[checkcircuits]

I've lived in a LCOL my entire life and really made actual development money by going remote. I've done it for so long and the wage disparity is so great I will likely have to leave the industry if remote dries up. Owning a home does not permit me to move around the country and I'm not going to do staff level engineering for under $150k (and that's the lowest I'd ever go). Far easier to just go work somewhere else in a different field because at least then I'd be starting from the bottom with no memory of the past.

Remote work seems to be more difficult to get these days with all of the applications coming from people thinking it's an easy meal ticket. I've gotten most of my jobs through my network. Who knows how long that'll last. Pair this with the general apathy of doing coding interviews and other song-and-dance nonsense to get a job and this current job I have may be my last in the industry anyway. When skills are not valued over CS brain teasers the shark has been jumped.

[ChuckNorris89]

>all of the applications coming from people thinking it's an easy meal ticket

Because it is an easy meal ticket. Why are we pretending it's not?

This is the only profession in the world where you can make decent money from the comfort of your home, via self study and without any high level education. Look at the other well paying professions, bankers, management consulting, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. how long they need to spend in university and how much money their studies cost, before they can get their first wage.

Meanwhile someone who's been coding for fun since childhood can get a decent wage starting 18th birthday, without a degree and without going into debt.

In my developing country that just moved to developed status, SW jobs were a big contributor in lifting young generations of ambitious youngsters out of poverty saving them from having to emigrate or do backbreaking work for peanuts.

The career has some downsides but it has the lowest bar for a skilled profession ever.

[danwee]

> Because it is an easy meal ticket. Why are we pretending it's not?

Well, at least for me it wasn't. I went to university to study CS (in Europe, so I didn't get a debt). It was hard (like any other Science/Engineering career I imagine). Then finding a job was relatively normal and the pay was normal as well. It was only after I got years of experience that it started to get better (e.g., home office, better salary, etc.), but it didn't come for free either (it happens that I like CS a lot, and I can afford to spend some part of my free time reading tech books... so that helps when it comes to salary as well).

I don't think it's an "easy meal ticket". Hell, I don't think anything in this world is an easy meal ticket (unless your parents are rich ofc).

[checkcircuits]

The fact my company turns down over 80 applications a week and only 1/5 of the accepted applicants make it through the first interview tells me you're wrong. It's only an easy meal ticket if you're deluded. Highly motivated, hungry, individuals are not the usual candidate. The usual candidate is a code school graduate who got tricked by an influencer into spending 18k for a moonshot.

[cableshaft]

> When skills are not valued over CS brain teasers the shark has been jumped.

That's been the case for like the past 15 years at least, in my experience. There's now dozens of businesses built just on helping others pass technical interviews. The shark was jumped a long time ago.