposure to computer programming at my state school in south GA was in college.
    - saltcured 1y ago
      Your experience is localized and perhaps more anecdotal than you admit. I also graduated and started my career in '96. But, I grew up in the SF Bay Area and did my CS major at UC Berkeley. I saw a lot more of the idealist types being described by others in these comments. It's not that we didn't expect to need jobs, but there was more passion-driven interest. Back then, it seemed like people "just in it for money" or to meet family expectations were more often going to pre-law or pre-med. I had a focus on programming languages in my undergrad studies and went into an academic R&D programming job, basically making tools for computational sciences. I've basically spent my whole career using and writing open source software. I've definitely seen a kind of culture shift where the frontier nature of our old R&D culture is getting drowned out by boring process. To me, it is largely the influx of cybersecurity compliance that is killing the old culture. The bureaucratic compliance overhead is antithetical to the small team prototyping approach that drove progress during most of my career. It inspires a sort of cargo cult risk-management process that seems more about appearances and plausible deniability than actual secure systems.
SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
I love computers, but I'm tired. I spend all day doing stand-ups and scrum and SAFE and then trying to build microservices that talk to other microservices that other teams have built and I just want to get it done with the minimal amount of explosions and call it a day. I can't afford to tinker at my job, and I have no energy at night. I made my hobby my job and it killed it.
- throwawaysleep 1y ago
  To be candid, even though my jobs have time to tinker, I don’t want to fight with Product or Management to get improvements into prod. Took me half a year to get them to value Sentry, lol. I’ll just collect my check and go do something else.
  - whstl 1y ago
    Exactly the situation in pretty much every company I worked at in the last 10 years. Fighting the Product Manager, fighting the Designer, sometimes even fighting some micromanaging stakeholder that won't leave you alone. It's definitely fights I can win, but do I even have the energy anymore? Development work involves more than meets the eye. While there are some folks who understand the technical intricacies, it's tiring having to join discussions you know won't go anywhere. I wish it was 2000-2010 again, when my biggest problems were Sales promising features we don't have and then having fun with the other devs coding it.
- downrightmike 1y ago
  The larger the environment, the more brain power it takes. Microservices didn't help with that
- stalfosknight 1y ago
  This right here is how I feel about this too. I used to have a lot more mental bandwidth and energy to be "curious" and to tinker once upon a time. But now the world is so literally and figuratively on fire and every executive is so rabidly frothing at the mouth over AI that now I just want things to "just work" with the least amount of bullshit so I can just go home on time and forget about work until the next business day. I just want this fucked decade to be over already.
varispeed 1y ago
Don't know about other countries, but here in the UK there is no longer money in the development. Subsequent governments turned the profession into the captive market, where you can only realistically work for corporations who fix the wages by following so called "market rates" and you cannot create your own job if you disagree with the rates.
- hshshshshsh 1y ago
  Tons of high paying jobs in FAANG and similar in London. What are you even talking about?
  - colesantiago 1y ago
    This is the very very small minority. Jobs in London pay less than peanuts and if you earn six figures in the UK, income tax takes half of it anyway even if you go to FAANG.
  - zipy124 1y ago
    Median pay for a dev in London is about £60-65k(a out $87,000). This isn't that high given the cost of living in the city, with your average shared flat with a few roommates going at about £1k a month nowadays. Add in that you'll be hitting the marginal tax rate of 40% plus 9% student loan tax and about 8% national insurance (ok income under 4k a month) and you don't end up with that much to live on. The average university grad would be better off in law/finance/medicine by income in London. This isn't to stay the top software Devs don't get paid a lot, but it's a minority compared to the legions of high paid people in finance in London and the surrounding industries.
- FredPret 1y ago
  I was always under the impression that high level UK engineers tend to become freelance consultants so as to get paid an appropriate amount - is this not true (anymore)?
  - colesantiago 1y ago
Scubabear68 1y ago
