To be clear: I’m not saying they’re bad people or anything— most people think their experiences are more representative than they are. But, from outside, some of the assumptions software folks make about the world just seem utterly ridiculous. Consider that on average, junior developers make more money than a first year medical resident that has a PhD in perhaps the highest demand field in the US and works shifts of 16-30 hours with many consistently logging 80 hours per week, and occasionally end up working much more. Ask that medical resident what a really bad day, and a really bad week at work looks like for them and ask a developer with the same amount of post-school experience the same question, and then consider how much more school it took… and then ask that same question to an aircraft mechanic, a chef with a culinary degree, a construction worker, a public defender, a commercial fisherman, a firefighter, a nurse… the software industry is more than an aberration — it’s a different planet. The kind of shit I’ve seen developers say they’re going to “pivot to” if the software industry falls apart is, frankly, flabbergasting. If we see the sort of sustained job losses some fear in software, there are going to be a whole lot of people learning some extremely bitter, difficult truths about the world outside.
I’m not saying we all didn’t and don’t work hard to get where we are — it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world. It’s easy to see your own contributions to your success and miss the industry and market scaffolding you could stand on to get what you did.