You've had already several replies commenting in your attitude issues; but it seems you are still to young to see them. I really, really hope in my heart that you can still keep the way of life you are used to. Although, from what I've seen in the US and the world currently, it will be quite difficult.
It is a reality that us people from Xenials (myself), Millenials and Z have have lived our work lives in a generally confortable era. I myself ended my BSc in 2004, way after the dot-com bubble burst, and fortunately the 2008 crisis didn't hit me.
But, the advice you are calling "boomer coping" (or similar) has some experience in there, most likely from people that suffered the 2000 dot-com bubble burst. From the accounts I've read of older friends, there were people with plenty of experience and great CVs washing dishes at local restaurants.
Right now, the way things are moving in our field, with AI, outsourcing and everything else playing, it looks like the skillsets are getting cheaper. So, we are getting punched by reality and I believe it will only get worse.
> But, the advice you are calling "boomer coping" (or similar) has some experience in there, most likely from people that suffered the 2000 dot-com bubble burst. From the accounts I've read of older friends, there were people with plenty of experience and great CVs washing dishes at local restaurants.
Also the early 90s weren’t great: the Cold War ending meant that a lot of defense contractors laid off very specialized workers. For an example of that circa 1994:
I had read so many raves about that book, and heard the author got a Nobel prize for his ideas, so I started reading it.
I just could not digest it. I understood the words but I couldn't make whatever message he was trying to convey... it felt too "dense" for me. Maybe im just stupid, but I could not get past I think the first two chapters.
Since you’re giving an edgy take in a thread discussing the death of a respected author, I’ll be pedantic: you’re wrong about those people not reading a word of Smith or Keynes, since it’s impossible to avoid reading at least one of their common quotations if you have even a passing interest in the field.
I suffered through the book and I just think it is a rather boring writing style.
The poseur part is that it doesn't matter if you know what is in the book or not. That is actually the interesting part of the book to me but also why it is largely an exercise in futility.
I would assume someone who says it is their favorite book just has not read that many non-fiction books.
Don't worry, it doesn't matter, because at best a lot of claims in this books just cannot be replicated, and at worst the book is completely useless because it's based on shitty science - depends on your POV.
The problem is that it's an inelastic market. So sellers can basically charge WHATEVER they want, constrained only to the line where people will revolt. But that's a very high line in the US.
Health providing shouldn't be a for-profit endeavor. Certainly shouldn't be in the stock market and it absolutely shouldn't be comingled with "insurance"
> The problem is that it's an inelastic market. So sellers can basically charge WHATEVER they want, constrained only to the line where people will revolt.
What keeps me from bringing my business too the competition like I do in every other market? The main constraint I see right now is that there are very few, but large hospitals and my insurance only pays for me to go to even fewer of those. However, competition already works (if the patient makes an effort) for some planned procedures like CT scans where you can safe up to 80% in my own experience.
Definitely true. However, it's not intrinsic to healthcare. We made it that way. You can go to https://surgerycenterok.com/ and see all-inclusive prices for surgeries right now. Some people fly there for procedures. They have higher success rates than competitors, surgeons take more money home and the procedures cost less. It's possible.
Maybe they're referring to the way the system is set up. You're probably not going to shop around for the lowest cost heart surgeon unless you have no insurance. Will they even say how much they charge? Couple that with emergencies. I think the only hope for America is a movement to stop a lot of this stuff before they become issues. Early diagnosis of cancer, national movement to unfat America (whatever that mean), people feeling more responsible for their own health inasmuch as they can.
Availability of prices is definitely an issue. Many, many things aren't emergencies though and arguably many of the expensive ones aren't (cancer treatment, many great procedures once stabilized). My wife used to work on healthcare and has helped friends and family shop around for cancer treatment and heart surgery. However, due to the lack of price transparency this was limited to shopping for quality. We could totally change that though. See the surgery center of Oklahoma website I've linked in several comments
Getting approval to build a new hospital seems to require regulatory stuff and how do you get the staff if there's a cap on how many doctors can be trained a year?
I feel for you. I just wonder, at this point why would someone look to go back to the US "At any price", given how bad are they being treated? From what I can see, it seems most of us non-US people are "persona non grata" in the US.
I myself am and live in a so called "shithole country ". But specially because of my Technical skills, I've got plenty of opportunities over here. I would never think on living in the USA. Even though I easily could via TN visa. But it's clear US people dont want me living there.