Agree, the money is the key here. I got started in the 1980s, and super-curious and technical people were the norm. We were incredibly strongly attracted to computers. The first real growth in computers in that kind of era was Wall Street and banks. Wall Street in particular started paying huge bonuses to developers because it was clear that software could make huge piles of money. Then we started seeing more people joining in for the money who were not necessarily passionate about technology. Then came the dot com era and bust, and then the rise of social media, FAANG, and absurd corporate valuations allowing ridiculous total comp to developers, and the needle moved even more towards money. The net result is the curious and the passionate are still here, but our numbers are massively diluted. I come places like here to find that passionate niche.
taude 1y ago
Exactly what the OP is saying.... This has been happening since the 2008 financial crash when a lot of people would have normally gone into careers on Wall Street, but the shrinking Wall Street job market led people into tech as a high-performant, decent paying career..... (U.S. biased opinion, of course)
hk1337 1y ago
> It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available. That's not entirely true. We (society, definitely US) pushed going to college HARD for the last 3-4 decades and glamorizing how much money you'll make. Now, we have an overabundance of people with college degrees and thousands of dollars in debt to those degrees. There's plenty of career paths where you could make decent money that don't require a college degree. We should have been pushing people to figure out what they wanted to do, not "Make lots of money", and figure out the path that gets them there.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  We should have figured out how that get some of the benefits of productivity gains to go to workers. We were promised a rising tide lifts all ships, but now that the tide rose and is started to go back out, those that promised didn't deliver but keeping hoping we won't notice.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    You're acting like it's something we don't have a solution for... that's not the issue, it's about insuring the investor class from winning capitalism and owning everything.
  - bpt3 1y ago
    Do you honestly believe that workers received 0% of the productivity gains over the last 40+ years? It's wild how this site has turned into reddit over the last couple years.
- downrightmike 1y ago
  We did push people into what they wanted to do: make money. The sad reality is that "everyone learn to code" was by and large a marketing distraction from the severe structural unemployment the fast and loose economy is in. No a coal miner can't just learn to code and get a job in WV, certainly not 1,000's of other miner sin the same position, not can the millions of people that corporate laid off over those same decades. Coding was a way out of poverty, but for most people it was just a distraction to keep them from seeing how bad the economy is. Americans are poor: PNC Bank's annual Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report shows that 67 percent of workers now say they are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/2025-rise-americans-living-paycheck-2128753 https://www.newsweek.com/2025-rise-americans-living-paycheck...
goalieca 1y ago
In defence, it's not just the developer. Every tech company seems to be copying the FAANG template of constantly having to prove your value and looking over your shoulder. There's no more "tenure" if you want to call it that. We've gone like academia where it's publish or perish and now everyone games the system to keep their luxury jobs.
epolanski 1y ago
This so much. I interviewed many people from top universities and they absolutely scream "I couldn't care less about the field, I'm just here to maximize the compensation". At the same time I get 19 year old self taught kids who are miles better at programming, learning and are genuinely passionate.
JohnMakin 1y ago
You say this as if it is a negative connotation and it seems to be ignoring realities of the modern world. My first trip through college I studied business and then the economy collapsed. Most people my age eeked their way through menial jobs (like me) and survived, found a way to break through, or, (like me) went back to school years later when the economy improved to try to find another opportunity. For me the choices were CS or nursing at that time, and I have always been good at math and with computers, so I chose that. I wouldn't say I ever "loved" development, especially not the current corporate flavor of it. I've had some side projects when I get time and energy. But there's never really been a point in my life where I could ever have afforded getting the level of expertise I possess now just for the "curiosity" of it. Not everyone has a trust fund or safety nets.
kilroy123 1y ago
While that is true, there is more to it than that. Some people _really_ do like coding and want to build cool shit. Just the bar is so high now, so much competition, so many cargo culting startups that only do bad leetcode interviewing. It's very hard to both find and get hired at places that want more than a coding monkey to just blindly move Jira tickets.

