Says / asks an article
in a media spin-off created by a big fintech company, which has been funded by, among others, Peter Thielby a big digital finance publisher / SaaS and advertising company with a history of not disclosing their investors, probably laying off people and heavily investing in AI themselves.Yes, the tech sector is in a harsh condition, but we will go on. Don’t let the AI hype / lay off waves for an overhired tech workforce from covid break your minds. There will be a need for smart people building and maintaining ecosystems, as long as a rising tech oligarchy won’t gatekeep us all out, which should be the headline here.
Edit: I can’t find a link between the fintech wise and the publisher wise. I still don’t like this type of sensationalist headlines as all technology gets allegedly obsoleted every other year.
I’m sorry no software engineer right out of college should be getting paid 100k plus. You have <1 yr of professional experience. Okay I’ll give your inter/“extern”-ship and land you a whopping 50k - 60k… it is and was overly inflated wages…
Okay I should’ve added regional based, like major cities should add above, and against inflation. Like obviously after the first year you can make more dependent on ones performance, bonus etc… I’m just saying like you enter with a lesser salary, and get more. Or you just hop around till you get a better salary with more experience
That’s absurd. Many other jobs should pay that much too.Take it from the billionaires.
Exactly. Fucking mcdonald’s should be a 6 figure job.
Cool story grandpa. Or maybe you’re just underpaid? Try adjusting for inflation. $50k doesn’t cut it for starting salaries anymore, and a chocolate bar now costs more than a quarter.
$60k a year is not enough to live comfortably in most of the cities with tech hubs. Rent alone would be 60+% of your paycheck, plus utilities and a car to get to work, you might be going hungry.
If their work brings in > 100k in revenue then they should.
you’re ignoring the $2,000,000 in training costs from sr devs and mistakes.
if you want to get serious about cost effectiveness, Jr devs should pay to work at a job.
keep in mind, you fuck up a steak at a cooking job you’re out the cost of the meal + time.
you fuck up a DB after a schema change you’re out thousands if not millions of dollars in outages, SLAs, and sales.
still want to use revenue as a compensation performance metric?
keep in mind, you fuck up a steak at a cooking job you’re out the cost of the meal + time.
What? Where?
To be fair, if a jr dev has enough acesss to screw a prod db from a schena update, then the issue is with the seniors and managers who did not set up the appropriate guard rails to prevent that.
you understand how that proves my point, right?
Idk, I’ve worked with recent grads where their work likely did bring in > $100k in a year. Maybe only took a month to get up to speed. Commits from all devs should be reviewed, and all code should be tested before pushing to prod, so those catastrophic costs should rarely be a problem. We had a good relationship with professors at a local university, and they’d send us their top students. The students would work with us for a while before usually getting picked up by big tech.
Pretty sure my work right out of college brought the company around $300k the first year (wrote the firmware for an electronic control board mostly by myself, which allowed the company to secure a large contract).
you’re almost there…
“six figure career” might refer to a career in which you get there eventually.
Agreed, but bump the internship up $10-20k for my area. In CS, you should be getting median household income more-or-less for a junior/intern role ($70-80k in my area), and double median income for a senior role ($140-160k in my area), or at least that’s how it works out in my area. There are roles above senior, and those should get paid accordingly.
Does anyone from Europe recognize this? Because it isn’t what I’m seeing.
Europe has a much more stable job market, stricter rules for hiring / firing.
This is because there isn’t a job shortage. It’s offshoring. The company I (thankfully willingly) left 2 years ago has shifted all of their software hiring to Europe. And since I left has had multiple US focused layoffs. All while the Euro listings keep popping up. And I get it, the cost of living is much lower and the skill set is equivalent. So yea, get your bank. But, this is companies exploiting Europe/Asia, rather than it being something Europe/Asia is immune to.
I haven’t been actively job searching lately, but based on the recruiters cold contacting me about job offers I’d say no, I don’t recognize this at all.
It took one year to find a replacement for a colleague who left the company. He was a senior in his field.
The guy says he couldn’t get a job at McDonalds due to lack of exerience.
Thats your problem dude. I can’t imagine a company hiring someone for a six figure job who has zero work exerience.
Get a helpdesk job for little while while you keep applying.
I believe the problem is that people feel entitled to a job with a six-figure salary just because they paid for an expensive college education. College has this air of excellence.
But then, reality sets in. Knowledge is nice, of course, but practical experience is key. You need to know how to act in the real world.
This sorta cracks me up. If your monthly expenses are 6k a month you might be able to be just in the black if you make just under six figures. Look at rents anywhere that can be described as in or around any city and remember recent grads have no savings and student loans on top of other expenses. Throwing around six figures as a large number in 2015 meant something, in 2025 its laughable.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
i would argue that it’s not so much the rich that are at fault here, but the politicians who are unwilling to implement taxes on the rich.
Ultimately the problem is an over saturated market and universities letting their programs grow too large.
The ultimate problem is greed and an uncontrolled lust for power.
Wrong on both fronts.
No, the problem is greedy corporations.
