This is just incredibly frustrating and disheartening to read. How is one supposed to plan for a future in this career when your lifestyle can just disappear overnight?
Plan like everyone else in your country who has to deal with this uncertainty on significantly lower salaries.
Budget. Save. Trim expenditure. And enjoy your career because you chose it as a career, not because it allowed you a lifestyle.
And then, when you are prepared, you can be more calm about a lot more things. Yes, it's possible for the Zombie Apocalypse to hit and make a mockery of all my prep... but because I'm more-or-less ready for more realistic scenarios, I'm also more chill about the possibility of them happening.
And they may not, in which case frankly I won't have wasted many resources anyhow, any more than it's a waste to buy an insurance policy that you never get to collect on.
But that also means that you need not be too alarmed. Even just one year of making the aforementioned $300,000 allows you several years of not working at all before you are making less, on average, than a typical low risk job. As you've already priced in the risk, you'll be fine.
And if the market is wrong then you've gained a nice reward.
That, from an employer point of view, is certainly what makes the difference between offering a high risk premium and deciding that the work isn't worth doing.
> which is partly because of the value of experience, which takes time to build
All jobs value from experience. The question the worker has to ask himself is: Where am I going to allocate my time to gain experience? One can't do everything. They have to make a choice. Tech is a risky place to allocate your time, but compensates for that by offering a premium to compel you in that direction.
Tech is risky because it is all about exploring unknowns. You get periods of fruit, but you are also likely to get periods of dead ends, and when those dead ends start to accumulate people start to back away. That is quite unlike, say, road maintenance where there is a strong belief that roads will be around for the lifetime of one's career. That isn't a guarantee, but it is lower risk. Tech is known to disappear.
Tech has crashed many, many times before after too many dead ends. It feels to me like we're in a dead end period. When was the last time you were excited about new tech? The WFH period during the pandemic brought some small excitement in tech emergence, but it seems we're trying as hard as possible to back away from that.
But who knows? This time might be different. And if that's the case you've got your risk premium as a reward for taking the risk.
This whole "its your calling" thing is how the abuse and low pay in adjacent industries, like game development, are maintained, and frankly it's BS.
I'd go back to school and into something that will maintain my lifestyle.
That said it's always a good idea in general to live below your means, and to be specific, not get the biggest mortgage your lender thinks you can afford.
You're not exactly risking your life and limb by taking a job at a cloud firm. Demand for software isn't going anywhere, and no hiring manager at any future job will give two cares as to whether or not your previous employer's revenues were inflated or not.
You are risking opportunity elsewhere.
Let's say your options are working as a developer for a random Fart App startup or a government job sweeping floors that has been around for centuries. Which are you going to choose? If they both offer $50,000 per year, the choice is clear: The government job. It is the one that is almost certain to have more longevity.
But if the Fart App startup increases their offer to $300,000, well, now it's a harder choice. The startup still isn't likely to last, but with $300,000 in your pocket you're not so concerned about it disappearing into the void on a whim. And if on the unheard of chance they do make it as a lasting company that spans centuries then you're in a really great position.
> Demand for software isn't going anywhere
Thing is, it does crater approximately every 10 years, as we've observed since software first became a thing. It is more entrenched now than it ever was, so there is some reason to think this time is different, but the market is pricing in the risk regardless. The market can be wrong, but the market likes to be prepared.
It slows down, along with the rest of the economy during recessions, because it, like everything else, is driven by the same market forces.
My point is that in the average case, there is ~zero opportunity cost or damage to your career, because you worked at MS Azure, instead of... Somewhere else.
You cite fartapp startups that run on rainbows and free VC money, but cloud providers are about as dissimilar from the fartapp as you can get, in terms of their economics and prospects.
You may be bearish on them, that's fine, I can't predict the future, but I see no reason to believe that you're going to have a better life working at literally any other random software firm, during an economic contraction. There's always a few workplaces that tend to be counter-cyclical, but they are, by definition, a minority.
... Also, many government jobs are a political football, that are only as secure as the next election. The best part is that after you worked one, and had half your compensation deferred to retirement, some politician will come along, and campaign on reneging on your pay, after you've given your thirty years of service.
Tech has been the darling of late exactly because it hasn't followed the general economy. In 2008, when virtually every other industry was about to sound death knells, developers were making bank producing apps. Similar story through the pandemic, when people were locked out of work during lockdowns tech was making a killing selling them things to do with their free time. Not having a good reckoning like everyone else only makes it appear more risky as time marches forward as it is assumed its day will come.
> but cloud providers are about as dissimilar from the fartapp as you can get.
I can't imagine Firebase, which is supposedly the fourth largest cloud provider according to a recent article here, is used for anything much beyond fart apps. As the fart apps die, where does that leave their business model?
Providing tooling to the gold prospectors is a good business to be in... Until people stop prospecting for gold. Firebase is Google at the end of the day, but if that division dies, that's still significant.
I appreciate the concern though :).