Workers are stuck in place because everyone is too afraid of a recession to quit
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Combine both these factors, and I'm now ignoring recruiters who are begging me to interview for insanely well-paying openings. I have a decently well-paying job with good work-life balance, and colleagues who respect me. And I have no interest in throwing that away just to navigate a political minefield at a new job
I once had a shift work job with a lot of overtime. The money was great, but I had an opportunity for a M-F nine-to-five for $20k less per year. I was at a crossroad and asked myself at the time "If someone right now told me I could be at home with my family every night and every weekend for the rest of my career but it cost me $20k/yr, would I pay it?" That helped me make that decision much easier, and now I reversed that same idea. Essentially, I sat down and thought "if I were to lose [great management|no work over 40hrs|remote without geographic restriction|great colleagues and no drama] would I be willing to pay $n to have it back?" It's too easy to forget what our goals were prior to achievement.
I learnt throughout these episodes that people make companies, not some branding or marketing dep.
My motto for the last 20 years has been "find good people, do good work". Emphasis on __good__, not great, best, immaculate, amazing, nonsense. But definitely good. My standards are pretty high though!
My impression is that for people with that choice, they're often unable to convince themselves they don't need the money, since there's always a way to rationalize it, and so they continue making choices exclusively on that basis
One of my friends here in Bangalore took a offer on those lines from a start up, around COVID. He realised instantly these things are for people with a life that is problem free, disease free, responsibilities free linear progression.
Soon enough his parents had to be hospitalised for big surgeries and he realised the start up comp had a near 0 health insurance cover. A decade's worth savings wiped clean in one go.
It took a while even for me to get to this realisation, if you have a good going, things are stable, office culture is good and friendly, and you have a comp that is better overalls. You are likely to do well in such a place on the longer run than jumping 10 places and realising the comp at a lot of places is just straight up fraud. They just cut things in one place and add some where else. In many cases the comp is bloated with big numbers but with a dozen ifs and buts(often company/team linked variable pay etc).
Eventually you could say that making rapid changes to a process doesn't necessarily add to bigger gains. You see this in the stock markets as well. Profit is inversely proportional to the quantity of trades you execute. Big gains come from stability and sticking to one winning formula for long. Same with health, relationships and jobs. Do more of that one thing that works. Don't try to do many such things that could work or mostly fail.
> start up comp had a near 0 health insurance cover. A decade's worth savings wiped clean in one go
A typical employer provided health insurance probably wouldn't have made a difference here. The sum insured generally tops out around 10 lakhs.
Its true some people make it big working at start up. Most unfortunately don't.
Overall, I would advice if you are having non trivial life situations like old parents, unstable health care situations, or just can't afford to take risks, I would say just don't work at start ups.
Relaxed and comfortable environment, flexibility, great co-workers and great boss that I both like, company treats me well, no stress, etc.
I don't find I need all that much money to live comfortably and buy and do what I want. (computers/gaming, home theater, backpacking, skiing, scuba diving, pickleball, travel in general). And on top of those things I still manage to put away about half my income into retirement investments.
Maybe no stress is being too generous. I never really feel stressed though at work, but maybe I am just also a low stress person.
There is a myth that higher paying jobs must be more miserable, but it’s rarely true.
> I'm now ignoring recruiters who are begging me to interview for insanely well-paying openings. I have a decently well-paying job with good work-life balance, and colleagues who respect me.
So their utility function has terms other than $. So define "successful", or define the utility function more objectively. It is very clear that yours vs theirs are quite different.
That’s not what’s happening.
a few years ago, i'd bail. not an option today since i like money. gonna ride this gravy train a bit more. not gonna do it with a smile though.
This led to a phenomenon in 2021 and 2022 called the Great Resignation, a period where hiring began opening up again. All of those employees who'd been itching for an exit saw an opportunity to make their move.
