Do people not aggressively prepare for this all the time? If you're being paid $150k a year, you should live like you're getting paid 75k a year and save the rest or use it to purchase some security for the future, like a years supply of pantry foods, or pay down your mortgage if you have one. I have a full-time job and two part time jobs, not because I need the part time jobs but because I'm watching the tech industry dissolve like tissues paper and I'm "holding my spot" in 2 unrelated industries.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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some of us live in major cities and have to spend that money on frivolous things like rent, bills, food and insulin.
I live in a capital city too, but if I'm not putting away at least 30 of my income, then I'm still living dangerously above my means. I have socialized healthcare but I've still experienced joblessness for 6 months, homelessness for 2 periods of about a year and a half each, and minimum wage. Being aggressively careful with money helped soften these situations, and now that things are going well for me ( I only just stopped living in my car in March) I'm still applying those same principles to my everyday budget.
Do people not aggressively prepare for this all the time?
They do not. People making $150K a year think they will keep making that (and more) for decades to come, and it's ludicrously easy to spend all that on useless shit. Shit, just drugs alone can take most of that.
Literally the reason we established social security in the first place ...
Tbf cost of living in such areas, assuming not remote, can be igher too and that consumes a chunk of the higher salary.
dang. poor guy. i cant get a job anywhere in IT and I was a greenfield and brownfield systems architect making a presidential salary. i have worked for a japanese zaibatsu, in education i was responsible for the architecture and implementation of a ~18mm public project, and "in finance" (pls kill me) and startups. i have over 3 decades of experience and ill tell you the struggle is real especially since 47 took office the first time. non-passing transsexuals are chopped off the block every time now. cant even get a job in labor because of my age coupled with the physical disability that made me leave the server rooms behind. now im a destitute homeless sex worker that cant even do that well because of my age and the hostility toward me where i live. strong young white men are now deeply affected and making the papers. vulnerable and marginalized people dont stand a fuckin chance. no one listened to the trans and look at them now.
What happens when AI develops its own programming language that no one understands and knows how to maintain, or how to fix things?
What happens when AI takes control of all the algorithms and sows discontent amongst us all with deep fakes and no one knows who or what is real any more?
This is the real AI apocalypse that I'm scared of.
I am waiting to see when AI decides that CEOs are actually redundant by-products of nepotism
ai can really only be used in non-critical things, as in, when people try to use it for anything remotely important it fails before deployment
He lost his job to the capitalist owners cost-cutting measures. AI was only the excuse they used.
If you must, hate people, not the inanimate tools they hide behind. Don't play into their game.
DEY TOOK OUR JERBS!
Also AI is not that useful even in coding, some software departments lie about its use to management to stop harassing them for "not using them enough".
Even worse is that the web is now flooded with barely useful AI generated slop, including documentations and tutorials.
I read this in the voice of George Carlin
George Carlin having a stroke
A stroke of genius
Well well well, if it isn’t my greatest fear
What I don't understand: He writes about 21 years of experience and having made 150k/year. Where is all that money? How can you make 150k and work for two decades and not have any savings/investments to stay afloat even if that means moving to a more remote and cheaper area?
I don’t know, it just goes out faster than it comes in, no matter what you earn. I think it’s usually an accumulation of decisions, not a single poor choice.
However there’s also high cost of living areas. I’m sure $150k seems like a lot to most people, but around here it would be a struggle to buy even a starter home if that’s all you earned. And renting can easily be more per month than a mortgage so you’re never getting ahead
Then there’s college. Not only does FAFSA no longer account for multiple kids, but they assume you use all your savings and get loans. One college asked me to reverse mortgage my house, rather than help with financial aid
I make 25k a year which is huge for me. It took me 2 years of buying all the shit i wanted and then i started saving up and investing. My goal is to have 10k in savings every year, because who knows how long it's gonna last.
I make about the same and save less than you each year - but I can only do it because I live in a van. How do you keep your housing costs so low?
I live with my nan. Yes the 25k a year is enough to make local reddit mad jelly and the .ml tankies want me tortured to death but reality is its not enough to even get you your own living space and remain financially secure.
I know several software devs who cannot save a dime and live paycheck to paycheck on around $2k a week.