And even if you decide it's time to leave, you'd still want to come back and settle your affairs and plan a proper move. You wouldn't want to leave everything behind, especially if you only brought enough for a brief trip.
That's an increasing consideration for people thinking about moving to the US or those who aren't settled there yet. But, of course, people who already have family and belongings there will want to get back in to at least sort those things out before leaving for good.
I did move away from the US because of these reasons, and it's been a good decision in retrospect. But no one likes uprooting their entire life and it takes years to build a new one somewhere else.
The calculus on immigrating to the US today is clearly negative, but many people immigrated 5/10/20+ years ago before all this shit and have lives there. They did not know any of this would happen.
Blender did everything The GIMP should have done. A very specialized software with complex UI done in a way that people WITHIN the industry praise.
I also remember downloading blender during my university years back in early 2004. Man was it crap compared to Maya or 3dMax. But nowadays it is incredible.
> Blender did everything The GIMP should have done.
Gimp is an amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is Krita, which is another amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is LibreOffice, ditto. Then there is KiCAD, ditto. Then there is ...
I am not saying this to detract from Ton's contributions. I am saying this because a lot of people have made contributions to the open source world and, by extension, to the lives of many people. We shouldn't be treating this as a competition.
Two of the major contributions Ton made though are relevant.
The Blender team did not always accept code or suggestions. This has been a running theme with several people I've known that felt their work and/or ideas were rejected by people that didn't grasp their brilliance. There was a possibly unusual willingness to say no, but it was more discerning than with GIMP which gave off the appearance of vetoing virtually everything. (At one time all GIMP woes would be solved by CinePaint aka "Film Gimp").
But it was combined with the idea of the studio, in order to find out where exactly the pain points are to be addressed. In a sense this is agile software done right, where you get the users and devs alongside each other with a common goal. Unsurprisingly one result is the UI today is not mocked in the way it was 20 years ago, while the GIMP UI has remained a constant point of confusion.
> In a sense this is agile software done right, where you get the users and devs alongside each other with a common goal.
I'm not sure Blender development is "agile" in the traditional sense of the term because from the outside there are signs that it is slow paced with high inertia (specialists in charge of large features, planning over many months, purpose-specific contractors and GSoC projects, features that are delayed until they are ready), but they are certainly successful at delivering copious, high quality and high value features. Let's hope that the good leadership continues.
I didn't see the parent comment as downloading the gimp so much as praising something blender specifically did well. The fact that it has had more impact within the industry is the evidence to support it.
Competitively, libre office has a fairly similar UI to the pre-ribbon office suite, which people at the time much preferred once the ribbon came around (before they got used to it anyway) but it hasn't had the same disruption that blender did. I suspect the file format compatibility issues and die-hard Excel fans have a lot to do with it, but it's an interesting counterpoint to the assertion that the UI is responsible for the difference in adoption rates.
Just my personal opinion (and there is of course no accounting for taste), but personally i consider libre/open office to have one of the worst UIs of any software i have ever used. (In fairness i haven't used it in a really long time, hence calling it "open"). I absolutely think usability issues are a major limiting factor for libreoffice.
The people who really drive ms office adoption are the ones who use it all day every day. They can't imagine a world without Excel, and (at the time) the cluttered formatting of the office controls were a power user's best friend.
When the Ribbon UI came around in office, it faced a ton of push back due to moving so many things around and hiding so many common operations, but the file format translation issues between office and alternatives kept people in the MS cage, I think.
Nowadays many users grew up with the ribbon, so it doesn't seem so painful.
Plus Gimp just works and its interface isn't that bad. It is far better than many modern apps that just don't have any significant functionality. I mean perhaps Photoshop is better in some ways, but it is not worth it to put up with Adobes Creative Toilet if you don't produce some specialized prints.
Krita is awesome too and does interfaces right as well. Bought it on Steam. But I still use Gimp since the use cases are different. But it might perhaps be worthwhile to put your open source project on Steam anyway to make some bucks. I would happily buy more.
Blender did make huge jumps in recent years. Suddly you couldn't even update as fast as they introduced new things. It is amazing by now but I would argue that its functionality was unfairly derided in the past while it was already quite capable for quite some time.
> Plus Gimp just works and its interface isn't that bad.
Gimp for a looooong time was a multi-window user interface, completely antithetical to almost any other application released in the last 20 years or so.
> Gimp for a looooong time was a multi-window user interface, completely antithetical to almost any other application released in the last 20 years or so.
