That's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal" her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself).
> The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer.
Mentoring is difficult; especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors.
For myself, I'm happily retired from the Rodent Rally, and find that LLMs have been a huge help, when learning new stuff.
The most frustrating thing about this whole junior position drought is how it simultaneously affects those who are passionate and get it, not only the opportunist bootcamp alumni who were lured by the prospect of high earnings.
If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
This article talks a lot about AI, but what I find odd is that in my relatively short (but long enough) ~9 yr career so far, this problem predates AI. I don't deny that it exacerbates it, but you don't kill a disease by addressing the symptoms. From the first time I was ever involved in the hiring process, senior leadership always encouraged me to hire more experienced staff, always most heavily scrutinized juniors, and had negotiations fall through with mid-level candidates the most. This was despite juniors passing technical screens with strong showings. This was not at a Fortune 500. This was a micro-cap subsidiary of a private, billion dollar company.
And although it hasn't discouraged me, I have to admit that I've been burned by juniors when caught in the middle between them and senior leadership on output expectations or strategy because frankly it's much more challenging to mentor how to navigate company politics than it is to mentor professional coding acumen. I want to be humble here. I don't think that's the junior's fault.
It feels like these problems go a lot deeper than AI. Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team. We've all experienced this. It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
>Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team
Well that explains why AI excacerbates this. It's all they ever wished for and they don't need to make do with that facsimile of "human interaction" anymore. It's not perfect but that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.
Or you know, they just really want to be as cheap as possible in production (hence, outsourcing).
>It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
I'll give a slight BOTD here after my disdain above and admit tha a small team probably isn't the best enviroment to train a junior. Not unless you either
a) truly believe that the skillet you need isn't out there, and you are willing to train it yourself to alleviate your workload, or
b) you are thinking long term efficiency and are willing to lose early productivity to power the future prosperity. Which, to be frank, is not how modern businesses operate.
And yes. Any teacher in any field (but especially education) will tell you that the star players make their day, week, and year. But the worst cases make you question your career. Our natural negativity bias makes the latter stick out more. Those in industry won't get star players as they are either filtered out by these stupid hoops or gobbled up for 100k above your budget by the big players. It's rough.
This isn't the first time that the industry has foot-gunned itself.
The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.
Even before LLMs, there were periods recently where multiple companies had "senior only" hiring policies. That just inflated what "senior" was until it was basically 5 years of experience.
This time seems a bit different, however. There are both supply and demand side problems. The supply of students it tainted with AI "learning" now. Colleges haven't realized that they absolutely have to effectively crack down on AI, or the signal of their degrees will wither to nothing. The demand side is also low, of course, since the candidates aren't good, and AI seems to be a good substitute for a newly graduated hire, especially if that hire is just going to use the AI badly.
> We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I referenced above cited the same thing - AI is getting good at automating junior work while only augmenting senior work. So the evidence doesn’t show that AI is going to replace everyone; it’s just removing the apprenticeship ladder.
Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we came to the same conclusion. You used to be able to make yourself useful by doing the easy / annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to waste time dealing with. In exchange you got on-the-job experience, until you were able to handle more complex tasks and grow your skill set. AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.
I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally. It's almost like the aftermath of a war killing off 18-30 year olds leaving a demographic hole, or the effect of covid on education for certain age ranges.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science in December of 2024, my career path so far has been doing sex work and then a minimum wage job once I got finically stable enough to not do sex work, but my financial situation is precarious enough I still have to do sex work off and on when unexpected costs come up. I spent a few months applying to everything I could after getting my degree, but got nothing but automated rejections back if anything.
I didn't have the best networking skills to be fair, but I spent most of my college doing remote classes and didn't have much of a chance to network or whatever. I'm thinking about doing grad school so I can have another chance at developing some kind of network or make myself more attractive to employers. My grades were good and I genuinely enjoy computer science so spending half a year improving my portfolio sounds like a fun time. But going to grad school wouldn't really about getting employment, I just want to use my brain for something. Just working a job makes me feel completely insane, like I know that I can do so much more. I feel like I'm wasting the best years of my life and there's no place in this market where I can be useful. The only value I have is selling my body or being a human stand in for a robot at my "real" job.
Maybe this isn't the best place to post this. I have very little hope that I will ever get a job programming, and I'm just sad. What a waste of a life the past 5 years have been.
On a kind of funny note, I would say that doing sex work is genuinely less humiliating than applying to jobs as a new compsci grad. At least I have some signal that I have some value selling myself.
We're not hiring a lot of rotary phone makers these days.
Who is hiring their own shoe-smith? It's been 30-ish years since my carpenter father last had work boots resoled.
