[maciejzj]

TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life.

This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will be. If you’re a fresh grad with student debt, no house, and no social network, you’re more or less gambling with your life.

[schnitzelstoat]

I felt a lot safer when I was a young grad than now that I have kids to support and I can't just up and move to wherever the best job opportunity is or live off lentils to save money or whatever.

[maciejzj]

Yeah, kids change the landscape a lot. On the other hand, if you don't have any personal ties, its easier to grab opportunities, but you are unlikely to build any kind of social network when chasing jobs all over the country/world.

Either way, there is very little to no path toward "family + place to live + stable job" model.

[didgetmaster]

When I was single with no kids, I felt pretty comfortable leaving a good job to join a startup. I took a 50% pay cut to join when the risk seemed high, but the reward also seemed high.

It paid off for me, but who knows if I would have taken that leap later in life.

[swah]

There must be "dozens of us" with this fear right now. I'm kinda surprised there isn't a rapid growing place for us to discuss this... (Youtube, X account, Discord place..)

[Havoc]

I'm on the flip side of this - not exactly young but no dependants which is making me a little bit less nervous. Seems like the next 20 years will be a wild ride & it doesn't seem optional so lets go I guess

[abc123abc123]

True. This is one of the best arguments for not having kids. I could never imagine putting myself in that uncertain situation. Much better to reduce those risks, and focus on yourself.

[chankstein38]

Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.

[WorldMaker]

If you are looking for any sort of hope, even a cursed one: there is the perspective that LLM generated code is legacy code as a service. LLMs were trained on a lot other people's legacy code. A lot of "vibe coding" is for what de facto are "day one legacy code apps". If my career has taught me anything, companies will always sunk cost fallacy throw new money at "fixing"/"expanding" legacy apps or the endless "rewrite cycle" of always trying to rewrite legacy apps but never quite succeeding.

Skills like Legacy Code Anthropology and Reverse Engineering will grow into higher demand. Like the worst legacy apps built by junior developers and non-developers (Access/Excel VBA and VB6 alone had a lot of "low code" legacy by non-developers), LLMs are great at "documenting" What was built, but almost never Why or How, so skills like "Past Developer Mind Reading" and "Code Seances" will also be in high demand.

There will be plenty of work still to do "when" everything is vibe coded. It's going to resemble a lot more the dark matter work a lot of software engineering is in big enterprise: fixing other people's mistakes and trying to figure out the best way you can why they made those mistakes so you can in theory prevent the next mistake.

It's a very dark, cursed hope to believe that the future of software engineering is the darkest parts of its present/past. As a software developer who has spent too large of an amount of my career in the VB6 IDE and who often joked that my "retirement plan" was probably going to be falling into an overly-highly-paid COBOL Consultancy somewhere down the line, I'm more depressed that there will be a lot more legacy work than ever, not that there won't be enough work to go around, and it will be some of the ugliest, most boring, least fun parts of my career, forever, and will have even less "cushiness" to make up for it. (That "dream" of a highly paid COBOL Consultancy disappears when good Legacy Code becomes too common and thus the commodity job. Hard to demand slicker, higher salaries when supply is tainted and full.)

[throwaway920102]

I think what we're missing is certainty, not hope. You used to have more certainty that if you checked all the correct boxes your financial future would be guaranteed. Hope for the future is sort of separate and the most optimistic person could hold on to hope even now, and the most pessimistic person could lack hope even graduating with a CS degree in 2015.

You can have hope even if a positive outcome isn't guaranteed. In fact that is when hope is the most valuable (and maybe also difficult to find).

[sekai]

> Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.

Unless you're a plumber.

[QuiEgo]

Also don’t forget the part where we’re told housing will never be affordable again in many areas, and don’t expect to be able to remote work to move to LCOL areas any more.

[seberino]

Not sure that is warranted. AI will create exciting changes to society for the better. These times are uncertain but certainly not depressing.

[jmyeet]

I say this without hyperbole: we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse.

We've had 50+ years of deteriotating worker conditions and a massive concentration of wealth to like 10,000 people. The 1980s crushed the labor movement, to all of our detriment.

The GFC destroyed the career prospects of many millenials who discovered their entry-level positions no longer existed so we created a generation that we're loaded with student debt, working as baristas.

A lot of people on HN ignored this because the 2010s were good for tech people but many of us didn't realize this post-GFC wave would eventually come for us. And that's what's happening now.

So on top of the millenaisl we now have Gen Z who have correctly realized they'll never have security, never buy a house and will never retire. They'll live paycheck to paycheck, barely surviving until they die. Why? All so Jeff Bezos can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion.

I'm reminded of the quote "only nine meals separates mankind from anarchy".

I believe we've passed the point where we can solve this problem with electoral politics. Western democracies are being overtaken by fascists because of increasing desperation and the total destruction of any kind of leftism since WW2. At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.