One of the interesting effects of this higher-than-normal employment migration in a relatively short period of time is tenure synchronization, where a large percentage of employees have been with the company for the same amount of time. Naturally, there will be some variation in when they decide to make their exits, but this synchrony does increase the chance of a mass exodus event once they've passed the year of average tenure.
There are other macroeconomic phenomena that are contributing toward sustained "phase locking" of the amplitude of employment migration. Post-pandemic, we saw an era of high inflation, and that caused many companies to veer back into more cautious territory and question whether they'd over-resourced themselves during the hiring boom. This led to rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023. These conditions have also led to downward pressure on wages. Thus, many employees are waiting until the next hiring wave to make their move.
These factors are likely to induce even more phase locking than the tenure synchonization alone, which means that we could see a second or even third "Great Resignation" event occur during the current decade as employees' synchronized tenures lead to voluntary exits that coincide.
The "Great Resignation" (a clever bit of branding; people were moving to better jobs, not resigning) coincided with that easy money drying up. Businesses had to actually start making money again, as did workers (many of whom re-skilled during the pandemic). Higher-than-normal employment migration might have just been people coming out of unemployment, gig work, and whatever jobs they took just to ride out the crisis.
Also, high inflation coincided with the increased numbers at many companies. The layoffs came after inflation started to cool (probably an important contributor to stagnating wage growth), and probably were related to the Fed continuing to raise interest rates and putting off a pivot to dropping them until... Well, they still haven't done a cut, yet.
The far from equilibrium state was software jobs with 0% interest rates the last decade.
Then you have people who entered the workforce during this time believing this is how things have always been and always will be.
Surprise! That was a temporary state we are never going back to in your lifetime.
It is like when I was young, every song had to have a guitar solo. To hear a song with no guitar solo was so weird. I assumed things would always be this way. Neither the guitar solo or the 2016 software job market is ever coming back the same way it use to be.
It isn't normal for it to be hard to get a job, what is hard is to get a better job than you have now since you worked hard to find that job.
That seems like a weirdly narrow perspective. Seems like it entirely depends on every aspect of circumstance, micro, and macro economic, as well as all facets of personal luck, industry, roll of the dice at birth. This is true of everything, not just the job search. Every one of my friends for example has a job and has no reason to think it's hard to get one, but they only know one guy in software, and my perspective for the last 8 years has been it's hard to find a job. Meanwhile, they're all lonely and desperate, struggle to form long term connections, and this is a sentiment shared by many on their 30s atm, but not me, it's normally easy. I'm sure when I get my next one, there's enough likelihood of meeting a few people who've been employed their whole life but haven't made any new close friends since school, to wit we'd reach a similar difference in perspective.
It's my impression though that it's nearly always been easier to get a better or different job than it is to get a job without one, which informs the general cliche, however factually true it is, that it's better to look for a new job while you have one.
I'm afraid this isn't accurate, unless your history of the U.S. is 10 years.
The lockdowns forced a lot of people into unemployment for a variety of reasons on top of the normal "it was a recession" ones.
in 1933 when the unemployment rate reached 25 percent.
My statement, "most dramatic rise in unemployment," means something different.
While the Great Depression saw a much higher peak unemployment rate, the rate of change in April 2020 was the fastest one-month increase in US history.
I applaud you, and (with AI assistance) I've written you an acrostic poem.
Holding oneself lightly, not with pride
Understanding we all have flaws inside
Modest in manner, gentle in speech
Inclusive of others, willing to teach
Learning from mistakes, growing each day
Ignoring the urge to have our own way
Thoughtful of others, putting them first
Yielding to wisdom, quenching ego's thirst
The measurements and metrics of the Keynesian economy need to evolve, they're about the same nonsense for the last 50 years. They have no consideration for the modern days, open economies, globalisation, remote work, isolation, depressive open offices and meaningless work.
Meanwhile we're still looking at the same job figures as a primary indicator of doom and gloom.
There is no measurement for innovation, happiness, self-worth or satisfaction; if they had one, it would show that it plummeted to never seen levels of despair. Job figures don't show how the economy relies on how much we can screw people over with things they can't get away from ("moats"), while being stuck in jobs they never wanted to do in their right minds ("career").