Same as Mac software in the late 90s. GIMP is/allows MDI, tabs or whatever it is called. A decade old at least, Wikipedia is not clear if the change was "new feature" or "new default but avaliable before". Maybe Mac native software went that way too, no idea what is the trend there now. Most things reinvent everything including window management, poorly, inside a browser, anyway.
I would recommend trying out GIMP again, it's gotten much nicer.
Still kinda stupid easy to accidentally have non-destructive edit filters making your entire computer fall over because you have these filters that are slow to apply... but the UI works out quite well now
I had a similar experience. I tried Blender for 10 minutes and the UI was unintuitive and just awful. Completely backwards from everything else.
A few years later, someone said I should try it again. It's finally good. And they were right. My whole team uses Blender now and we're very satisfied with it.
I've heard the same thing with GIMP: "Try it again. It's good now." Unfortunately, this isn't true and likely will never be.
The most significant reason that Blender is in its current position is because of the significant refactoring it undertook starting in version 2.5 I believe. 7 years brewing in the pot! It cant have been easy... but the outcome (Blender 2.8) is when we sersiolsy starting thinking about using it in our uni.
I guess the question is: how did Ton afford to spend that much time on it? How did all the other contributors? And more importantly: would Gimp have been able to achieve the same thing?
I think the GIMP hate is almost entirely down to the difference in its UI from Photoshop.
I use GIMP almost exclusively in my job. I have photoshop, but I know GIMP and I'm better with it. I make presentation pieces and fix images, do image data rescue and make fun pieces with it on the side, like posters for my bands and accidental art made by playing with sliders in the FX.
Its very versatile and capable, but it is almost entirely unlike photoshop, and since I grew up with it I vastly prefer GIMP over photoshop.
in earlier years, but in a way to this day, a significant factor against GIMP was not the UI - people could get used to the UI and did even when grumbling about it.
A big problem for a chunk of possible users was that GIMP's colour support sucked (and I believe it's still not really fixed). The moment you wanted to work outside RGBA at 8bits per channel, and maybe a bit playing with indexed color, you were in for a lesson in pain. And a lot of people wanted a tool they could earn money with, and that meant for a long time at least some amount of print work. And print, even digital printing, means CMYK. Later on photography started demanding HDR features. Even web these days will deal with non-RGB color spaces, and I am not talking about HDR.
Meanwhile GIMP's engine for years even if in UI you technically could select colours in CMYK, they were internally converted to RGB for calculations, then converted again. CinePaint, aka FilmGimp, started because people could not get patches for 48bit RGBA into mainline. And so on, and so on. Meanwhile Photoshop and other competitors would not only have a less divisive UI, but also additional features (I knew people who would choose Photoshop just for included pantone colour database).
I don't think its because of being different to photoshop. I tried Gimp many times during the last maybe 15 years. The UI used to be so chaotic I could not find my way around. If I tried very hard, I was basically able to do everything I needed, but with so much effort. Years ago the UI was just bunch of floating toolbars on the desktop without the possibility (or at least I couldn't find a way at that time) to have a common backdrop. All the little settings and modals were just so hard to use it was very frustrating.
I had the very same experience with Inkscape over the years. I want to like those project so much, I know a lot of effort is going into that, but it didn't work for me. Same experience was with blender before the big redesign. Now blender is simply awesome and pleasant to use. I hope for such transformation for Gimp and Inkscape. (and Audacity)
This reads as "because I can do my job with it, it should be good enough for anyone". Making band posters is not really the same as being a professional creative using it all day long. It has not been adopted among those people, while Blender has. The reason is almost certainly because its UI sucks, not because it's "different".
I never said that GIMP is better or more useful than blender or krita or photoshop, only that I am better with it, that it can do all of the photo and image editing I need, and that I think the UI is most of the problem for the people who dislike it.
Honestly, yeah. I know on HN we’re all used to it and over it, but the general population is not.
Like, you can claim the weird name is a celebration of how anti-corporate and unfettered the team is, but whenever I try tell people about it for the first time, it’s super distracting and adds a lot of unnecessary friction. It always goes like this:
“Photoshop licenses are so expensive, I wish there was something cheaper since many of our team members don’t need all the features.”
“Have you tried GIMP? Now hold on, I know the—“
“I’m sorry, tried what?!”
“It’s got a weird name, but a lot of people find it a really good replacement for—“
“Wait, is it named after that BDSM guy from Pulp Fiction?”
“Well it’s an acronym… (sigh) but also, yes. But it’s really solid software people have been—“
“Why on Earth would you name a product after that guy?”