There is an active need for many developers, think of every time you’ve used terrible software, every time a program crashed or you found yourself manually doing something and thought “there should be a tool for this”, every bad search and broken social media site.
Hell, we’re supposed to be in the middle of an “AI boom” and someone has to actually implement all those pie in the sky “automate away everyone’s jobs”. While AI can, debatably, write the code for that, it still takes a person to design, architect, implement, test and validate those systems.
No. The entire technical foundation on which “computer science” is built is crumbling due to lack of maintenance and funding and desperately needs people to fix it, however corporations are doing their what they do best; devaluing, destroying, and parasitizing their surroundings.
Just like AI can write code, it can also design, architect, implement and test…badly
No manager cares about validation. Today’s mindset seems to be “ship now, fix later”
Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)
I’m not sure that works. There were 20 shillings to the pound.
So £0.75 a week.
This inflation calculator:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
£75 in 1843 is equivalent to £8,310.96
So 15s then is equivalent to £83.11 a week, £4321.72 a year.
40 hour week (which is implied to be too low). ~£2.08 an hour
So if he worked over 40 hours you’re talking a sub £2/hour wage. Around $2.70 in US money.
I suspect the stat relies on converting to dollars before applying inflation as GBP to USD was about 1 to 5 then instead of about 1 to 1.33
It’s fun but I wouldn’t want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.
It’s fun but I wouldn’t want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.
I think they’re actually making the opposite claim- American wages are just that fucked, rather than Dickens being wrong
I think who you’re responding to knows that and is saying while doing the math wrong makes their point better it does Dickens wrong.
I think
Unfortunately you aren’t
That was from December of '21. It would be $15.69 now.
Another thread put it at 16.14 an hour.
Not surprised, I just clicked on the first inflation calculator that came up. I think it was the BLS CPI calculator.
And I only did it in dollars from December of '21 until now. Converting back to shillings, either in '21 or Dickensian times, before bringing it forward to today could result in a big difference due to the charging exchange rate between the pound and the dollar.
GODSDAMN YOU BRETTON WOODS
Do project managers and vision directors next
Do CEOs.
I’m a visionary director, I have visions like all of the time !
If your job can be automated. Your job will be automated. Even if the work it produces is hot runny shit.
They would rather pump out pure garbage than pay an honest wage for honest work. It doesn’t even have to work. They’ll just put an arbitration clause in the EULA. Then sit back and count their money.
That’s not how companies work. The CEO has a fiduciary duty to maximize company gains, so they have to invest in AI, because it’s more profitable. They don’t even have a choice, if they want to keep their job.
The current crisis has nothing to do with the individual decisions of a single CEO. It’s a legal issue, i.e. CEOs could only act differently if there was a significant and serious change in the way that the law requires them to operate. Which, all things considered, is unreasonable in this case.
They wouldn’t act differently. Watch 1 hour of CNBC. Those people only technically qualify as human.
Hey look, it’s the late 90’ and early 2000’s again.
Same crap that was talked about after the .com bust.
This was the start of my career. Then 2008. Then now. There’s never been a good time.
This once in a life time recessions seem to happen quite frequently.
The secret of the CS and IT job is that it has always been the Neuveaux Blue Collar job.
For every IT exec and formerly-technical middle-management douchebag making really good money, there are 2 to 10 actually technical resources making “okay” money relative to their skill and the insane hours and scenarios they are expected to work.
Oh and let’s not forget they’re constantly trying to outsource as much of that support and engineering talent as possible.
And that is why we need unions in tech. Tech is a cost center for most companies. It’s a space to beat down as much as possible to get margins up, just the same as the guys working on the line making the thing.
I am in tech, I am in a union. Its fucking great!
Its so nice. Mine just got me a raise this year.
Maybe if people hadn’t pushed everyone in the entire fucking world into my field we wouldn’t have this problem
Maybe if the field hadn’t pushed everyone else out of business…
Skill issue /s
Do you mean to tell me it wasn’t a quick get-rich scheme and people who aren’t interested in the field will have issues after doing math puzzles 8 hours a day in front of a monitor before going home to do more on github?
But the rich non-programmer guy told me so!
Yea bro that’s what they do. See you making a living wage, then flood the labor pool. Welcome back to the barrel Mon crab
So old man time. In the early nineties things did not look great. Almost any college degree was not bringing in a salary one could like think about having a family with. Then came the late nineties and dot com and tech jobs were like the only thing that paid to possibly have what was, in many peoples mind, the typical middle class life. You know own your own home thing eventually. Since then its been tech or bust and now tech is bust and there is no go to field for people to run to.
Homeowning and paying a mortgage, especially now, is the single most important thing maintaining my quality of life.
A neighbor recently sold and it is now a rental. Paying that rent would effectively raise my housing costs about $20k a year.
It’s almost exactly the same house and lot. It’s insane.
Is it fixed? although interest rates are likely to go down so even a non fixed is helpful currently.