It's almost as if... technology and economy evolve over time.
For all the arguments software people make about freedom to use their property as they see fit, they ignore non-programmers use of personal technology property is coupled to the opinions of programmers. Programmers ignore how they are middlemen of a sort they often deride as taking away the programmer's freedom! A very hypocritical group, them programmers.
What's so high tech about configuration of machines with lexical constructs as was the norm 60+ years ago? Seems a bit old fashioned.
Programmers are biology and biology has a tendency to be nostalgic, clingy, and self selecting. Which is all programmers are engaged in when they complain others won't need their skills.
> Imagine a tech industry where relationship skills weren’t just nice-to-have but essential. Where navigating complex human systems was seen as a core competency.
If that were to actually happen, we'd wind up excluding many of our greatest technical performers while drowning in a sea of would-be middle managers. People skills matter, but so do many other strengths that don't always overlap with being naturally good at navigating interpersonal dynamics.
The idea that the only reasonable path into a software related career is through networking may be true, but it obviously signals something deeply wrong with the culture around work.
It is also something which is likely to be quite harmful, since it selects for people who are great at networking over people who have good technical skills. Obviously interpersonal communication is important, but how well a 20 year old in University performs at it should not doom or make their career.
And even people with bad social skills deserve to exist and should be allowed into their chosen career. Being someone who does good work and is respectful, but not overly social, should be good enough.
Agree, but ultimately it's a regression to the mean of most white-collar professions, where grades and network make for a significant jump-start in someone's career.
This is neat — I do think this is relevant to more than just the software engineering space. See also, healthcare and law (I wrote more at length here, not to derail this comment thread [1]). Our junior training on-ramps for a lot of knowledge-work fields are in some semblance of equilibrium, but it's an unstable one.
this is the end game of capitalism, where the greed driven pursuit of profit wins over social maintenance and development. we see it very clearly with the incredibly socially damaging mass immigration to replenish the slave class and maintain the mythical GDP growth, which is only "necessary" because the native slave classes have been squeezed out of breeding
new grads will be fed to the meat grinder with no regards, its a closed shop unless you know someone
>Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities
I highly doubt throwing even a 3YOE "senior" of 2012 at a modern junior interview would turn out as well as you'd expect. the standards have gotten sky high. That doesn't mean they can't do the job, it means the industry created more hoops to jump through.
I agree to an extent with title inflation (and where the hell is the mid level?), but I don't think peple are confusing "juniors" here. It's new grads to at best 2 years of experience. not much controversy there. I also don' think the idea that the 2014 graduating CS class is smarter than the 2024 class would pass the sniff test.
Sadly - as I've mentioned on HN a bunch - junior salaries need to fall dramatically to somewhere in the $60k-$100k range in order to make it cost effective against automation/AI or offshoring.
The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async induced offshoring.
Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new grad range have largely risen because having experienced developers really does matter and provides positive business outcomes.
State and local governments needs to play the same white collar subsidy game that the rest of the world is playing in order to help fix the economics of junior hiring for white collar roles. This is why Hollywood shifted to the UK, VFX shifted to Vancouver, Pharma shifted to Switzerland, and Software to India.
This problem is not new. No one's wanted to give juniors the time of day since at least 2018 when it took me 8 months to land my first software developer role.
I upvoted the article for the purpose of discussion. I disagree with it. The core tenant of the article is that AI is the reason why companies aren't hiring juniors. That's just not it. Do people just blindly believe whatever some CEO or company says in their press briefings? This was all happening before the AI boom. Interest rates went up, hiring went way down, and then AI launched. Before interest rates, interviewing was getting harder and harder every year. That's usually an indication that you have more supply than demand. The bar for getting into any American tech company was getting much harder - not just FAANG. Leetcode had gone from having practiced 50-100 questions to there being a bank of over 3000+ with many people having regularly studied hundreds. It went from easy/medium to being typical in interviews to medium/hard being typical with many original hard questions now being reclassified as mediums.
Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago. The joke of senior FAANG engineers making $400k has been a meme for over 5 years. Yet, inflation has done over 20% in 5 years? Look at new offers for people joining the majority of positions available at public tech companies. You're not seeing $500k offers regularly. Maybe at Jane Street or Anthropic or some other companies that are barely hiring - all of which barely employ anyone compared to FAANG. You're mostly seeing the same $350-400k/yr meme.
The reason we're not employing new grads is the same reason as the standards getting much more aggressive. Oversupply and senior talent has always been valued more.
This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a networking service, something which is not really made clear until near the end.
