I first entered the workforce at IBM and several months later they did layoffs (resource action). Every six months after that for my 6ish year tenure there were more resource actions.

To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.

This is to say at least it's done in one fell swoop. Repeated layoffs are certainly demoralizing.

It is a healthy mentality. After staying at my second job for too long - 9 years until 2008, I was uncompetitive in the job market and I didn’t have a network. I was 34 then. I said never again.

I don’t get demoralized at all. I’ve had 10 jobs in 30 years. When a company decides or I decide that the deal of they give me money and I give them work doesn’t work for one of us - I move on.

And I found a job quickly with multiple offers after being Amazoned in 2023 and again in 2024

I think part of my anxiety is this. I went to IBM, stayed until my subsidiary went under, and then started job 2 in 2019, and I've been there sense. I'm a bit terrified of my market competitiveness.

But the good news is the mentality helps me keep costs under control. I'm nowhere near real earners in tech at only 200k, but I have two littles so haven't considered moving until they get a bit older because I'm fully remote and the flexibility with daycare sickness is helpful.

Well two things in my case can both be true.

In my niche - customer facing + strategy + implementations hands on keyboard cloud/app dev consulting and every project I’ve had over the past year and half has involved integrating with LLM - my resume never gets ignored by companies looking for full time consultants not bragging I am old and experienced.

But my niche is just that a niche. “Cloud architects” who spend time doing migrations and infrastructure babysitting are far more in demand since AWS throws money at 3rd party partners for it than software developers who know AWS and can lead consulting projects

I’m very concerned about not being able to find a job in this market. It wasn’t this bad in 2000 in second tier cities as an enterprise dev working for profitable companies

And to your other point, I’m also just over $200k. But our kids (my step sons ) are “taxpayers” and fully launched and my wife and I moved to a condo 1/3 the size of our old house in state tax free Florida in 2022. Our fixed expenses are 35% of my gross. My wife has been retired since 2020 since she was 44. Push comes to shove, I could take a job making $135K (only a little less than I was making in Atlanta before 2020 and my pivot to consulting) and be fine - just wouldn’t be saving much.

Glad to hear you're doing well. Hopefully it continues and you don't have to enter the job market.

I'm hoping the same for myself, but hopefully at some point in the future I at least try to go for something new. I'm torn between the status quo of the cushy role I have now and the feeling that I've never accomplished anything noteworthy. But until the kids grow a bit more I think I'll remain stationary but try to enhance my skills when possible. I'm also just starting llm integration on a project where we'll be implementing mcp for agents with google-adk. Between that, vertex ai services, etc. it seems mostly like gluing things together more than actual innovation.

There is absolutely no need to be torn about anything. Stability is important when you have kids. While I did change jobs 4 times between when I married my wife in 2012 and 2020 when my youngest stepson graduated, my wife was able to work part time in the school system so we could have stable insurance and she could be there for them.

But times are different now. The market isn’t what it was and it’s even worse when you want to stay remote. I live in a tourist area (central Florida), there are very few even enterprise dev jobs in the area. I’m hoping I can stay at my current job long term. I’ve never craved longevity at a job like I do now. I actually like this company. The only other two I liked as much were startups - one went out of business and I left the other when a remote job at AWS fell into my lap in 2020

> To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.

Why? It lets you plan your actions accordingly.

So exactly what will the magic of unionization do when any company can hire developers from LatAm (much easier to deal with in the same time zone) that are good enough enterprise devs for half the price?

Why should tech workers care about the small minority of tech workers that make obscene amounts of money? The median dev salary in the US is ~$130k. [1]

Besides that point, I would very much like to get paid over time for being on call. I would very much like a preplanned process that comes to layoffs rather than firing people at random. I would like paid paternity leave.

Always a classic HN post about the rockstar dev willing to fuck over their fellow workers so they can make a quick buck then feign upset over how meaningless their lives are because they devote so much time making capitalists more capital rather than bettering their community.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

I would like all these things too but I wouldn't like the downstream side effects:

a) Fewer companies taking a chance on people because the cost of firing has risen.

b) Lower productivity growth leading to lower wages in the long run because adversarial union restrictions lead to less dynamic companies.

Cry me a river for the “average” senior developer who as a rule, makes twice the median income of whatever city they live in. It’s called saving money and living below your means. Yes I was a standard enterprise dev for 25 years before 2020 living in a second tier city.

Clearly the cia or other gov institution. Its purpose is to create an irresistible honeypot so that anyone who figures out a working and time feasible implementation of shor's law or other prime factorization technique would reveal their hand.

Why would I want to be beholden to any authority to run software on a device I own?

How about banks issue 2fa via authenticator apps instead of through sms notifications? Or they have out hardware tokens.

I have a hard time with this because it's the world we've lived in forever. Everyone knows installing an "app" installs an executable.

Doesnt android require a specific permission to be user-accepted for an installed app to read notifications? I think it's separate from the post-notifications permission.

This seems to be an issue of user literacy. If so, doesn't it make more sense for a user to have the option to opt into "I'm tech illiterate, please protect me" than destroy open computing as we know it?

this. just like how when you start playing a hard esoteric game like an RTS or MOBA, they ask you what your degree of comfort/experience with the genre is to avoid making a pro player go through the tutorial and vice versa.

In an ideal world where governments and corporations weren't trying to lock us into a closed system for massive surveillance and control, during the installation/setup of a mobile phone should be a question about tech literacy and protection. Selecting any option that isn't "I'm tech illiterate, please protect me" should be very annoying. There should be many warnings in uppercase bold red letters telling the user it can be dangerous and listing those dangers. But if I'm a developer and want to patch my kernel or modify the system as I please, I should be able to do so. If i want to install a malware app in a burner phone to study its behavior (or just for fun) I should be able to do so.

There would probably be one or two grandmas that would still somehow choose the pro hacker mode and get scammed down the line, but I think that minuscule amount of harm done is very much preferable to closing out *literally everyone else* from using the devices THEY BOUGHT.

So now I'm not allowed to choose what software runs on my personal computing device with a cellular module?

What if my kids want to follow nand 2 tetris or build their own custom os from a Linux fork?

Shouldn't it be done at the account level if you're going to do this? I am an admin. My kids have a non admin account. That seems pretty normal.

BTW this is a terrible idea. What if I can afford only one computer but have a household of four?

It's as easy as parents keeping the default router password, a kid logging in and then setting up port forwarding to a device on a port that they're running a server on, tied to their current residential ip, and then pinging their friends that ip and allowing them all to connect and download whatever files or upload whatever files. The peer-to-peer network could really start establishing itself in ephemeral and very hard to track ways. All you need is one kid with access to a vpn to torrent without copyright concerns to seed the network. Or one kid to get its parents to buy a domain and use that as an anchor so that the dns to ip is set behind the scenes for the peers.

I'd like to add we are discussing communication over the internet. It is an open standard. I should be allowed to build my own pcb without a secure element and talk to anyone over http so long as I am abiding by the correct rfcs.