$2,000. I used to get less than that a month at my first job.
just because you have to be smart doesn't mean you're brilliant. these devs failed to understand what budgeting was and would literally piss their paycheck away by eating out 3-4 times a day, bars, women, toys, etc.
I maxed out my 401k contributions every year. I saved half my check. I was able to save a lot, but recently I've been living paycheck to paycheck because everything is so damn expensive.
my point is, some of it is because of poor financial decisions. some of it is because COL is out of control. it's hard to pass judgment on others when you don't know their story.
The wisest thing I did was save a lot of money in my 20s and 30s, and then buy and pay off a place to live. I always knew the 150k a year salary days were likely to end one way or another. Now I at least have a pretty controlled cost of living if I have to take a huge salary hit.
The widest thing I did was save a lot of money on my 20s and 30s. Arguably the stupidest thing I ever did was spend it all on the wedding my ex wanted, then indulge her for way too long so I could never make that back
I got a real one. We made money on our wedding because the wedding and receptions were so cheap.
Rent, eat out every day, spend money on toys, drive an expensive car and so forth. It is surprisingly common.
You don't know enough rich people.
Faux rich. You don't get rich by blowing all your money. Your well placed savings paired with reliable income make you rich. Nobody ever got rich by paying the bank all their money so the bank could own their fucking vw touareg with a lamborghini logo.
Software engineer here - I make more than this guy did and I have roughly the same amount of experience in the industry that he does (perhaps a smidge more, going off of his linkedin profile).
For folks who are saying that there's something off about this guy - that would not have mattered two or three years ago. At most he would have just been seen as a highly talented dev who was also slightly quirky.
For those who say it's not about AI and more about the economy - well, maybe. We do have a couple of major ongoing wars right now and moves over the last couple of months by the recent administration of the US haven't helped.
But I was around during the crash back in 2008, and this still feels different. Harder. Before, I had recruiters just banging on my door. Now, it's tough to past the automated screenings unless I have a contact at the company who can refer me there.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing from my co-workers about how great AI is - how they ran their code through it and it came up with a bunch of unit tests for them and some boilerplate code. Vibe coding is already a thing. So is using AI to write your resume and cover letters and applying to jobs.
Likewise, I look upon tools like Devin.ai with increasing trepidation. Today, LLMs aren't good enough to replace a single senior dev, despite a lot of investment happening to move things in exactly this direction. It probably won't happen tomorrow, or even next year. But in 25?
Let's just say that this article really hit home for me.
The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that's a win for the people. We want to lower the barriers to entry here, to give this highly elite power to others. Actually, there shouldn't be an elite at all - there should just be a democracy where everyone is equally empowered to create and build great things.
Working in tech will not remain this vaulted, lofty place for much longer. If we aren't content creators, or controlling company owners, then ultimately tech workers like myself are in the same position as any other kind of worker - we work for someone else and serve only at their sufferance.
I'm very happy I started hedging early in my career by saving a very large fraction of my income. Working in tech has been excellent for me, but there's never been any guarantee that this will last forever. At that point, I will probably be ready to live off my savings, should that become necessary. Then it doesn't really matter what any market looks like - I will be able to do whatever I feel like during the days.
It’s really not ai, but the general economy. My company has been tightening down for longer than we have ai - only hiring in India. We’re in one of those phases again.
People want it to be ai but it just isn’t. Actually I’m a bit worried about my job because I don’t drink the coolaid. Ai is a nice additional tool to help me be more efficient and I use it when it can help. However I will not participate in these overblown claims within my company that we’re saving like 40% of our time because of ai. We all know you’re just making numbers up to ingratiate with the new boss
"The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that's a win for the people"
Lets not have any illusions here. Currently this tool is available to the public with reasonable access cost only because it is not at that stage and needs a lot of testing and training. The moment it becomes capable of such feats, if it ever does, tech giants will monopolize the shit out of it.
I'm a senior mobile dev, and I needed a website for the app which I've never done before. AI was able to help me make one. Is it a well programmed website? Nope! Does it work? Yep!
With my knowledge I was able to troubleshoot problems the AI created, and fix things that came up, but it would have taken me so much longer to do that on my own, or I may have hired someone to make it for me.
I might need to do it better in the future, but for now it works and gets me off the ground.
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