The article is self-serving in identifying the solutions ("do things related to the service we offer, and if that doesn't work, buy our service to help you do them better"), but it is a subject worth talking about, so I will offer my refutation of their analysis and solution.
The first point I'd like to make is that while the hiring market is shrinking, I believe it was long overdue and that the root cause is not "LLMs are takin' our jerbs", but rather the fact that for probably the better part of two decades, the software development field has been plagued by especially unproductive workers. There are a great deal of college graduates who entered the field because they were promised it was the easiest path to a highly lucrative career, who never once wrote a line of code outside of their coursework, who then entered a workforce that values credentialism over merit, who then dragged their teams down by knowing virtually nothing about programming. Productive software engineers are typically compensated within a range of at most a few hundred thousand dollars, but productive software engineers generally create millions in value for their companies, leading to a lot of excess income, some of which can be wasted on inefficient hiring practices without being felt. This was bound for a correction eventually, and LLMs just happened to be the excuse needed for layoffs and reduced hiring of unproductive employees[1].
Therefore, I believe the premise that you need to focus entirely on doing things an LLM can't -- networking with humans -- is deeply faulty. This implies that it is no longer possible to compete with LLMs on engineering merit, and I could not possibly disagree more. Rather than following their path forward, which emphasises only networking, my actual suggestion to prospective junior engineers is: build things. Gain experience on your own. Make a portfolio that will wow someone. Programming is a field that doesn't require apprenticeship. There is not a single other discipline that has as much learning material available as software development, and you can learn by doing, seeing the pain points that crop up in your own code and then finding solutions for them.
Yes, this entails programming as a hobby, doing countless hours of unpaid programming for neither school nor job. If you can't do that much, you will never develop the skills to be a genuinely good programmer -- that applied just as much before this supposed crisis, because the kind of junior engineer who never codes on their own time was not being given the mentorship to turn into a good engineer, but rather was given the guidance to turn them into a gear that was minimally useful and only capable of following rote instructions, often poorly. It is true that the path of the career-only programmer who goes through life without spending their own time doing coding is being closed off. But it was never sustainable anyways. If you don't love programming for its own sake, this field is not likely to reward you going forward. University courses do not teach nearly effectively enough to make even a hireable junior engineer, so you must take your education into your own hands.
[1] Of course, layoff processes are often handled just as incompetently as hiring processes, leading to some productive engineers getting in the crossfire of decisions that should mostly hurt unproductive engineers. I'm sympathetic to people who have struggled with this, but I do believe productive engineers still have a huge edge over unproductive engineers and are highly likely to find success despite the flaws in human resource management.
> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees.
Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process of gutting multiple departments as fast as possible with little regard for the long term consequences. This is not the only company that I know of acting in this way (acting like they're about to go bankrupt when in fact they are seeing record profits).
To me the societal risk is that an entire generation of employees becomes extremely jaded and unmotivated, and fairly so. We used to work under the assumption that if our company is successful, then the employees would be successful. Record profits == raises for all, bonuses for all. And while we know that that connection was never that strong, it was strong enough to let us at least pretend that it was a law of universe.
That fundamental social contract is now at its breaking point for so many workers. Who can really blame people for putting in minimal effort when they have so much evidence that it will not be rewarded?
for anyone with children, dont waste their time with traditional school, that path is stone dead and is leading nowhere but the abyss of the permanent underclass
apologise for inflicting this era on them and teach them to be entrepreneurial, teach them how to build, teach them rust on the backend, teach them postgres, teach them about assets maintaining value while money loses its
tell them to never under any circumstances take on a mortgage, especially not the 50 year variety. tell them to stay at home for as long as possible and save as much as possible and put it into assets: gold, silver, bitcoin, monero
they must escape the permanent underclass, nothing else matters
103 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 92.0 ms ] thread> The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer.
Mentoring is difficult; especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors.
For myself, I'm happily retired from the Rodent Rally, and find that LLMs have been a huge help, when learning new stuff.
If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human relationships matter.
And although it hasn't discouraged me, I have to admit that I've been burned by juniors when caught in the middle between them and senior leadership on output expectations or strategy because frankly it's much more challenging to mentor how to navigate company politics than it is to mentor professional coding acumen. I want to be humble here. I don't think that's the junior's fault.
It feels like these problems go a lot deeper than AI. Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team. We've all experienced this. It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
Well that explains why AI excacerbates this. It's all they ever wished for and they don't need to make do with that facsimile of "human interaction" anymore. It's not perfect but that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.
Or you know, they just really want to be as cheap as possible in production (hence, outsourcing).