I think tools like git get past this issue by being so aggressively useful and now ubiquitous, but in the early stages of a project if you don’t have the massive adoption git had (which led to a positive feedback loop of more feature development leading to more users) then you can end up dragging your name like an albatross around your neck.
Honestly I find Blender much more offensive as a term, considering it actually comes up in daily life. I never hear anyone say “gimp”. But in context, neither usually bring up the wrong association for me…
In general I think naming is a vastly overblown issue. If bike shedders had their way, we would never have names as nondescript as Apple or Amazon, or as obscure as Google, yet they are wildly, unreasonably successful.
Sorry lol, it’s apparently a strictly German expression meaning someone who’s all show and no substance. It was late and I got confused there for a second. Anyway, the point on Gimp stands. Although to be fair, a rebrand would hardly do any damage given how deeply unpopular it already is.
So in American English, the term “gimped” refers to someone who has a physical disability, usually affecting the way they walk. This term has largely fallen out of fashion though and isn’t used much anymore unless someone is very deliberately trying to be edgy.
Nowadays in America, if someone over the age of 30 (and many people under the age of 30) hear the word “gimp” or more specifically “the gimp”, their mind immediately flashes back to this scene from the incredibly popular movie Pulp Fiction (this clip is not safe for work and depicts sexual assault) https://youtu.be/PcZUjEWFpKs
If you check the first paragraph of the History section of GIMP’s Wikipedia page, you can see that this is not a coincidence, the creators did in fact name it after the character from that clip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP
So no, I don’t think this is an issue of “any interesting name being too controversial”. There are many places you could draw the line before getting to “let’s name our software after the Gimp from Pulp Fiction”.
I'm very late to this thread, because I just didn't have anything I felt was valuable. But now i have.
At first I also had thr reaction of thinking "he asked for it" , and all that schadenfreude feeling.
However, now I think it was a great loss and hope the killer gets the whole extent of the law.
See, in a society that is tending more and more to the extremes, polarization and radicalism, we NEED people to TALK.
Being from outside of the US, I don't know the ideas this guy was spewing; However, from what I've read, what he did was basically talking and debate. We need that. We need to be open to talk ideas, even if we dont agree. Where are we when someone who speaks his mind gets killed for that?
I am socialist and anti-US-imperialism in general, but I tend to frequent r/conservative and r/ccw and even patriots.win subteddits. Because im interested in a different point of view.
I get sad that most posts in r/conservative block externals, as I would love to interact in some of the posts. But... after this guys assassination... I dont blame them. People should feel safe to talk and discuss their ideas.
I'm to stupid to be able to debate against this guy, or the other guy.that speaks too fast and always looks angry (anti abortion American dude). But ... why isn't someone smarter and with opposing views debating them?. We need it.
I don’t disagree with your point overall but the sad reality is that Charlie Kirk was not there to have a discussion. He went around trolling people and provoking big responses at universities so he could farm it out on social media. A huge part of his income was being a troll.
That does not mean he deserved to die. He didn’t. But he did not die undergoing some noble endeavor or engaging in free speech in some profoundly brave way.
But that's my point. Where is the guy with the opposing view and sharp tongue that's able to talk back to him? The fact that its monetized is good. Talking should be attractive to people. I'm all in favor of that.
But it’s not talking it’s rage baiting and selectively clipping your successes, deleting the failures, and using the former to stoke flames online for profit.
Modern political commentators and influencers are strategic about who they will engage with and how they engage.
You can see this with Ben Shapiro when he walked out of an interview with conservative BBC host, Andrew Neil. Shapiro was unprepared for a real challenge and his go-to of speaking fast, gish galloping, and calling out the “radical left views” of his opponent didn’t work because the host was a conservative.
It always baffles me how indignant people like Shapiro get when you simply read their words back to them. They act like you sprung a bear trap around their ankle and are viciously mocking them while they bleed out on the ground. It’s this performative outrage that is meant to distract you from what they’re outraged about, which again is simply quoting what they said. They depend on being able to try on opinions like hats and discard them when they no longer fit the specific argument they are engaging in in that moment, and they get mad when they can’t swap hats.
Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%?
I've worked remotely for 5 years now, and there is NO way I would return to an office based job. I even have moved to a small town where there are practically 0 tech jobs; and at this point there's NO way I would relocate for a new job. Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job if they made me return to office (even for one day a week, as it would mean having to move to wherever the office is). Fortunately I am in a position where I can go several months without a paycheck, and I have some passive income.
