Hacker News Reader

Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

> It doesn't even pay that well anymore, and AI is just another huge excuse to drop wages by management.

Can you expand on this? I haven’t noticed salaries going down where I’m at (only fewer open positions the last ~1.5 years due to the global economic climate - but I’m sure this is cyclical and will swing back soon enough).

View on HN

Salaries are not going down but costs of living skyrocketed. I am in the top 3% earning bracket as a dev in my country (Poland), I live in a relatively cheap area (south-east) and when I reached my 30s I could afford to buy just a ~100sqm city apartment which cost exactly 5x of my parents 200+sqm house which they bought without mortgage as factory workers without higher education.

And each year I can afford less and less with my relatively huge salary.

When your parents bought, your country had few highly-paid jobs, and places like that have low housing costs: the presence of many highly-paid workers is what causes housing prices to be high.

But “not as well paid as it used to be” is relative to other wage earner, not to cost of living. Two uneducated polish factory workers today won’t be able to buy your parents’ house either.

Idk, maybe it's not the exact book definition but I always thought about how well I'm paid in terms of the purchasing power, not the arbitrary value, and especially not by comparison with others (strictly speaking, because costs of living are kind of that, isn't it?).

The software jobs slowly go into the direction of not being worth the effort (I don't really believe that we will reach that point but that's the current direction).

> Two uneducated polish factory workers today won’t be able to buy your parents’ house either.

Of course - because from my point of view factory jobs are currently paid terrible. They used to be paid better (worth the effort due to being able to buy more).

Did you hear that, bruh, you should be totes cool with not being able to afford what your parents could because if they were where you are they wouldn't be able to afford shit either. You just need to understand economics is all. That makes it all ok.

I'm not saying we should be fine with it, just trying to understand what "doesn't even pay that well anymore" mean practically. E.g. if other careers have gotten better compensated while programming has gotten worse, it would have meant they'd be incentivized to change careers.

What I see locally is that cost of living has gone up but no other jobs (aside maybe real estate?) have improved compensation relatively to programming in that time.

There is a lot more value being produced, but the capitalist class has managed to capture a much higher percentage of it, leaving the worker bees with less and less. At least we have lots of toys to distract us!

Outsourcing everything is what's really destroying the salaries in "advanced" countries. And high inflation seems to go hand in hand with the domestic economic shutdown and trade imbalances.

Thing is, Poland IS the country a lot of stuff is being outsourced into :)

Worry not we started to outsource to India as well... My wife's company (low code domain-specific software creators) laid off 80% of their workforce and contracted a smaller amount of people from India.

It's not going well but I bet it's gonna take at least a year before anyone notices.

well I'm pretty well paid for Denmark, but my wages haven't really gone up in the last few years and when I look at payment rates in Denmark I'm still pretty much at the top for programmers who don't consult - but my wage used to be the same as the average two person household in Denmark and now it is a couple hundred dollars less.

It could be a nod to a shift into ‘do more with less’. In Sweden hospitals and schools have basically lost all their administrative staff and students per class has grown. Teacher salaries might not have gone down, but expectations are much higher, as they have less support from non-teaching staff.

Assistants, like Copilot, substitute for junior devs, making it possible or more likely that a team will put off hiring. I have seen this silent killer in action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com