>It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
I'll give a slight BOTD here after my disdain above and admit tha a small team probably isn't the best enviroment to train a junior. Not unless you either
a) truly believe that the skillet you need isn't out there, and you are willing to train it yourself to alleviate your workload, or
b) you are thinking long term efficiency and are willing to lose early productivity to power the future prosperity. Which, to be frank, is not how modern businesses operate.
And yes. Any teacher in any field (but especially education) will tell you that the star players make their day, week, and year. But the worst cases make you question your career. Our natural negativity bias makes the latter stick out more. Those in industry won't get star players as they are either filtered out by these stupid hoops or gobbled up for 100k above your budget by the big players. It's rough.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.
Even before LLMs, there were periods recently where multiple companies had "senior only" hiring policies. That just inflated what "senior" was until it was basically 5 years of experience.
This time seems a bit different, however. There are both supply and demand side problems. The supply of students it tainted with AI "learning" now. Colleges haven't realized that they absolutely have to effectively crack down on AI, or the signal of their degrees will wither to nothing. The demand side is also low, of course, since the candidates aren't good, and AI seems to be a good substitute for a newly graduated hire, especially if that hire is just going to use the AI badly.
Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we came to the same conclusion. You used to be able to make yourself useful by doing the easy / annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to waste time dealing with. In exchange you got on-the-job experience, until you were able to handle more complex tasks and grow your skill set. AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.
I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally. It's almost like the aftermath of a war killing off 18-30 year olds leaving a demographic hole, or the effect of covid on education for certain age ranges.
Plenty of skilled work requires a master’s or PhD. CS, for those who want a safe, secure job, looks like it’s going that way.
I didn't have the best networking skills to be fair, but I spent most of my college doing remote classes and didn't have much of a chance to network or whatever. I'm thinking about doing grad school so I can have another chance at developing some kind of network or make myself more attractive to employers. My grades were good and I genuinely enjoy computer science so spending half a year improving my portfolio sounds like a fun time. But going to grad school wouldn't really about getting employment, I just want to use my brain for something. Just working a job makes me feel completely insane, like I know that I can do so much more. I feel like I'm wasting the best years of my life and there's no place in this market where I can be useful. The only value I have is selling my body or being a human stand in for a robot at my "real" job.
Maybe this isn't the best place to post this. I have very little hope that I will ever get a job programming, and I'm just sad. What a waste of a life the past 5 years have been.
On a kind of funny note, I would say that doing sex work is genuinely less humiliating than applying to jobs as a new compsci grad. At least I have some signal that I have some value selling myself.
We're not hiring a lot of rotary phone makers these days.
Who is hiring their own shoe-smith? It's been 30-ish years since my carpenter father last had work boots resoled.
It's almost as if... technology and economy evolve over time.
For all the arguments software people make about freedom to use their property as they see fit, they ignore non-programmers use of personal technology property is coupled to the opinions of programmers. Programmers ignore how they are middlemen of a sort they often deride as taking away the programmer's freedom! A very hypocritical group, them programmers.
What's so high tech about configuration of machines with lexical constructs as was the norm 60+ years ago? Seems a bit old fashioned.
Programmers are biology and biology has a tendency to be nostalgic, clingy, and self selecting. Which is all programmers are engaged in when they complain others won't need their skills.
If that were to actually happen, we'd wind up excluding many of our greatest technical performers while drowning in a sea of would-be middle managers. People skills matter, but so do many other strengths that don't always overlap with being naturally good at navigating interpersonal dynamics.
It is also something which is likely to be quite harmful, since it selects for people who are great at networking over people who have good technical skills. Obviously interpersonal communication is important, but how well a 20 year old in University performs at it should not doom or make their career.
And even people with bad social skills deserve to exist and should be allowed into their chosen career. Being someone who does good work and is respectful, but not overly social, should be good enough.
[1] https://blog.jordan.matelsky.com/AI-doctors-bum-me-out/
new grads will be fed to the meat grinder with no regards, its a closed shop unless you know someone
1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior.
2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume.
The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.
I highly doubt throwing even a 3YOE "senior" of 2012 at a modern junior interview would turn out as well as you'd expect. the standards have gotten sky high. That doesn't mean they can't do the job, it means the industry created more hoops to jump through.
I agree to an extent with title inflation (and where the hell is the mid level?), but I don't think peple are confusing "juniors" here. It's new grads to at best 2 years of experience. not much controversy there. I also don' think the idea that the 2014 graduating CS class is smarter than the 2024 class would pass the sniff test.
The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async induced offshoring.
Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new grad range have largely risen because having experienced developers really does matter and provides positive business outcomes.