It all started with mortgages if you ask me. It never became about how much you could afford a house, but how much a third-party thought they could get out of you to afford a house - they inflated the prices of. The idea that we buy these extremely expensive "permit to live here", paying for the rest of your life is mental.
This is mostly a result of utter incompetence and irresponsible spending during the pandemic. Economy got pumped with cheap money and there was always going to be a day when the gravy ends. Doesn’t help that tech over hired and poured funding in just about anything.
I’m calling it right now, AI will see the same crash within a few years.
see the 5Y chart https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate
With you on the AI crash.
All of this is representative of, IMO, late stage - and nearly population wide - burnout due to an incredibly long ‘up and to the right’ period of economic growth coupled with high stress (from COVID) when it would otherwise be slowing down, and extreme emotional manipulation by those too afraid to look down and have it end. Which isn’t just from ‘the rich’, BTW. I’ve seen that manipulation from a portion of all segments of the population.
That's the blame shifting GP was referring to. It actually means "doing only what you're paid to do" instead of the "work is family" unpaid overtime trend that had been becoming common.
It’s a wide spectrum.
But yeah, folks stopped busting their ass to do stuff that wasn’t even in the job description - the horror.
But on the other hand, I cannot socialize without a job.
I have embraced the antiwork mentality, but it needs to be said that it doesn't solve everything.
I still want to get a job just so I can get up in the morning and have a routine and see people and feel included.
I would say antiwork is the expression of mental illness through politics or vice versa. It's not going to get solved soon.
For me it is quite the opposite, my entire social life is very separated from work, and I tend to compartmentalise and not hang out with colleagues after work.
I think it's just something about flipping the page in the middle of the day, letting go and relaxing.
Sedentary lifestyle is no good either.
The problem is finding people to see and connect with. I find very few, but not enough.
You should try to not work to see how it goes for you.
Also, I have some past of slight depression that I treat.
Generally, staying at home is depressing and you lose energy very quickly, your body goes hibernating but you don't want to.
I have the time to work on various projects to not feel bored and useless, plus working out and going out. I do not gauge my worth based on "value" of my output, as it is very clear that the perceived value in our society makes no sense whatsoever. So I still feel productive doing random things I love.
It wasn't always like that for me though. Things improved a lot when I started fasting, took care of my diet and started working out.
Hope things work out for you, work or no work :)
What's odd is that, on paper and for the engineering jobs we work with specifically, it doesn't seem like that's actually more justified now than it was a year or two ago. The tech hiring market seems to have bottomed out and to be (unsteadily) on its way back up. Two years ago, prediction markets [2] were pretty confident a recession would occur by this point, but it hasn't. They're now down to about 25% that it'll occur by the end of this year, although the fact that the percentage has stayed flat even as time has run out suggests markets are a bit more bearish now than they were six months ago. And they think [3] that large interest rate cuts are coming.
But perhaps a few years of frustration and seeing others struggle has taken its toll in ways that go beyond object-level economic predictions. Experience with rough conditions might've made people more risk averse, or make them feel more secure in the job they do have (after all, there's a good chance they've survived some layoffs at this point), both of which could (rationally) make them stick where they are even if their opinions of the broader economy were the same or better.
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[1] EDITED to add: reasons they turn down outreach we actually send, meaning it's not disqualified by some structured info we have about their preferences. For example, we know whether a candidate wants a remote job, so even though ~60% of our candidates are looking for remote jobs only, that wouldn't be in this ranking.
[2] https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-the-us-enter-...
[3] https://manifold.markets/barak/by-how-much-will-the-fed-cut-...
And beyond hiring, internally, the companies are being hyper focused on performance. People are being let go despite working hard and going above and beyond.
The comparison really is: Do I leave my current job which may pay less but won’t fire me or do I go to a new company, risk performance based firing and then be unemployed for months before I find the next job.
