Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

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I’m from France where the market is still tense, so I have hard times understanding whether it’s a general trend or a local problem:

- How do you know it’s not just your surroundings (technologies, skills, area) which are dry?

- Are you maybe getting aged? (The programmer market is very ageist, hopefully I’m not turning the knife into the wound, but I’m not young either) and maybe you are experiencing the dry part of life for the first time?

- Or did you take the $500k+ post-Covid market as the norm? Here in France, beginners are at 38k€ gross annually, and the high end was 85k€ during Covid, but historically the high-end had been capped around 65k€ until Covid.

All in all, developers aren’t magicians. We deserve a high engineer pay, but look at electrical engineers, they have shit pay. We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade. And this is the 3-year experience mark for a developer.

So, are you expecting Facebook-level pay, or higher-engineer-office-worker kind of pay?

>We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade.

I don't understand this mindset. We should all support our working class brothers to get better wages. Just because the custodian, accountant, and jr HR person are also paid crap doesn't mean we should all grin and bear because at least we're not the day laborers outside.

Well I would love to have found a $500k job, that's definitely not my point of reference.

The problem is that I'm not even getting to the stage of asking about salary, because I'm not getting any interviews in the first place. Neither is anyone else in my friend group.

I am probably overqualified for a lot of jobs, but my friend group, which has a lot of variance in age and experience, would definitely not fall into that classification.

Yes, I understand.

I hope I didn’t come across, my comment was not delicate but I was genuinely curious about the answer. I’ve created a product which luckily works for now, so I’m out of the job market, but I think everyone on HN knows that your situation is the normal one that awaits all of us in the second half of our career.

>We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade.

Normal office jobs don't bring the value that STEM jobs do, that's why STEM jobs command more money. It's like comparing doctors to other careers and being surprised that doctors get paid more.

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