State and local governments needs to play the same white collar subsidy game that the rest of the world is playing in order to help fix the economics of junior hiring for white collar roles. This is why Hollywood shifted to the UK, VFX shifted to Vancouver, Pharma shifted to Switzerland, and Software to India.
I started in tech in the late 70s. I can say this break happened during the Reagan Years with a bit of help from the Nixon Years.
Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago. The joke of senior FAANG engineers making $400k has been a meme for over 5 years. Yet, inflation has done over 20% in 5 years? Look at new offers for people joining the majority of positions available at public tech companies. You're not seeing $500k offers regularly. Maybe at Jane Street or Anthropic or some other companies that are barely hiring - all of which barely employ anyone compared to FAANG. You're mostly seeing the same $350-400k/yr meme.
The reason we're not employing new grads is the same reason as the standards getting much more aggressive. Oversupply and senior talent has always been valued more.
Because those senior people will NOT be around forever. And they have killed their talent development and knowledge transfer pipelines.
Either direction you take it, this feels like a lose-lose situation for everyone.
The article is self-serving in identifying the solutions ("do things related to the service we offer, and if that doesn't work, buy our service to help you do them better"), but it is a subject worth talking about, so I will offer my refutation of their analysis and solution.
The first point I'd like to make is that while the hiring market is shrinking, I believe it was long overdue and that the root cause is not "LLMs are takin' our jerbs", but rather the fact that for probably the better part of two decades, the software development field has been plagued by especially unproductive workers. There are a great deal of college graduates who entered the field because they were promised it was the easiest path to a highly lucrative career, who never once wrote a line of code outside of their coursework, who then entered a workforce that values credentialism over merit, who then dragged their teams down by knowing virtually nothing about programming. Productive software engineers are typically compensated within a range of at most a few hundred thousand dollars, but productive software engineers generally create millions in value for their companies, leading to a lot of excess income, some of which can be wasted on inefficient hiring practices without being felt. This was bound for a correction eventually, and LLMs just happened to be the excuse needed for layoffs and reduced hiring of unproductive employees[1].
Therefore, I believe the premise that you need to focus entirely on doing things an LLM can't -- networking with humans -- is deeply faulty. This implies that it is no longer possible to compete with LLMs on engineering merit, and I could not possibly disagree more. Rather than following their path forward, which emphasises only networking, my actual suggestion to prospective junior engineers is: build things. Gain experience on your own. Make a portfolio that will wow someone. Programming is a field that doesn't require apprenticeship. There is not a single other discipline that has as much learning material available as software development, and you can learn by doing, seeing the pain points that crop up in your own code and then finding solutions for them.
Yes, this entails programming as a hobby, doing countless hours of unpaid programming for neither school nor job. If you can't do that much, you will never develop the skills to be a genuinely good programmer -- that applied just as much before this supposed crisis, because the kind of junior engineer who never codes on their own time was not being given the mentorship to turn into a good engineer, but rather was given the guidance to turn them into a gear that was minimally useful and only capable of following rote instructions, often poorly. It is true that the path of the career-only programmer who goes through life without spending their own time doing coding is being closed off. But it was never sustainable anyways. If you don't love programming for its own sake, this field is not likely to reward you going forward. University courses do not teach nearly effectively enough to make even a hireable junior engineer, so you must take your education into your own hands.
[1] Of course, layoff processes are often handled just as incompetently as hiring processes, leading to some productive engineers getting in the crossfire of decisions that should mostly hurt unproductive engineers. I'm sympathetic to people who have struggled with this, but I do believe productive engineers still have a huge edge over unproductive engineers and are highly likely to find success despite the flaws in human resource management.
Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process of gutting multiple departments as fast as possible with little regard for the long term consequences. This is not the only company that I know of acting in this way (acting like they're about to go bankrupt when in fact they are seeing record profits).
To me the societal risk is that an entire generation of employees becomes extremely jaded and unmotivated, and fairly so. We used to work under the assumption that if our company is successful, then the employees would be successful. Record profits == raises for all, bonuses for all. And while we know that that connection was never that strong, it was strong enough to let us at least pretend that it was a law of universe.
That fundamental social contract is now at its breaking point for so many workers. Who can really blame people for putting in minimal effort when they have so much evidence that it will not be rewarded?
apologise for inflicting this era on them and teach them to be entrepreneurial, teach them how to build, teach them rust on the backend, teach them postgres, teach them about assets maintaining value while money loses its
tell them to never under any circumstances take on a mortgage, especially not the 50 year variety. tell them to stay at home for as long as possible and save as much as possible and put it into assets: gold, silver, bitcoin, monero
they must escape the permanent underclass, nothing else matters