> Doesn't this just open every job up to insane amounts of competition with the lowest price of living areas in the country
Remote jobs will have a much bigger pool of applicants to choose from, but likewise applicants will have a much bigger jobs to choose from too. So the two should cancel each other out.
Backend devs do this as well. You could just as easily start a thread called "Why use MicroServices/Serverless/Kubernetes/NoSQL etc.". Just like SPAs, those things all have a time and a place but unfortunately devs often push for them to be used in order to practice resume-driven-development and so they can play with the shiny new toy that everybody is talking about.
Personally I think SPAs have a time and a place - highly interactive web apps like google docs, facebook, slack etc. should definitely be SPAs. But using React to create a blog site is just ridiculous. Indiehackers.com is a perfect example of a site which would be so much better if it was a plain old statically rendered site. I remember a podcast where the founder of indiehackers said that he used React to build the site because he wasn't happy that the indiehackers business is not technical enough - so using react was a way making it more "techy" even though it actually makes the site worse (he didn't admit that part though). And thats fine for him as he is a solo-entrepreneur, but when developers working on teams take on that mentality it be extremely frustrating for the developers who would rather produce value than produce overly-complicated solutions in order to gain bragging rights.
Sorry I'm going to be contrarian here but if "people can't afford kids", then why is it well established that poorer people have more kids while richer have fewer? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility).
Answering my own question.. I think the reason people are having fewer kids is more to do with urbanisation and all the social and cultural changes that come with that.
Poorer populations have less access to sex education.
The government pays $850 a fortnight to a single mother, on top of a $5000 baby bonus and various other incentive schemes. Poor social classes see this as an easy means of money compared to working a "dead-end" job.
Maybe they have kids to escape their reality. People cope in different ways; drugs, drinking etc. Maybe they desperately want to live through their kids.
> Poorer populations have less access to sex education.
This is likely an accurate thesis based on macro and micro studies.
TLDR Education, empowerment (contraceptives), labor force participation = decline in fertility rate. Provide access to all of the above, fertility rate drops off.
I would sum it up as counterintuitively "Because they can't afford not to have kids." Urbanization is certainly a factor in how affordable kids are as in rural contexts they essentially paid for themselves via farm labor.
In the world wide context of rich vs poor in the third world it is often the case that your children are your social security. This may also be culturally enshrined as a literal legal duty for offspring to care for their parents no matter how alienated they were.
It would be technically accurate yet misleading to say Social Security and pensions are anti-family. Ensuring care in old age regardless of savings or offspring ability to provide undermines the obligatory support network role. Of course modern perception of family has evolved in the same sense that marriage is seen more about love instead of an economic transaction.
And that is before any conscious or subconscious k/R strategy. Essentially "elites" are incentivized to get the "best" heirs and dedicate more resources to them. Those struggling and incentivized to reproduce enough to have some survive and be successful.
It’s very simple. If you are poor, your needs can be met with a small budget. If you are rich, (upper middle class..truly wealthy people don’t have to care)the ‘fixed costs’ are higher.
You are lower middle class and Disney world is fine to take your five kids and you don’t have to break the bank. But if you are upper middle class or even borderline rich, every additional expense due to extra progeny is many times over. Your savings can’t be stretched if there is a dip in earning potential. It’s difficult to ‘step down’.
A very simple example is mortgage/owning house vs renting. Less riskier to be laid off as renting capacity is elastic vs losing mansion and cost of living of a certain lifestyle is inelastic.
Financial independence comes down to simply earning as much money as you can while spending as little as possible.
As to how to earn the most money you can, I think that depends a lot on your personal circumstances. But if freelancing hasn't worked out for you then I guess the other options are to get a permanent job or to start your own business. Its impossible for me to say which one is the best option for you though.
I am a developer with a CS degree and think you hit the nail on the head with that observation. There are also plenty of other things developers have to know about now that you didn't have to 20 years ago - security, privacy concerns over data, devops etc.
It's very lazy thinking to resort to a "kids these days" mentality of modern software development.
No, bullying is just a US (and UK) thing. Everything in the US and UK is bad. Everything in Europe is good. We don't have bullying, or smart phone addiction, or family breakdown, or populist leaders, or racial tensions or drug and alcohol problems. We all live harmoniously in Europe, you guys (Americans) can learn a lot from us. </sarcasticcomment>
No, I have not ever seen it work well. I was so frustrated by its prevalence in the industry that it was one of the main reasons why I decided to leave software development and work in cyber security / penetration testing instead.
I have since returned to software dev because the fact is I love coding and development but I try to minimise the time I spend working for companies by only working short term contracts while working on side projects inbetween jobs. If one of my side projects becomes successful and I end up hiring developers then there is no way in hell I will be forcing the horrorshow that is Scrum on them. Yes, yes I know "thats not real Scrum", but that doesn't change the day to day reality of working in teams that follow Scrum, or "Scrum".
Remote jobs will have a much bigger pool of applicants to choose from, but likewise applicants will have a much bigger jobs to choose from too. So the two should cancel each other out.