[tavavex]

> we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse. (...) At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.

This is, in a twisted way, an expression of hope. The expectation of a grand collapse is one that's shared by many, but can you explain what gives you that complete certainty that it's near or that it's coming at all?

The far bleaker possibility that I think is totally realistic is that things continue getting worse, but they never cross over the final line. Things are mismanaged, everyone is worse off, but that nine-meal gap is never allowed to happen, and any real threats are squashed at the roots. There's no singular collapse, instead of one definitive societal stab wound that's followed by long hospital recovery, we're inflicted with a thousand minor cuts to near-death.

The people who benefit from all this have been refining their knowledge and growing their power and influence. They're near-gods at this point. They may make a mistake, but what if they don't and the current situation is maintained for decades to come?

[brabel]

You’re focusing on the US. In Europe, worker protections are great. However, Europe has been lagging behind the US for a couple of decades and the gap has been growing. All tech giants are based in the US or China. Maybe things will collapse in the US now, but very unlikely to do so in Europe unless the impact from the US is so great it propagates to Europe, despite Europe itself not having done the things that caused such collapse in the US , which seems to be the result of prioritizing profit and greed above everything else, including people wellbeing.

[theshrike79]

At one point there will be enough people with no job or no hope who will do the math of "there are 100 million of us and 3000 billionaires" and hopefully have read enough history to learn about the French Revolution and the tools they used.

The only way to prevent this is to guarantee that people without jobs will still have a roof over their heads and enough calories and micronutrients every day to survive - and some entertainment.

[shimman]

I do wonder what will come next, it seems very unlikely that modern states can effectively be toppled and replaced by revolutions but maybe the nature of revolutions will change themselves. After all, it's not like the neoliberal paradigm was always so, it was systematically planned by elites in the 1970s and we're now proudly living in the society they envisioned (elites have wealth while everyone else struggles). The neoliberal establishment was definitely a revolution that impacted and destroyed many lives but it wasn't treated as such.

I guess the next turning of the wheel will be similar too.

Or maybe we all just have poor imaginations.

[RivieraKid]

It's been a cause of mild background anxiety for me for the past 3 years. One part is financial and the other is a potential loss of a comfortable and relatively high status job that I can get even with below average social and physical skills.

I need about 4.5 years until basic financial independence, I wonder how does it feel to be at that point.

[glemion43]

I'm more worried about the global impact.

Will people still buy and sell houses?

Will house prices go down because no one can afford them?

Will house prices go up because so few will sell their assets?

I would like to buy a small farm today without debt and cheap energy (upfront investment in solar and storage) but I need a few years more.

Does the world can really change that fast? I don't know but the progress in AI is fast, very fast.

[AstroBen]

Fresh grads will be fine regardless. You're okay to start over from scratch at 25. 42 on the other hand is tough

I feel for the mid-career people with families to support. Can't imagine how stressful that would be

[aeldidi]

This is a fresh perspective for me. I'm around 25 and have been struggling with finding some kind of path towards making my career into something sustainable long-term, but never really considered the other side. I think the issue many have on my end is that they don't really have much of anything to stand on while they rebuild yet, whereas they might think that someone more experienced could pivot to business and people-oriented roles by leveraging what they have now. I know many people personally struggling to find work as it is right out of school, and many have student loans which exacerbate the situation. For a lot of people, starting from scratch is not realistically feasible in the near future unless they're content with being homeless for a while.

Of course labor jobs will always exist, and a 25 year old would (on average) be much more physically able for that than someone older, so it goes both ways.

[rwmj]

Work on becoming Financially Independent. The best time to start was when you started your career, the second best time to start is now.

[pepperball]

Yeah really seems like the only way to win (or rather not lose) is simply not to play.

At this point I’ve realized I need to cast all other ambitions aside and work on getting some out of the way land that I own.

[SkyeCA]

> TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point.

Honestly? It does and I feel completely hopeless. I'm very, very angry with the world/life at this point to put it mildly.

[block_dagger]

I think we all need to respond by being very, very flexible and open minded about how to contribute to society going forward. I'm on the back end of my career but I imagine it's terrifying for newcomers. Stay agile! We're all in this together.

[Havoc]

And not just SWE. If that falls then we're pretty close to societal upheaval because the difference vs other jobs is largely just better training data (github)

[Mountain_Skies]

And yet the current administration, like every other administration since the mid 90s, still sets labor immigration policy on the testimony of the tech industry that there is still a critical shortage of tech labor so the doors must be remain open for the 30th year of the temporary program that's only going to be in place until the tech companies have time to train domestic talent. If you have a problem with this, you're a racist Nazi who should be excluded from society. Left, right, up, down, they all agree on this, as does the vast majority of posters here. Their defense for this is that little down arrow since they have no other legitimate defense for the 30th something year of the temporary program to give them time to train the talent they claim doesn't exist in the United States.