This is what primarily scares me and my circle. I'm not going to look for another job while I see and know people far smarter than me being let go from positions far more important than mine.
From the employee side, I have no way of knowing whether I've actually found something better. It could be that I've just found a company that interviews well or that got lucky enough to avoid putting foot in mouth long enough to get me out the door.
If I'm in a company that's good enough and am not sure I'll be able to land a job six months from now, it makes very little sense for me to even start looking because I know that any new job I find might be a lemon, even if it looks better during the interviews.
Markets, even markets for lemons, are frequently in non-equilibrium states. That can happen because actors have imperfect information, because underlying conditions have changed, because some actors are new to the market and haven't settled to equilibrium yet, because people have personal beliefs that override market-rational behavior, because market actors are simply bad at their jobs, or any number of other reasons. Far more information-perfect, rational, and optimized markets than hiring frequently show inefficient behavior in practice.
Yes, there are market pressures that tend to remove good candidates and good jobs from the market, and that incentivize both sides to pretend they're better than they are. But a tendency is only a tendency, and not a guarantee, and incentives can be missed or ignored or defied or failed in implementation. A bad company might be incentivized to lie to you, but they have to be self-aware that they suck (a trait terrible companies very frequently fail at) and capable of implementing the deception, among other things. And that means that your impressions when you speak to them do carry meaningful signal that should shift your beliefs about them.
A new job might be a lemon. But it also might not. You don't need to be certain that it isn't; you just need to be sure enough that the expected value of taking the new job, minus whatever risk discounting you're choosing to use, (minus the cost of searching for one), is greater than the expected value of staying in your current job.
Agreed. And what I'm saying is that people aren't looking because the job interview process provides little enough information that the expected value of job hopping right now is very unlikely to exceed the expected value of staying put unless they're already in a bad situation. The time spent fielding phone screens and interviews isn't worth it if you already know that even a seemingly dream job wouldn't be worth the risk right now.
In another, more certain environment with lower risk of long-term unemployment the calculus is different, but right now sticking with the devil you know is for most of us the most rational move until the layoffs slow down.
If you are being paid some multiple of six figures would you not expect this?
It's also why companies are desperate to sell AI as its currently the only visible avenue for further large growth to pump stocks.
It just all sucks. The process was already pretty bad IMO, but now you're being treated as random quota fodder, with no interest to even pretend the position exists.
They almost always respond with an apology, and then I'm sure black list me. I don't much care. I'd rather work with competent caring people. And maybe my scolding will help the next recruit.
I mean, as someone out of a full time job for 15 months now (4 of those by choice), I can't really blame them. Of course, I'm an extraordinary case in games that seems to be hit the hardest out of most domains, but the fallout hasn't seemed to bottomed out in this industry just yet.
And in tech specifically: it's not like these interview processes are just a drink with the founders and a firm handshake anymore. You gotta weigh the question of "do I REALLY want to study trivia and go through 5 stages of calls" vs. the potential upsides of a new job/pay raise. Many tech professionals are probably not scrap for cash, so there's no financial pressure to jump at the next step up if they are focusing on security.
>Two years ago, prediction markets [2] were pretty confident a recession would occur by this point, but it hasn't.
Layoffs and the previous COVID bailouts probably "helped" in that regard.
And indeed. As you said, it caused an even more extreme dichotomy of financial pressure between the middle class and below and the asset owning or upper-middle+ (who weren't laid off). Where the former may as well be in a depression while the latter two are on cloud nine, trading houses like baseball cards and growing money by just letting it sit.
Is that better than a proper recession? I can't say, but you can understand why the former group can feel that way, and even feels bitter at the latter. Being told that the economy is soaring while your income barely increased 10% that barely covers rent. While rent surged 30% in the past 5-8 years.
