Yes, you and I are outliers and so are many people here.
Those of us who work in tech, and many of the people we find ourselves bonding with and staying close to in our adulthood, are lucky to have taken up in a sector that happened to see disproportionate growth during our careers and admitted many people from modest backgrounds.
But people who didn't stumble onto that path, or perhaps hoped to follow their parents into professions that were more flat or failing (medicine, education, academia, farming, manufacturing, "the trades"). In aggregate, some of those people are still doing okay, some are doing well, and some are flailing in desperation for having made the wrong bet.
Of the people I grew up with in a modest blue collar community, I don't know anyone besides the few most ambitious and capable that were able to find the security that their parents had. And as one of those more ambitious and capable people who later circled with people of fancier backgrounds, I similarly don't know anyone who pursued things like academia or medicine and found what they expected there either.
As someone in the US that’s bounced in and out of tech, including some longish stints in blue collar jobs, it honestly blows my mind that the tech scene is so all-encompassing that many in it feel like it is representative of… anything else. I’m not talking about the tech libertarian types that think any impediment to the ultra rich vacuuming up everyone else’s wealth is tantamount to dictatorship. I’m talking about the typical happy path developer (I shy away from saying average because all us developers are above-average developers) that went to college for comp sci right after high school pretty quickly secured a junior role for maybe 6x-9x the (ridiculous) Federal Poverty Level.
To be clear: I’m not saying they’re bad people or anything— most people think their experiences are more representative than they are. But, from outside, some of the assumptions software folks make about the world just seem utterly ridiculous. Consider that on average, junior developers make more money than a first year medical resident that has a PhD in perhaps the highest demand field in the US and works shifts of 16-30 hours with many consistently logging 80 hours per week, and occasionally end up working much more. Ask that medical resident what a really bad day, and a really bad week at work looks like for them and ask a developer with the same amount of post-school experience the same question, and then consider how much more school it took… and then ask that same question to an aircraft mechanic, a chef with a culinary degree, a construction worker, a public defender, a commercial fisherman, a firefighter, a nurse… the software industry is more than an aberration — it’s a different planet. The kind of shit I’ve seen developers say they’re going to “pivot to” if the software industry falls apart is, frankly, flabbergasting. If we see the sort of sustained job losses some fear in software, there are going to be a whole lot of people learning some extremely bitter, difficult truths about the world outside.
I’m not saying we all didn’t and don’t work hard to get where we are — it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world. It’s easy to see your own contributions to your success and miss the industry and market scaffolding you could stand on to get what you did.
> it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world
It's about margins. Software has the 2nd highest margins of any sector (highest is High Finance), so it's easy to pay competitively in software compared to other fields.
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.
Those of us who work in tech, and many of the people we find ourselves bonding with and staying close to in our adulthood, are lucky to have taken up in a sector that happened to see disproportionate growth during our careers and admitted many people from modest backgrounds.
But people who didn't stumble onto that path, or perhaps hoped to follow their parents into professions that were more flat or failing (medicine, education, academia, farming, manufacturing, "the trades"). In aggregate, some of those people are still doing okay, some are doing well, and some are flailing in desperation for having made the wrong bet.
Of the people I grew up with in a modest blue collar community, I don't know anyone besides the few most ambitious and capable that were able to find the security that their parents had. And as one of those more ambitious and capable people who later circled with people of fancier backgrounds, I similarly don't know anyone who pursued things like academia or medicine and found what they expected there either.
Appreciate what you have! Many don't share it.