alt Hacker NewsThat's not rare for a SWE in NA. Difficult is another matter. Plenty of SWE's in NA are now staring down the barrel of not being able to afford their own home for much longer (or to afford their first home).
That's not rare for a SWE in NA. Difficult is another matter. Plenty of SWE's in NA are now staring down the barrel of not being able to afford their own home for much longer (or to afford their first home).
If you've been working for three years as a junior and just put down a big down payment on a house you can barely afford, yes, you're going to have problems.
If in 19 years as a SWE, you haven't saved up a lot of money, you are one or more of:
1. Incredibly unfortunate in the jobs you've been taking.
2. Have made some incredibly bad investments.
3. Are spending like a sailor, burning every dollar as it comes in.
4. Have gone through one or more absolute life catastrophes.
... Then yes, you are also likely to have financial problems if you're out of work for two years.
I don't mean to say that these are incredibly uncommon. They aren't, especially in people chasing the startup carrot and ending up with nothing but the brown, sticky bit.
But I think it's fair to say that a large number of people in the profession should have managed to avoid all four. (With #3 being the main 'avoidable' culprit, and with #4 being largely unavoidable.)
Consider that somehow, people making less than a quarter of our prevailing wages manage to live... Fairly comfortably.