- you have net positive statistics, so the government doesn’t intervene
- you have a class that controls the levers of power growing substantial wealth in “services” and other extractive portions of the economy; and accompanying growth in large institutions or government
- you have a largely devastated productive and working economy; and accompanying collapse of SMBs
In whatever sense we’re not in a recession, that’s only because economic looting is so profitable on paper, we’re marginally positive. But that false signal of “not recession” can suppress normal responses and allow the country to move into socially unstable territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_employees_in_the_Un...
Do prediction markets in general even predict well? Someone might stake out a losing long-term prediction, but in a way where it isn't profitable to bother taking their money.
I made this derivative market to try to address the issue somewhat, but not much trading yet:
https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-manifold-pric...
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-job-market-recession-outl...
This type of appropriation of content has been happening for well over a century. See this Supreme Court case from 1918: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._...
Those references to Business Insider were self references that the original BI article made:
> A 24-year-old employee working in histology named Amanda, who spoke with Business Insider
And
> Raymond Lee, the CEO of the career outplacement firm Careerminds told BI.
There is no rearranging of facts here - these phrases, and the rest of the article - are copy and pasted.
Also pulling old content, leaving 404s, making them an unreliable archive as well.
This is so common. People are afraid of and unprepared for income and status setbacks. Sometimes you need to take a couple steps back to get back on track. (I’m currently taking a step back and I’m intimately familiar with the uncertainty of it.)
"What do I want out of my one short life? To spend it toiling away unhappy 90% of the time and spend money trying to be happy the remaining 10% or find something I enjoy doing the majority of the time that can also pay some bills?"
A lot of people are asking themselves these questions, and if you're not -- why not?
So, trading your week days for money to do everything you want in the weekends is pretty okay now. Being a company (wo)man is sort of seen as being a class traitor?
Maybe that's just because I work with low income college students, though.
Then a generation of millenials collectively got millions of degrees in liberal arts and humanities, but the degrees didn't have any class-signaling power or economic value the way a college degree in 1970 did, so instead of getting cushy careers they ended up in low-paid, low-status unfulfilling jobs, with debt from a useless degree.
Gen Z saw that happen and took a more practical view towards college, careers, etc.
In addition, it can be non-job motivations. e.g. you take a year off to travel for a bit, or engage in some hobby that you know won't make any income. I wouldn't mind doing some art classes if I ever got to that kind of money to live off of for years.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious here. I’ve been in tech for almost twenty years and the only way I could have 7 figures in stocks is if I still lived at home and didn’t contribute anything to the budget. There is a whole world of people working in tech outside of Silicon Valley’s ridiculous compensation. Money is still a concern for the vast majority of us.
No one in my company has equity except the founder. On the off chance we actually get far enough for me to get equity I’ll be lucky to get $100k out of it.
But yes, it was a purposeful use of extremes. Unless you rush to young retirement or are in that SV scene and move out, most people won't have the means to metaphorically move out to the pastures and become a farm hand.
But that is in fact an option for a few in tech. I recall some 20+ year googling choosing to leave and pick up comedy as a career.
How does that work?
I've received an offer from a company that seems to have a lot better alignment... But it pays 10% less. Meanwhile my current salary has not kept up with inflation over the past couple of years.
What is truly problematic is the social isolation, the inactivity, and a feeling of not being included.
I could go working any job for 20h per week if it did not feel alienating and so competitive and busy.
The work mentality is survival of the fittest on steroids.
Work is a binary ingroup or outgroup. People who are out are seen as undeserving and seen as lesser people.
That's why people want to keep their job.
but still can't get a job anyway
"I want to leave but if I do I may not be able to find another job and may not be able to pay rent" is instead the reality most Americans face.
For a single, childless person who wants to live a lower-middle class lifestyle in a low cost of living area, sure.
But if you want to live in a decent location, you're looking at needing at least a million just for a house. That leaves 1.5 to generate income, so at a 3% safe withdrawal rate that's $45k per year. After taxes that's now like $35k. And you're not getting health insurance from employer so budget $6k per year for premiums (and be ready to pay out up to $6k per year more if you end up in the hospital).
