| >First, you conveniently ignore COL which matters a lot. Doesn't matter how much money you make if you spend most of it on rent and food. In every single place, there are people that live stably at much lower salaries than what SDEs make. Nobody is entitled to a nice high rise 2 bedroom apt for themselves and eating out all the time. My first software job I made 80k a year in Northern Virginia which has a very high COL including state income tax, and still managed to have enough money left over for some recreation as well as a safety net. >Second, I don't think you really appreciate the cognitive toll software engineering takes on you. It's not simple OOP and leetcode that is complicated. It's understanding and enhancing legacy code, it's dealing with unrealistic expectations, it's having to continuously pretend that the emperor has clothes and brag about bullshit things like productivity. I absolutely do. My point is that if you are stressed, quit. Simple as that. And again, if you can't quit because you spend too much money or don't want to quit because you don't want to give up that lifestyle, then don't complain. There are people who have more stressfull jobs that make half as much and don't have the luxury to just quit. >if blue collar workers could do what sw engineers do they would go for it. Completely missed the point. For the actual work that majority of CS people do, especially new grads, it is not that hard. There are plenty of lower paying CS jobs compared to FAANG where the bar to get in may be much lower, but you pretty much do the same basic tasks day to day. The reason FAANG pays that much is because they have (or realistically had) the funds to recruit talent en masse in expectation that statistically something profitable would come out of it, whereas other smaller companies that are ran much more conservatively tend to pay closer to market value. If FAANG jobs came with a explicit disclaimer on which every single new hire had to sign off: "Hey, we are going to pay you way more above market rate, but you accept the risk of being overworked, potentially being piped out due to quota, and layoffs in cases of economic recession", I don't think people would be complaining about mental health in regards to jobs. But people shouldn't need that disclaimer to understand this. |
For most people out there it's hard as fuck. Overworking people is the norm in the US