Cause the median developer is now someone who went into it for the money. It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.

klooney 1y ago

Housing inflation also really cuts down on everyone's ability to not be mercenary

varispeed 1y ago
It's not just housing. Imagine you want to start a business. There is not much commercial property available and if there is something, it is too expensive and wildly taxed.
- mothballed 1y ago
  I was once told a story by an Argentinian. They have a business tax rate above 106% of profit[]. That is it is illegal for a business to make a profit. Yet there is apparently a video out there of a black market cart seller selling wares right in front of the Argentine tax office, totally unbothered. It made me wonder if this was just an allegory of what's in store for us. [] https://archive.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/country/a/argentina/ARG.pdf https://archive.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/...
  - zipy124 1y ago
    That number is not tax as a percent of profit like corporation Tax, but includes all contributions. For example 23.5 from that number is just social security paid by the company. In other developed countries like the UK we also have those sort of taxes (at 15% of pay in the UK). It is misleading of the report to give this number as a % of profit since then if a company makes no profit, it technically has an infinite tax rate, despite the fact the tax owed does not depend on the profit.
davidw 1y ago
Oh, I am so here for "housing theory of everything" comments! That is, in my other comment on this post, precisely my "interest in local politics". Working on fixing our housing shortage has felt extremely meaningful to me. I'd like to find some of that idealism in software again.
- gia_ferrari 1y ago
  There are current efforts along these lines! For example, permitting is a huge bottleneck - software could be part of the solution (carefully and thoughtfully integrated, of course). Disclosure: I work at govstream.ai - we work in this space [we're hiring!]
  - davidw 1y ago
    Sent you an email. Not sure you got it...
taurath 1y ago
This is the root of it all. 8-10 years of experience with an above average pay rate means you can just start to afford a starter home in any of the tech hubs.
- varispeed 1y ago
  That sounds dystopian. If you are a chicken with 5 years of experience laying eggs, you can just start to afford your own cage on the farm.
  - davidw 1y ago
    It is super bleak: yeah, as a software person, you can think about what it would take to afford a home. As a teacher or many other professions? Forget about it. You need to either marry someone with a more lucrative career, or move somewhere more affordable.
    - taurath 1y ago
      Yes exactly. There is a huge amount of people going into software development so they can have the basic security of owning their own dwelling. Prices have gone up even in non tech hubs. Home pricing vs what people earn is the reason for so much destitution in this country, and so many people are locked in its a complete non-issue for them, or a benefit.
- mothballed 1y ago
  Rent a shoebox in a tech hub, save enough for a house in flyover country, then become a plumber there or something if remote is dead.
Hammershaft 1y ago
The single biggest determinant of people's cost of living, and the single biggest driver of backsliding living standards in many of the most productive cities in the US.
emporas 1y ago
When math starts falling from the sky, generated by AI of course and proved with theorem provers, then everything will start falling from the sky. There will be a way to have more houses than anyone would ever need, for every person on the planet.

mupuff1234 1y ago

I think it's more the MBA-fication of the industry. There's no time for exploring and tinkering, it's all just chasing after the next ticket/okr.

StableAlkyne 1y ago
The best model I've seen is the 3M-style "10% Time" Under that model, 10% of your time is completely up to you (within reason) to work on things that aren't your main project or scope. Works out well for R&D or more open ended positions, since you can have the flexibility to explore hunches without having to justify a whole project around it.
godelski 1y ago
Funny thing being is that doing that exploring and tinkering is what makes them more money. Otherwise you're just stuck with trying to make a thinner iPhone and that doesn't seem to be going all that well...

candiddevmike 1y ago

The people who hated thinking about and writing code think everyone else does (or should) too. Unfortunately these folks manipulated their way into management.

Sohcahtoa82 1y ago

I would often say that learning to code is a shortcut to six-figure salaries and a middle-class lifestyle. Unfortunately this is the consequence.

huffer 1y ago
So if only you could have kept your mouth shut, this would have never happened.. Burn the witch!
fuzzfactor 1y ago
And it's all a consequence of the dollar being so worthless by now that you need a six-figure income and still may not be able to afford a middle-class lifestyle in a growing number of places any more :\

JustExAWS 1y ago

It always makes me groan when I see this sentiment like back in the olden times, people got into development for “passion”. Sure I was a hobbyist in the 80s programming in assembly language on four separate architectures by the time I graduated college in 1996 in CS. But absolutely no one in my graduating class did it for the “passion” we all did it because we needed to exchange money for food and shelter. The people jumping into tech during the first tech boom were definitely doing it for the money and the old heads I met back then programming on Dec Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes, clocked in, did their job and clocked out.

