I feel like outside of the AI advancements, 2019 is a timeless year, and not much has changed from 2019-2024. Has it felt like anything has significantly changed since then? 2024 is just 2019 with ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
Yup. The BLS suggests about a 20-25% increase on food between 2019 and 2022, and that's backed up by independent estimates. That said, we've seen much larger spikes in the past; in the 1970s you can see spikes in that ballpark in one year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1hsGr
> Finding a job seems way tougher now, too, even though they're claiming a 3.7% unemployment rate.
Maybe in tech (chiefly on the more junior or on the more support-ish side, from what I can tell), but that doesn't mean that "they" are describing something incorrectly--just that perhaps you're on the wrong side of an average.
I mostly run in circles that are of not-tech-people, and while the jobs may suck, I get the feeling that finding them is not the hard part right now.
I moved out of tech a few years back. I'm responding to ads that claim to be desperate to hire people, yet I'm not getting replies.
In tech, the growth of remote work is big: I just changed jobs, and I live in South Bend IN. In 2019, finding work would have been really hard—I'd estimate fewer than 10% of dev roles were remote at the time (and roughly 0% in South Bend). Today, I feel like we're probably over 50% of all dev jobs fully remote. That's a huge change.
Tech-wise, LLMs are significant, but otherwise, yeah, not a lot.
For normal people...again, LLMs. Unemployment is down a fair bit, and real wages are up, especially for the bottom quartile, so those are both good news. It's a marginal change, of course, but a big deal for a lot of people. Dobbs is a big deal for many, many people.
But compare 2014->2019: what big changes were there? Everyone switching to React? Trump?
2009->2014 does stand out a bit for smartphones going from relatively rare to ubiquitous, and tech-wise we had big growth in cloud hosting.