This question isn't very revealing because it almost entirely depends on this one variable:
> maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job
Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family.
The second variable it depends on is their current salary. Someone who currently earns a huge number can afford to give up a higher percentage than someone who earns barely enough to make ends meet.
The question becomes a proxy for the person's financial situation and current salary, not their remote work preferences.
This is also a question where people's claims don't match their actions. Similar to every election season when a lot of people declare they're going to move to a different country if their party loses, but the number of people who actually do it is much smaller.
>Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family.
Maybe this is the way companies rid themselves of older workers who push back on things. The FIRE movement is huge in tech, and I imagine a not insignificant number of people have RTO as the last straw where they pull the ripcord. Personally, for me? There's no going back. The only way you could get me into the office on a regular basis is if you let me work on rovers at JPL or something.
For myself, I'd love nothing more if I could code part time in retirement, for the rest of my life, but I won't RTO to do it. If I have to leave development behind? So be it.
You got the underlying reason for my question almost in passing:
I've been involved in hiring Software devs from US and LatAm for several years in different management positions. I wondered how feasible would be for say, a company in Mexico to compete on hiring a dev in the USA at a lower cost (normally, a Mexico dev is between 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a US one), by leveraging the value of [allowing] working Remote.
EDIT: Which actually made me think of a crazy idea: A job board called something like "Work for Less", where small companies or companies from overseas offer jobs that have compensations more focused on Quality of Living vs compensation. So for example, a job opening might have "We offer: 70% of your last salary. 3 day weekends, remote work". Or if it is say, a Mexican company, "We offer: 80% of your last salary. Comprehensive relocation help to live/work in a Mexican beach for 4 months a year. Medical Tourism coverage (don't know what this is called, but basically, help in say, taking people to high quality medical places)".
Maybe it is a stupid idea, but at the end of the day, Remote Work is one of several "Levers" for Quality of Life, and although historically the US has focused on monetary compensation, maybe newer generations value other aspects more.
There is also the unknown future. How stable is this remote-pay-discount bargain opportunity? If the company goes bust and you need to RTO, you need to live in a market with employment options.
I’ll give some real world numbers. Right now I make a little over $200K. I am 51, never struck it rich in tech and make the same as former intern I mentored when I was in BigTech between 2020-2023 and when they got back. They got promoted to an L5 (mid level) earlier this year at 25. We both worked in the Professional Services department.
I’ve said no to opportunities that would have paid $250K - 280K that would have required me to relocate and be in an office. I can honestly say there is no amount of money that would convince me to go to an office.
My wife and I already travel extensively, I “retired her” at 44 years old in 2020. We have done the digital nomad thing for a year since then and we are planning to spend a couple of months in Costa Rica next year and be away from home during much of the summer.
I have the freedom to spend a week with my parents and work from there and fly to another city to see my friends and adult sons.
Why do I need more money? I’ve had the big house in the burbs built twice and we sold and downsized from the second one.
I also have a year savings in the bank outside of retirement savings
More money would do absolutely nothing for me if I had to exchange it for remote work except make my life worse in every way.
I couldn’t spend the time with my 81 and 83 year old parents, I wouldn’t have nearly the amount of time with wife, I couldn’t spend months away from home.
Short version: At 51, the value of my time is too important. My wife and I are gym rats, very healthy and I am not willing to trade this time in my life for more money. My health is not going to be better in 5 years statistically. Not that we have any debilitating illness, but no one beats aging.
The tradeoffs would be too great. I’m my parents only child. While they are as healthy as an 83 and 81 year old can be, time catches up with all of us. I’ve enjoyed the past 5 years (Covid times excepted) being able to see them and spend a couple of weeks with them multiple of times a year.
When the time comes that I do need to pack a bag and see about them for an extended period of time, my wife and I can do that. There is no amount of money that I would trade for that.
It’s the same about travel. I wouldn’t give up our travel now and put it off any longer than we already have because of financial and family obligations (raising my two step sons).
What would more money do for me right now? Allow me to travel more? Allow me to get a bigger house even though we already had the big house in the burbs and sold it for twice what we had it built for and downsized to a 1250 square foot condo in a vacation community in Florida where everyone ride uses their home as vacation home.
Nicer cars? We sold both of our cars when we traveled for a year and bought the cheapest new car that we could stand when we settled down.
A better retirement? By the time I retire, we will have traveled to every place we could possibly want to go and plan to go back and forth between our current home and spend extended periods of time in other cities both domestically and internationally. We are experimenting with that now. But in US time zones.