taude 1y ago
People doing it now for money aren't the same as you likely doing it for the money in the old day. When I went into comp-sci, it wasn't the cool path to riches it's been marketed as for the past 15 years. EDIT: you graduated around the same time as me. Sure everyone wanted jobs. But there were easier paths to getting a good job in '95/96 that cramming late night comp-sci work. Almost everyone in my class had grown up in the age of hacking around on Apple IIs, their first PCs, etc. No one just randomly ended up in the Comp Sci part of the university because they just wanted a job to make money.
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  It wasn’t for the “riches” and there has never been a time where 90% of the developers working weren’t doing boring old enterprise dev making middle class wages. And most of the people in my class had their first exposure to computer programming at my state school in south GA was in college.
  - saltcured 1y ago
    Your experience is localized and perhaps more anecdotal than you admit. I also graduated and started my career in '96. But, I grew up in the SF Bay Area and did my CS major at UC Berkeley. I saw a lot more of the idealist types being described by others in these comments. It's not that we didn't expect to need jobs, but there was more passion-driven interest. Back then, it seemed like people "just in it for money" or to meet family expectations were more often going to pre-law or pre-med. I had a focus on programming languages in my undergrad studies and went into an academic R&D programming job, basically making tools for computational sciences. I've basically spent my whole career using and writing open source software. I've definitely seen a kind of culture shift where the frontier nature of our old R&D culture is getting drowned out by boring process. To me, it is largely the influx of cybersecurity compliance that is killing the old culture. The bureaucratic compliance overhead is antithetical to the small team prototyping approach that drove progress during most of my career. It inspires a sort of cargo cult risk-management process that seems more about appearances and plausible deniability than actual secure systems.

SketchySeaBeast 1y ago

I love computers, but I'm tired. I spend all day doing stand-ups and scrum and SAFE and then trying to build microservices that talk to other microservices that other teams have built and I just want to get it done with the minimal amount of explosions and call it a day. I can't afford to tinker at my job, and I have no energy at night. I made my hobby my job and it killed it.

throwawaysleep 1y ago
To be candid, even though my jobs have time to tinker, I don’t want to fight with Product or Management to get improvements into prod. Took me half a year to get them to value Sentry, lol. I’ll just collect my check and go do something else.
- whstl 1y ago
  Exactly the situation in pretty much every company I worked at in the last 10 years. Fighting the Product Manager, fighting the Designer, sometimes even fighting some micromanaging stakeholder that won't leave you alone. It's definitely fights I can win, but do I even have the energy anymore? Development work involves more than meets the eye. While there are some folks who understand the technical intricacies, it's tiring having to join discussions you know won't go anywhere. I wish it was 2000-2010 again, when my biggest problems were Sales promising features we don't have and then having fun with the other devs coding it.
downrightmike 1y ago
The larger the environment, the more brain power it takes. Microservices didn't help with that
stalfosknight 1y ago
This right here is how I feel about this too. I used to have a lot more mental bandwidth and energy to be "curious" and to tinker once upon a time. But now the world is so literally and figuratively on fire and every executive is so rabidly frothing at the mouth over AI that now I just want things to "just work" with the least amount of bullshit so I can just go home on time and forget about work until the next business day. I just want this fucked decade to be over already.

varispeed 1y ago

Don't know about other countries, but here in the UK there is no longer money in the development. Subsequent governments turned the profession into the captive market, where you can only realistically work for corporations who fix the wages by following so called "market rates" and you cannot create your own job if you disagree with the rates.

hshshshshsh 1y ago
Tons of high paying jobs in FAANG and similar in London. What are you even talking about?
- colesantiago 1y ago
  This is the very very small minority. Jobs in London pay less than peanuts and if you earn six figures in the UK, income tax takes half of it anyway even if you go to FAANG.
- zipy124 1y ago
  Median pay for a dev in London is about £60-65k(a out $87,000). This isn't that high given the cost of living in the city, with your average shared flat with a few roommates going at about £1k a month nowadays. Add in that you'll be hitting the marginal tax rate of 40% plus 9% student loan tax and about 8% national insurance (ok income under 4k a month) and you don't end up with that much to live on. The average university grad would be better off in law/finance/medicine by income in London. This isn't to stay the top software Devs don't get paid a lot, but it's a minority compared to the legions of high paid people in finance in London and the surrounding industries.
FredPret 1y ago
I was always under the impression that high level UK engineers tend to become freelance consultants so as to get paid an appropriate amount - is this not true (anymore)?
- colesantiago 1y ago