Yep. It’s the only real option in my opinion. My spouse’s student loans weren’t fixed and they’d fluctuate so much in payments and started accruing balance randomly. Our homeownership allowed us to leverage another fixed loan to pay off her variable loans. Now it’s just a steady small payment for 15 years.
Have you done the math on it though? Yeah, a mortgage stays constant, but to get a mortgage, you need a down payment, closing costs, and whatever you’re paying your real estate agent. And then there’s maintenance costs, utilities (most purchasable homes are larger than what you’d otherwise rent), probably extra costs to get around, etc.
If you instead took that down-payment and additional costs and invested it in a diversified stock portfolio, how would they compare?
I’m in a similar boat where my mortgage is now less than half of what rent would be, but my house is growing in value far slower than stocks. Here’s a nerdy video discussing rent vs buy, and the result is that it’s more of a wash than most people assume. This is extra true if you properly account for repair costs (i.e. if you DIY, what’s the value of your time?). The decision to rent vs buy is far less consequential in terms of long-term financial impact than most people assume.
I did the math. I bought in 2019 and all those costs and expenses were nothing compared to ballooning rent. My monthly housing expenses went down across the board. The equivalent cost of rent since purchasing dwarfs closing costs and even all the maintenance that’s gone into the place. Rent (in America) is calculated to cover all possible homeownership costs so I’m paying for the new fridge or hot water heater one way or another.
Plus I haven’t had to move legislative districts since.
If we use some rules of thumb, it gets closer:
- closing costs - 3-6% of purchase price
- maintenance costs - 1% of current value
Take the down payment and closing costs as an initial investment, the repair costs and any difference in initial mortgage payment vs rent as regular investments, and adjust maintenance and rent (and the difference between mortgage and rent) for inflation. Run those numbers to estimate total wealth after a given period (both house appreciation and investments) and you should end up with pretty similar numbers. I’m ahead on mine as well, but only by ~10% after about 15 years, and my area had really rapid rent growth.
I think it’s an interesting exercise that may not be applicable to everyone since it doesn’t take into account the discipline needed to invest the difference.
That’s also looking at just pure numbers.
I was forced to move every year I was a tenant. I hated it. And the fees and expenses of moving weren’t insignificant, not to mention the time. Some places I lived I never unpacked.
But now I have kids. Things like school districts matter.
Stability matters beyond the strict dollar amount sometimes, if not most times.
Sure, there are tons of intangibles that go into it. I’m just saying that people shouldn’t buy because that’s the only way to get ahead, they should buy because that’s the lifestyle they want.
Yeah but you’re arguing that to someone who already said they did buy. You can make that point but you’re directing at the person you’re responding to, who has already said they own a house. You are going to strain your shoulder.
I bought my own house and the price of owning a house is nothing compared to the price of renting.
Anyone who tries to argue otherwise is a moron who genuinely does not know what they’re talking about.
The government should give the people jobs, or money if it fails to provide meaningful jobs.
this gets me about the bs work reqs. They should give you a place to go to meet the req then (lets be clear the req itself is stupid) if you can’t find a job. It literally makes no sense. Can’t find a job so I need help. Can’t help unless you work a job ???
(lets be clear the req itself is stupid)
if the government requires that you work when you get help, i guess the proper response is to open a business and employ yourself as a mattress tester - test mattresses’ sleep quality for 8 hours a day or night. It’s a job, it provides no value to society, but it’s a job. Work requirement fulfilled.
I honestly think this is a lie because it’s because people are mainly going for SWE or Game Dev. But literally everything else in the computer bubble is still doing fine
I find the jobs are super picky. Had one with a laundry list except for one job scheduling software and I had experience in the one they wanted but the feedback I got back was that the other one was real important even though I had the other and everything else. So I had experience with job scheduling software in general. including one they used. but not the other. and in that laundry list is software way more complicated than job scheduling. Through most of my career having about half of what they wanted was fine and they got that picking up the rest was not going to be a big deal for anyone who had experience in the field.
To some extent, yeah. I work in web development and there’s no shortage of opportunities for someone good at reactive front end development and JSON APIs. But I think there is a shortage of grads who have the necessary skills.
I’ve been trying to grow my business, and it’s frankly depressing how many people graduate with computer science degrees without learning the basics of the field, the volume of vibe coders is too damn high.
This was a problem before AI as well. I’ve been in so many interviews where someone w/ a CS degree can’t deliver solutions to even basic problems. I’ll ask them foundational CS theory, and they can only answer if I don’t expect them to apply it. It’s like they studied for the test instead of actually learning the material. Now w/ AI, they can’t even answer those gimme theory questions, much less apply them.
I used to look for github profiles as a “nice to have,” but it’s becoming more and more of a requirement now, because I just can’t trust someone to actually know how to write code unless they’ve contributed to a larger FOSS project or built something themselves. I can usually tell when they’ve vibe-coded something, so I can disregard most of the nonsense applicants. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for people w/o copious time to get interviews, which sucks (I’ve been there).
Tech is kind of all based around SWE though. What are these other roles you are referring to?
what runs the software?
No, but yes too.
