The problem is not finding a job, it’s finding a job that pays well while not destroying your mental health, and ideally also feeling somewhat rewarding or otherwise meaningful.
You can earn money doing “something IT” no problem, but say you don’t wanna do webdev, your options are easily cut in half. Don’t wanna do ML/data science either? Half that again. And then you apply what I mentioned above und suddenly you look at a tiny market.
Based on all of the people I know who work in IT, mental health seems to be a sacrifice that often has to be made in favor of meeting deadlines.
Based on my own experience (albeit in Germany) that’s all too often a problem we create ourselves. Devs don’t like to be late or seem bad, so they’ll take deadlines seriously, even though deadlines are almost always made up and irrelevant.
This is of course not helped by the fact that most of us actually like what we do. Last week I closed my work laptop where I wrote a deployment pipeline, and opened my own laptop - to write a deployment pipeline.
It’s different in the U.S. Germany doesn’t have America’s “Protestant Work Ethic” bullshit where you’re expected to work your ass off and go well above what is required of you if you want to get ahead.
I never went along with that nonsense myself, which is why I’ve probably never succeeded in the corporate world.
Well, first of all, that term has been coined by Max Weber, who wrote that at least in part about Germany as well.
Anyway, the behavior you described is also kind of self inflicted pain. Developers simply don’t have much room to grow, unless you want to get into management, and there are countless cushy, well paying, but somewhat boring jobs where you can just coast along doing 40h. And that’s perfectly fine. But for some reason, Americans seem to be unable to get out of their total competition mindset and absolutely need to grind all the time and especially need to talk about how they are grinding.
Tldr:
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Author doesn’t understand “the economy” is just about corporate profits
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Wages are (slightly) up, but not enough to afford food and housing.
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Author looks at mean instead of median retirement savings and say everything is great.
If you’re wondering why she has such bad takes, she’s a self described “crypto reporter” who was trying to convince us inflation was a good thing a while ago.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/01/economy/inflation-good-bad-winners-losers/index.html
She’s completely detached from reality
I appreciate the summary and the warning about the reporter. I had a feeling, but confirmation helps. 👍
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