alt Hacker NewsHuh. I'm a successful person in my mid 40s, just a year or two behind you. Objectively things are going great.
However, my perspective has gotten a lot worse the last couple of years. Enshittification, corporate consolidation, tech market, AI, etc. I didn't once worry during the dot com bust, or the financial crisis, or the outsourcing boom.
It feels VERY different this time.
Basically it feels like tech was the last place where you could do well and outrun the long term real wage stagnation the country's faced since the 70s. And it's not anymore.
It's really early to see if the current layoff wave is just a lean time like the dotcom burst or 2008, or if it's really they end of tech as a low unemployment, high paying profession.
Yes AI can change the situation durably, but it's not the first time developers get a new tool that gets them more productive. We've seen that with compilers, IDE, frameworks, etc.