That's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast.
Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.
Getting rich fast, and doing what you love in your spare time, rather than pretending you love your work, which no one does, sounds perfectly coherent to me.
Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body.
Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.
Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
What does the alternative look like though? Sure tech companies pay engineers well, but there's plenty of other jobs requiring a college degree that don't reach that salary level.
If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.
Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.
I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.
But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
The jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.
Kids who used to study electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering or go into finance and accounting, decided all to major in computer science instead, because if you are going to be an office drone, why not be an office drone in the field that everyone is getting 6-figure starting salaries in?
Surely the overabundance of graduates in CS played into the current situation.
When computers get much better at doing stuff I'd think more people would want to work with computers, this to me seems obvious. There will be even more computers and more people needed to deploy them and operate them. And by the time that is automated, most other jobs that require physical jobs will have robots doing them anyway, so it really is hard for me to understand that as computers get better people predict less people will work with them. Better tool = more of that tool. Paperclip would also say that over a long period of time all of our energy and available space would go to more and more compute. It's hard to think anything else is safer than computer.
"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that won't last either, though.
The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
But shortages of necessities are used to ensure that peer competition remains stiff enough to keep us outbidding each other for housing, etc necessitating optimizing for income, necessitating working more hours, for all but a lucky few.
Isnt this healthy? Decades of single-minded idea that the only progress is college degree formula "because stats shows college degrees is indicator of whatever progress metric" has led to massive personal debt and unsuitable - both personal and societal - careers.
Isnt it healthy that people/society dont think there's a singles formula for success?
Longshoremen in the USA have had to fight tooth and nail to avoid the automation that the other world ports of adopted, much to the detriment of port capacity.
Welding is supposed to be future-proof? At $90+/hour for unionized labor? Don't make me laugh. Look at the work Boston Dynamics has already done with neural networks and tell me that we're not going to see robots doing perfect welds in any space a human could reach, 24/7 around the clock without any need for rest breaks.
> The cobots have already begun production performing high-volume and repetitive welds, but the technology still lags behind humans in artistic quality and problem-solving ability.
AI reduces the repetitive work humans have to do, freeing up our minds for creative problem solving - and creative problem solving is also amplified by having an AI to dialogue with.
kleene_op|6 months ago
Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.
verisimi|6 months ago
beej71|6 months ago
bsder|6 months ago
Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body.
Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.
JumpCrisscross|6 months ago
It doesn’t need to. Not for welding.
kubb|6 months ago
mschild|6 months ago
627467|6 months ago
madaxe_again|6 months ago
varelse|6 months ago
[deleted]
hiAndrewQuinn|6 months ago
If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.
Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.
I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.
But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
runsWphotons|6 months ago
geremiiah|6 months ago
F7F7F7|6 months ago
A 18 year old who goes from graduation to the electrical union will make $60k in year one.
Sure, not the total comp package that those in tech covet but have you looked at median income?
vasco|6 months ago
globular-toast|6 months ago
The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
CalRobert|6 months ago
627467|6 months ago
Isnt it healthy that people/society dont think there's a singles formula for success?
siva7|6 months ago
torium|6 months ago
seanmcdirmid|6 months ago
bestouff|6 months ago
colesantiago|6 months ago
Then they can just live off the interest and in 5-10 years think of buying a house instead of renting.
House prices needs to come down and crash though and more housing needs to be built.
solatic|6 months ago
https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=p5BZaGOUQJsqd1f_
What's the case for optimism here?
frainfreeze|6 months ago
nelox|6 months ago
lifestyleguru|6 months ago
cadamsdotcom|6 months ago
AI reduces the repetitive work humans have to do, freeing up our minds for creative problem solving - and creative problem solving is also amplified by having an AI to dialogue with.
tennisflyi|6 months ago
Fraterkes|6 months ago
varelse|6 months ago
[deleted]