So in the end, you've got something like $20k-$29k per year to live on. That covers groceries, car maintenance/insurance/payments, upkeep on the house, phone, etc sufficiently for one person. But you're probably not joining your friends on their ski vacation or even going out for drinks with them too often.
And of course, the whole thing falls apart with a family. The average cost of health insurance for a family of 4 is $24,000 per year.
FYI when I took some time off, I had to pay ~$3500/month for health insurance for a family of three (and of course still pay deductibles and out of pocket costs).
Health care insurance in the US is unimaginably expensive.
Businesses made accomodations during the pandemic to stay open. Remote work really took off. Also, TC continued to rise.
But then some companies failed and the door opened to what I called Permanent Layoff Culture. Most companies end up laying off 5% of their staff every year. This is really an extension of Corporate America's "up or out" culture. The likes of Jack Welch extolled the "virtues" of firing the bottom 5-10% every year.
If you believe the companies, this is necessary. They over-hired. If so, there was a decade of "over-hiring". Why was it fine then?
Market conditions changed such that with a wink and a nod companies could effectively collude on lyaoffs to suppress wages. The goal in cutting staff is to spread their work to the remaining employees (ie free labor) and to stop people getting raises (ie reduce labor costs).
It's really no different to how one food company will raise their prices and every other one will follow suit. There's no direct collusion. That's price manipulation and it's illegal. It's price leadership. What's the difference? Price leadership is legal. There's just no agreement in a smoke-filled room.
Workers afraid to quit? Mission accomplished. They won't be asking for raises.
This is a prime example of how our society has become so precarious for the middle class while the rich just keep getting richer.
The only way to actually start a business with some potential degree of success involves being a suck-up to massively wealthy individuals so you can onboard an angel investor for your product. This also generally means gimmicks that appeal to the rich and wealthy. A great example is smart kitchen appliance whose goal is to do something worse than what's already on the market so that they can corner people with dark patterns and subscriptions.
The main one that comes to mind is Costco.
Apple came so close. Still very young, but their retention seems better than competitors and they dodged a lot of the layoff stuff the rest did (with caveats. They simply "did not renew" contractors). But that came to an end in May.
I'd probably need to look up some companies in trades, but my impression is many of those are small businesses as opposed to a corporate career.
> One big problem is that TSMC has been trying to do things the Taiwanese way, even in the U.S. In Taiwan, TSMC is known for extremely rigorous working conditions, including 12-hour work days that extend into the weekends and calling employees into work in the middle of the night for emergencies. TSMC managers in Taiwan are also known to use harsh treatment and threaten workers with being fired for relatively minor failures.
> TSMC quickly learned that such practices won’t work in the U.S. Recent reports indicated that the company’s labor force in Arizona is leaving the new plant over these perceived abuses, and TSMC is struggling to fill those vacancies. TSMC is already heavily dependent on employees brought over from Taiwan, with almost half of its current 2,200 employees in Phoenix coming over as Taiwanese transplants.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
And nearly everyone has gotten rid of pensions, sadly.
Yes, I could be doing all this useful stuff which makes 100x better use of my skills than my day job but those things don't pay because I won't be able to find any users for it. I don't have much time for it. I could find users but not users who are hooked to a money printer and can afford to pay. I'm sure most users would love it if they spent 20 minutes trying my side project, however, this is too high of a barrier.
The company I work for is already well hooked into a money printer and already has its own users but, unfortunately, I cannot produce my best engineering work there because there is too much legacy code and, understandably, my colleagues are as beaten down as I am over this industry so the will to innovate is severely limited. The best we can provide is stability.
I've (unfortunately) learned to perceive software complexity as a friend; in the same way as security consultants perceive hackers, as pharma companies perceive chronic illness and as those who build mouse traps perceive mice.
I already got burned badly for innovating at a previous company and experienced politics getting in the way in a mind-bendingly disturbing way so I'm not keen to experience that again!