I left an on-site job for a fully remote job, taking about a 35% cut to do so. Literally every aspect of my life improved, including financially.
The financial savings come from 3 things: downsizing to one car and elimination of transport costs; dramatically reduced lunch and coffee expenses; not buying a bunch of stuff to cope with the emotional toll (by far the biggest component).
The savings are even more dramatic if I factor in the opportunity costs of commute time. After accounting for the two way commute time, gas station line time, and vehicle maintenance time, my effective hourly rate working in-office was probably lower than working remote.
> Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%?
Where's the office? The bike ride through some parks like my last? A ten minute drive in surface streets? A 20 minute rail ride away? A half hour drive on crowded highways?
I'd go back to the office a bicycle ride away without issue. I like a nice office, and it's nice being able to separate the work space from the home, it's like I gained a room of my home back. I'd probably require a lot of benefits or a good bit more pay to take a job with a long highway commute.
I'd have to do the math on what the commute would cost me in time and financial cost.
I don't own a car. I have no plans to buy one. If I "needed" one for a job, that would be brought up at the salary negotiation. Sorry, I'm not going to pay for a car I don't otherwise need and lose $15K a year for something decent. What a scam!
On the time, well, it just depends on what they're going to pay me. Divide by work hours per year. Add 2 hours a day. Add that to the offer. I don't work for free. I don't travel for free. When I need to fly somewhere I get free ground transport, free meals, free flights, free hotel, but because we put "we're forcing you to travel 10 miles a day for no reason" in a little special box called "expected" we can force you to spend your own salary on it. *Scam*. It's all a big scam. They're subsidizing their bottom line with your time, your money, and your air.
I worked a terrible job in high school because I could walk there. There was no point in going someplace else that paid more because I would've burned all the extra money up in gas.
Enough to win the competition for the fixed number of available homes in good neighborhoods convenient to the office. Which is effectively an infinite amount, if every employer in the area is trying to throw money at the problem.
Based upon the recruiters messaging me, if I gave up my remote job for one that required in-office attendance I would get an immediate 30% pay bump.
That would however, demand an hour and half commute each way and that would impact my ability to take my children to school and be involved with family meals. Back when I did have a hour commute each way it was costing me £2,800 a year in fuel, plus £2,220 in parking fees, plus about the same again for lunch out with colleagues.
So yeah, i'd get a 30-40% pay bump, but a large percentage would be consumed by additional costs with no benefit to my performance.
I would never take less pay to work from home. Im good with working in office or at home. Also, Im doing the same job either way, so I'm not sure why I'd be paid differently one way or the other. If anything, I'd think it's more expensive (insignificantly) for the company to give me a desk.
In 2008 I was given 2 offers from a company: WFH or paid relocation to work in-office. I chose the former, which came with a 26% lower salary, and have been remote ever since. Just comparing the salaries in that case is a little disingenuous, however, since the relocation was from a low cost of living city to a high cost of living city.
A large impact on the extent to which WFH may need to come at a discount is specialization: If you're easily replaceable with an in-office worker, why would the company deal with remote? If you're not so easily replaceable, the company is more likely to be willing to work with you on your terms.
There's generally been a large disconnect between the job market in the tech sector and the rest of the economy, at least until a few years ago. There's now much more of a bifurcation within the tech job market, where rank-and-file and entry level software engineers are suffering while experienced and specialized software engineers may be doing better than ever. This plays into the RTO/WFH discussion because some people may not have the option to get their preference at any discount, or given either option in the first place.
> Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially
You think? I was so sure that anyone who can get by without working would immediately rush to upend their life and suffer the many annoyances of working in an office! /s
If it wasn't obvious, a lot people don't have a choice. They can always leave, but this RTO thing is everywhere and it's not so easy working remotely nowadays.
It is a reality that us people from Xenials (myself), Millenials and Z have have lived our work lives in a generally confortable era. I myself ended my BSc in 2004, way after the dot-com bubble burst, and fortunately the 2008 crisis didn't hit me.
But, the advice you are calling "boomer coping" (or similar) has some experience in there, most likely from people that suffered the 2000 dot-com bubble burst. From the accounts I've read of older friends, there were people with plenty of experience and great CVs washing dishes at local restaurants.
Right now, the way things are moving in our field, with AI, outsourcing and everything else playing, it looks like the skillsets are getting cheaper. So, we are getting punched by reality and I believe it will only get worse.
Good luck.
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