Scubabear68 1y ago

Agree, the money is the key here. I got started in the 1980s, and super-curious and technical people were the norm. We were incredibly strongly attracted to computers. The first real growth in computers in that kind of era was Wall Street and banks. Wall Street in particular started paying huge bonuses to developers because it was clear that software could make huge piles of money. Then we started seeing more people joining in for the money who were not necessarily passionate about technology. Then came the dot com era and bust, and then the rise of social media, FAANG, and absurd corporate valuations allowing ridiculous total comp to developers, and the needle moved even more towards money. The net result is the curious and the passionate are still here, but our numbers are massively diluted. I come places like here to find that passionate niche.

taude 1y ago

Exactly what the OP is saying.... This has been happening since the 2008 financial crash when a lot of people would have normally gone into careers on Wall Street, but the shrinking Wall Street job market led people into tech as a high-performant, decent paying career..... (U.S. biased opinion, of course)

hk1337 1y ago

> It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available. That's not entirely true. We (society, definitely US) pushed going to college HARD for the last 3-4 decades and glamorizing how much money you'll make. Now, we have an overabundance of people with college degrees and thousands of dollars in debt to those degrees. There's plenty of career paths where you could make decent money that don't require a college degree. We should have been pushing people to figure out what they wanted to do, not "Make lots of money", and figure out the path that gets them there.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago
We should have figured out how that get some of the benefits of productivity gains to go to workers. We were promised a rising tide lifts all ships, but now that the tide rose and is started to go back out, those that promised didn't deliver but keeping hoping we won't notice.
- pixl97 1y ago
  You're acting like it's something we don't have a solution for... that's not the issue, it's about insuring the investor class from winning capitalism and owning everything.
- bpt3 1y ago
  Do you honestly believe that workers received 0% of the productivity gains over the last 40+ years? It's wild how this site has turned into reddit over the last couple years.
downrightmike 1y ago
We did push people into what they wanted to do: make money. The sad reality is that "everyone learn to code" was by and large a marketing distraction from the severe structural unemployment the fast and loose economy is in. No a coal miner can't just learn to code and get a job in WV, certainly not 1,000's of other miner sin the same position, not can the millions of people that corporate laid off over those same decades. Coding was a way out of poverty, but for most people it was just a distraction to keep them from seeing how bad the economy is. Americans are poor: PNC Bank's annual Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report shows that 67 percent of workers now say they are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/2025-rise-americans-living-paycheck-2128753 https://www.newsweek.com/2025-rise-americans-living-paycheck...

goalieca 1y ago

In defence, it's not just the developer. Every tech company seems to be copying the FAANG template of constantly having to prove your value and looking over your shoulder. There's no more "tenure" if you want to call it that. We've gone like academia where it's publish or perish and now everyone games the system to keep their luxury jobs.

epolanski 1y ago

This so much. I interviewed many people from top universities and they absolutely scream "I couldn't care less about the field, I'm just here to maximize the compensation". At the same time I get 19 year old self taught kids who are miles better at programming, learning and are genuinely passionate.

JohnMakin 1y ago

You say this as if it is a negative connotation and it seems to be ignoring realities of the modern world. My first trip through college I studied business and then the economy collapsed. Most people my age eeked their way through menial jobs (like me) and survived, found a way to break through, or, (like me) went back to school years later when the economy improved to try to find another opportunity. For me the choices were CS or nursing at that time, and I have always been good at math and with computers, so I chose that. I wouldn't say I ever "loved" development, especially not the current corporate flavor of it. I've had some side projects when I get time and energy. But there's never really been a point in my life where I could ever have afforded getting the level of expertise I possess now just for the "curiosity" of it. Not everyone has a trust fund or safety nets.

kilroy123 1y ago

While that is true, there is more to it than that. Some people _really_ do like coding and want to build cool shit. Just the bar is so high now, so much competition, so many cargo culting startups that only do bad leetcode interviewing. It's very hard to both find and get hired at places that want more than a coding monkey to just blindly move Jira tickets.