You're zooming out and considering this negative sentiment with similar times in the past. I think that's wise. I think we should keep zooming out to other industries. Imagine you're an engineer for GM in Detroit in the 70s - would you consider the mean to be your contemporary middle-class lifestyle, or what it is in 2025? Similar for steel and semiconductors.

It goes for other places, too. Is the US's financial strength of today its mean, or is it where the UK was pre-Suez Crisis? Where Japan was in the 80s?

I got my first programming job in ~98 while still in college. I had family members telling me then that programming was a dead end and was all going to be outsourced. I lived through .com, GFC, etc... This does feel more like a reversion to the mean at this moment rather than some crash...yet. I feel for the people who only have known a job market that was easy to step into and paid great salaries because they don't know anything else. It's a lot like the people who think they are great stock pickers because they've only been investing in the greatest bull market we've ever seen.

When I came into the job market the rule of thumb was it would take 1 month/10k of salary to find a new job. Over time that moved to 1 month/20k of salary or so. Even then, someone making a FAANG type salary should be prepared to look for a ~year for a new job matching that salary. Being able to bounce from job to job while getting big raises along the way was the exception, and ZIRP only exacerbated it.

Adding my voice to sibling comments, this is from European experience, I have had several times been dumped from consulting projects, and having to do competence transfer to the offshoring team that would take over our team roles.

Around five times since 2007.

I've had my job offshored in the past, in case a personal anecdote is relevant here.

> I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.

"This time it's different."

20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming.

Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems.

> We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest.

We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc.

We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.

>Junior engineers can fight back against this by

Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue.

>This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas:

This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%.

And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.

> learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.

This sounds almost word for word like The Onion’s classic: Secretary Of Labor Assures Nation There Still Plenty Of Jobs For Americans Willing To Outwork Robots

[0] https://theonion.com/secretary-of-labor-assures-nation-there...

> when the bottleneck is communication + taste

That was the bottleneck in the industry when it was in growth phase, it's a mature sector now and it's all about efficiency and profit now. Speed to market and product iteration speed isn't the most important thing anymore, there's not a lot of innovation taking place. Outside the actual novel AI specific companies out there, of course, there are a few other spots of growth and exceptional companies but largely the kings have been crowned.

Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees).

I'm genuinely curious.

I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand.

Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output.

From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now.

We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.

> how about re-banning stock buybacks?

This is pretend boogie man. Banning buybacks will not automatically make that money flow into hiring or salaries. Companies are not charities, they exist to make a return. If hiring people and/or paying more will generate a larger return than giving the money back to shareholders either through buybacks or dividends, then companies will do that.

AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns (shareholders believe so) and buybacks are being pushed out as money goes elsewhere[1].

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/move-over-stock-buybacks-ai-1...

> turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?)

What would banning stock buybacks accomplish? Companies can still return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends.

A big tech breakup needn't be anti-capitalist. In fact, it might be the most pro-capitalist move.

If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit.

Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc.

Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V.

Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies.

Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.

We posted a job a year ago for a dev. We received terrible candidates, but still tried to fill it from the pool. 2/3 ghosted the interview and the other I'm not sure had ever done anything in iOS. I just pulled the job instead of wasting more time. I'm planning to post another job in the new year and I'm not looking forward to wading through the garbage.