[surgical_fire]

> Why would the US population want:

>>> The whole VC/startup grift needs the greater fool to be either a big company with money to burn to do an acquisition, or the retail investor to be the greater fool via IPO.

I was the one that originally wrote that. Bear with me for a second.

I avoid working for startups, but the VC/startup grift indirectly benefits me, as they soak a bunch of software developers from the market at large, increasing demand and salaries across the board. I call it a grift out of sincerity, but I was never hypocritical to pretend I didn't benefit from it.

As for the general population is hard to say. The layoffs that affected tech reached way beyond cushy software engineer jobs.

We may recognize that building castles on sand is a bad idea. Perhaps our economies, and the rules that create incentives (perverse or otherwise) should be different than they are.

Fact is, we have a lot of fucking castles built on sand right now. If they crumble, a lot of people will be left to wander among the rubble.

I do hold a deep despise for the billionaire class that was the ultimate beneficiary of this whole "building castles on sand" activity. It's not them who will lose the most when everything crumbles though.

[tivert]

> I avoid working for startups, but the VC/startup grift indirectly benefits me, as they soak a bunch of software developers from the market at large, increasing demand and salaries across the board. I call it a grift out of sincerity, but I was never hypocritical to pretend I didn't benefit from it.

I get that, we as software engineers have indirectly benefited from the scam.

> As for the general population is hard to say. The layoffs that affected tech reached way beyond cushy software engineer jobs.

I don't think it's hard to say. If the general population was made understood the full situation, they'd tell us software engineers to get lost along with the billionaire VCs, because the general population are the ultimate greater fools that pay for it all (either directly through the stock market, or indirectly through the businesses who make so much through monopoly off of them that they can easily afford to be greater fools).

We software engineers have had a pretty privileged time while a lot of people have been struggling (viz. the whole "learn to code" bandwagon from a few years ago).

[surgical_fire]

To be frank, the whole "learn to code" fiasco was pushed not by software developers. My impression was that it was pushed by parties interested in flooding the field with newcomers to push wages down.

Nonetheless, I don't think you are wrong. I'll just point out that the monopolies you refer to, and the billionaires that ultimately benefit from it exist due to policies and laws that directly benefit them so they achieve that very position.

I don't deny that we lived though a privileged time - I was perhaps lucky that I had aptitude and interest in coding right at the time when the profession was on the rise.

While some may be deeply concerned about AI taking jobs (which I think is complete bullshit), my main concern is a shift in economic conditions that will severely reduce demand for developers due to less money moving around the sector.

I believe the the ones that will suffer the most are the newcomers. Either recent graduates that are coming to the market at the worst possible time, or those that switched professions very recently only to find the promised land had withered before they arrived.

Oh well. Time will tell.

[tivert]

> To be frank, the whole "learn to code" fiasco was pushed not by software developers. My impression was that it was pushed by parties interested in flooding the field with newcomers to push wages down.

Yes, it wasn't pushed by software developers, but it wasn't some fake thing either. The main driver was the anxiety and stress a lot of people have about their economic situation. Software development was seen as one of the few achievable "good" job as precarity crept into many previously stable types of employment. The "parties interested in flooding the field with newcomers" just took advantage of the situation.