Right. There’s obviously a totally valid market-based reason for it, and I am absolutely not implying that developers should receive less of that than they do. However, its an external factor which gives many developers a very skewed understanding of how much work most people expend for the amount of money they receive and agency they get at work, and how much they’re worth as workers outside of the software world with roughly the same amount of ambition and effort. Compared to most industries, software companies coddled developers and really tried to trump up the mystique of the great hacker genius. While particularly apparent in the restaurant industry, developers thinking they’ve ‘solved’ an unrelated business they’ve got no experience in using their genius software brain or assume they can simply transfer their existing skills to a new field is pretty common. I encountered one developer who thought they’d simply pivot to crime to keep their family comfortable, which is hilarious. The beginning of a career in crime is long and full of petty bullshit crimes that pay very little because you don’t have the wisdom to not get caught doing more serious crimes, and you don’t have the network to support you doing things like getting unregistered guns, fencing, etc. What I wouldn’t pay to see that guy walk into a bar in a rough part of town, order a craft beer, and try to debate the sketchiest people he saw about why he’d make a trustworthy partner in crime.
I'm just saying the only reason SWEs (and IBs) get paid the big bucks is primarily because of market economics, even if plenty of other high stress roles (eg. Nursing, EMT, Teaching) get paid a relative pittance.
I think a lot of us members of the tech industry need to cut down on our hubris and respect other industries and jobs, and understand that we are cogs inasmuch as anyone else.
Much more recently to be honest. The bottom only fell in MechE fields (Automotive, Aerospace, Defense) in the 1990s, but if global tensions continue, it might be a good time to be a MechE.
That’s right. Things are changing and it’s going to be a really tough pill to swallow for a lot of people that only think they understand what work looks like for nearly everyone else in the world.
Ask the nurses how much they got for severance when steward health closed. Or what my severance was when I got laid off in 2009 working as a fine dining line cook as a culinary school graduate. Or the career concept artists replaced by AI. Add all three up, throw in 4 bucks, and you can buy yourself a coffee at Starbucks. And all of their salaries were a hell of a lot lower, even in the exact same housing markets. Hell you might be able to add all three up and still be in the neighborhood of junior developer.
The dev world’s baseline for what constitutes good treatment, bad treatment, and fairness from employers, an acceptable amount of disposable income, acceptable housing expenses, etc. is completely detached from the rest of the working world. Now that the demand is dramatically changing, that will probably also dramatically change, and that’s going to be rough. If it does, maybe it will recover. It has before, but this seems like a much more significant change.
