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.

I still see plenty of first person syndrome on HN crying about RTO or multi-month severances.

I get it, because it sucks, but it's still tone deaf for people in the top income brackets, 401Ks, and plenty of disposable income.

Most Americans (employed or unemployed) don't get any of those kinds of benefits.

Not all of them have plenty disposable income given the ever increasing cost of home ownership, healthcare (tied to employment), and everything else.

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.