| How was this voted up? >developers becoming blue collar workers This is possible only in the lowest most commodified positions. There will always be specialists, regardless of the number of libraries, frameworks or SAAS that exist. You most likely have not looked at the edges of what's being developed by those doing the real science and writing papers on their progress and experiments. >web development with inexperienced people You are a freelancer. Everyone can call themselves a freelancer and throw together a quick site to say what they can do. You've stated your specialty is being a generalist. This puts you at the easiest tier because "jack of all trades master of none" typically means you just glue libraries together that have been made specifically to cater to people who don't have the special knowledge required to make those libraries. This is not an infrastructure engineer. This is not a WebGL expert, this is not a computer vision specialist, this a not machine learning engineer, nor a data scientist, nor statistician. Your stuff has been generalized and simplified from the esoteric skill, knowledge and techniques of specialists that came before you. You have been standing solely on the shoulders of giants that hunched in front of computers before you and I were born. >spending time in front of a computer Congrats, you finally noticed. Here's another thing that a lot of people don't seem to notice until it's too late: The ones that get paid the most are the salesmen. They're the ones that can prove that they made the company money. When they bring a check through the door it hits the bottom line, they prove their worth that way. As such, the people who live in the nicest places in SF? The $MM condos closer to Pacific heights or the apartments near the ports? Executives or Sales. People people. The engineers working for relative peanuts are living 5 to an apartment. Sales eats what they kill, Executives are similar in that they bring people in who provide the meat. The two ways around are that your startup lottery ticket pays off for FU money (highly unlikely unless you spot winners better than VCs) or to work at a BigCo[1] and rise through the ranks as an engineer (likely if you get in and contribute hard). >medicine You're looking at credentialed blue collar workers. It's a step up, you have more specialized knowledge but unless you handle it correctly you may still be under the sway of the hospital you work for, not to mention the cost of becoming one. You would be a doctor. Respectable but given your disdain for your current situation you may become just as jaded with it in 15 years time. I'm not sure why I wrote all of this. [1] http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ |