Companies colluding to make the life of workers worse and boost their profits, that has never happened before in the history of humanity.
Apple and Google were caught red handed for their secret anti-poaching agreement (With the Jobs/Schmidt emails leaked to prove it). All these CEOs are in the same social circles, it's not a big reach to think they chat with each other behind the scenes about things like RTO, Layoffs, etc.
Beyond that, we’re in for years of macroeconomic reckoning for unresolved asset bubbles in the 2000s and horrendously bad COVID policy. Laying off makes sense. Sometimes you hire to backfill roles or for strategic teams. Sometimes an H1b is the correct hire.
How many software developers can, in a reasonable timeframe, buy a house in the place they live and support alone a family of four people? Then the truly insane salaries you are talking about are not really that insane.
>Laying off makes sense. Sometimes you hire to backfill roles or for strategic teams. Sometimes an H1b is the correct hire.
Developers are seen by companies as over expensive peons and they have been maneuvering to turn the whole field in an low cost industry. I hope you are younger than 30 to still hold such a naïf worldview.
House prices have gone absolutely nuts in the last forty years. We are witnessing the largest generational transfer of wealth in the history of the world.
Healthcare and education have also experienced broken cost growth.
But those are problems for everyone that’s not on the winning side of these giant money sucks.
It doesn’t change the fact that ratio of programmer salary to median salary has been moving way up. It’s both true that we are doing relatively much better and we are getting screwed by costs just like everyone else.
This has been true up to about a year ago
The causes of that are things we can band together with people across many industries to fight. Like breaking the power of the land-owning gerontocracy.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but probably 80-90% assuming you adjust your living standards and move to an area that is affordable.
Yes, it's probably more like 10% if you're sending your kids to private school, buying a house in expensive metros, etc.