> Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.

Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income

> The tooling we have now is amazing,

Yes, although it's not necessarily a blessing but a curse. Being amazing means maturity. Being mature meaning stalled marginal return. Stalled marginal returns means no growth. No growth means no meaningful projects. I missed the 2000s, when there were so many low-hanging fruits. We had multiple competing KV stores in development, multiple stream processing frameworks, multiple ML frameworks, multiple query engines. Heck, even multiple programming languages for data analytics.

> Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income

Other jobs are getting fucked much more severely. Most industries have bled their labor dry, to the bones. There’s nothing left, they’ve solve the optimization problem of moving as much money as possibly away from them.

Tech is still working on that optimization problem.

It's heavily company/team/manager specific, but you are absolutely correct. I've seen a lot of disillusioned peers leave the industry pretty much since COVID, and they came back after a small break because it's the best of all alternatives.

I think a lot of my peers didn't really understand what working was, and really bought into a lot of the BS. The last few years have been a reality check for us all.

My current employer (big tech) is the best I've ever had. The internal tooling is amazing and works well, access to powerful development hardware is straightforward and everything just works, expensing things required for my job is not a hassle. Yes, there may be a lot of annoying process and it can take a long time to get the 20 approvals you need to deploy a code change, but in all, I've never had it so good. I've seen what it's like in startups and medium sized companies, and it would take a lot of convincing to go back.

Then I see coworkers who have only ever been in this environment. This was their first job out of undergrad, and they've never seen the shit you have to deal with at other companies. They get frustrated at the trivial little things here and decide, "I'm going to quit and go to a small or medium sized company" where there's less bureaucracy or where they can have a bigger "impact" or whatever. Then they get to their new company and HR tosses them a half-working workstation and a dirty used mouse as "onboarding". And they realize they don't have the massive build infrastructure they took for granted or a dedicated build/release team. They don't have robust performance and crash metrics dashboards, and they don't have automatic code bisecting tools to find the change that caused the error. They don't even have a QA team! They don't have continuous builds or maybe they don't even have functional source control or a reliable internet connection. No free food, no massage chairs, no flexible work hours, they have to fill out a time sheet now and maybe even have to clock in and out for bathroom breaks (yes, I've worked at a shitty software company where they made engineers clock in and out).

A lot of these guys realize what they had and boomerang right back after a year or so of this. And now that we are in a bear market and hiring is getting tough, I wouldn't count on the ability to just waltz back in anymore...

A lot of people I know in SV are quitting as 60 hours is being normalized and they’re getting treated like they should be grateful. I know, I know, 60 hours is just what it takes to “focus” as that’s what the working world is like, or some other nonsense coming from the cult of overwork, which seems to be the tone being set.

> AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption

... such as destroying what's left of the entry to junior-level job market. And perhaps in the near future, mid-level too.