Repeatedly in my career, I have seen the low-performers and outright saboteurs being promoted and the innovators being suppressed so my goal now is to emulate those people and engage in political bs. It's the only way. I'm a little bit older, I have to think about my finances now. I know how money flows through the economy and I just go straight for the jugular straight out of a money printer... Printing leafy, digital monetary goodness straight into my bank account. Oh that feels nice.
I argue that's always been true. Most of the big tech we know today came from very privileged backgrounds that allowed them to take risks that'd be unthinkable for many of us. drop out of college early, run 2-3 failed business to the ground, being booted out of one company and come back later to the same company as an executive, etc.
It takes money (or a lot of your time) to make money, that's always been true. The money it takes these days are just so high.
Wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, and I'm sorry you gotta navigate this way. I still have some decades to try and get something I can truly own be sustainable, so I want to at least make use of my youth while I have it.
It strikes me as rather absurd to believe it was better in the past when capital was much harder to come by.
Imagine trying to get startup funding in the late 80s when a person with capital could get 9% annualized on a short term US government bill. Good luck with that.
sure, but when you have connections or your own finances in the millions, it's a lot harder to truly lose "everything" in the same way a missed rent check can actually cost some working class person their home. They will lose a lot but not be out on the streets per se.
Many of these people aren't dumb, they won't use their own money to finance this. It just better helps them get investor money to potentially mismanage.
>It strikes me as rather absurd to believe it was better in the past when capital was much harder to come by.
it was arguably better for people who had capital to begin with. Money begets money, that's always been true in every time and society.
for truly scrappy startups, it varies. You could truly innovate with 2-3 buddies out of your garage and make a multi-million dollar business, "self made". Fewer would be chosen, but the line would be lower as well.
There's more money flowing, but you also need so much more to get off the ground c. 2024. But you can reasonably chance it an self-publish. I don't think it's objectively better or worse, just different. I argue that if you do need money than it is in fact worse though.
During the 9-5, the goal is to solve other people's problems. It's not pretty but it's what we're paid to do
However, at some point, employers heavily leaned into the whole "work is fun/rewarding/meaningful" shtick in order to skimp out on actual tangible compensation. So I'd argue that an informal "contract" was made or implied, whereby I agreed that "job is fun/rewarding" would form part of my compensation.
And that's going away now as people are realizing they were duped. There's only so many free perks, parties and vending machines before you realize "this place is f-ing toxic, the clients treat us like shit, and my boss really isn't treating me like 'family' and being loyal to me."
The way I see it: work stuff can be "fun" during the 9-5 and it will actually be kind of enjoyable. I don't think that that's bad for the employer or the employee, sort of like a mutually beneficial relationship
For side projects, they can't just be plain fun but have to be interesting also. A project has to push the envelope in some way. And that's a way higher bar that imo shouldn't be conflated with work
Good code ships, even if it’s dogshit. Works for everyone else, fuck it.
I hope to find something soon, but to be honest, unless people start hiring again in larger volumes, it's hard to get into the larger companies. They let go of a lot of people before, and rather hire those again then someone new. After all, those people are known quantities, I'm not.
Shameless plug: contact me if you need a Senior Software Engineer. Rust, and a whole other bunch of languages.
or we see the end of the petrodollar as the global kingpin
so maybe not
So is the cause and effect backwards?
More software requires more software engineers to maintain it, who then write more software, which then require more engineers to maintain it, on and on and on…
Oh, and 1 of those engineers is a "React engineer", who operates purely at the level of that framework, following boilerplate and documentation like a cook book, who would've otherwise been left out of the industry altogether but is now delivering as much value as someone who put in the work to understand JS, single-threaded UI, web browsers, network protocols...
Didn't the Treasury secretary quip “The enemy keeps postponing when the recession’s going to come... They are dying to have a recession. They can’t bear going into next year’s election with the economy the way that it is.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/wilbur-ross-democrat...
Wait, that's the former Treasury secretary, they sure knew how to do petty.