Houses, yeah, but unless you’re going to dump them offshore ya gotta live somewhere. Many have or are downsizing which frees up larger houses in desirable areas. Not their fault that investment firms are inhaling houses to give them a better return than stocks.
And remember all this retirement savings stuff has to start paying its taxes at 72 or 73 so the government gets their share. Downward price pressure won’t help the market but one has to sell to eat.
What I see amongst all the people is that both skill and the quality of work decreasing. Which is why, arguably, AI _is_ taking over entry-level jobs.
High percentage of new generation spend their time on TikTok & Instagram, watching reels & stories of some popular/famous people, who tend to have some money (high chance of inheritance or rich family), posing as a "regular" person on the street.
Take this quote for example; “I told myself, by 26, I’d have my own house, I’d have my own family, I’d have my nice little luxury car. That hasn’t happened.”
This is an unrealistic by definition. I don't know what sort of thing a person needs to smoke to come to a conclusion that having _all_ of these, including a luxury car, is a norm for a 26 year old. By definition, if everyone has that _luxury car_, that car would not be a luxury item in the first place. Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one. One can probably buy/lease a car, probably second hand, but that's unlikely to be a `luxury` vehicle.
Another point is, while some people had adequate pictures/images posted, some did not even bother to put an effort to give a proper picture to the newspaper article. I am not a "wear a suit" person at all, but this attitude clearly shows how much care certain people put into actual work. Would you hire a such person who does sloppy job even at the job application? I would certainly not.
There is a strong belief that everyone should be able to afford a place to live, alone, in some place with a convenient location (downtown or within walking distance of transit), and then after a few years you should be able to buy a house.
When I grew up, I had multiple roommates, and we’d carpool whenever possible. I scrimped and saved pretty hard to get a down payment saved up. By my day’s standards, it wasn’t crazy to cook 99% of your own food, brew all your coffee at home or the office (hopefully free), get any free food you can possibly convince your employer to give you, and have one TV everyone fights over. My dad made his own “furniture” (until my mom moved in and smacked some sense into him…). My mom grew up sleeping in an hot attic with 3 siblings, because the other 5 siblings took up all available rooms.
I’m not saying life shouldn’t improve each generation, but I think people are expecting it to improve way faster than it actually is.
It's the much quoted - boomers pulling up the ladder after them in action. In the oz market new home buyers can't compete with investors that are pushing up prices.
In the areas that rose the most, they dropped 50%.
Based on that article you linked a 50% drop in the hottest markets wouldn’t bring price to income ratios down to 1975 but it would be kinda close.
Especially when you consider house sizes now vs then.
Maybe there’s something unique to the Australian market that justifies 30 years of rising prices with no corrections.
Or maybe you’re overdue for a massive bust.
The problem, it seems, is the stratification of classes expanding.
My uncle worked in the GM plant for many years, owned a nice house and a car and a bass boat and is comfortably retired. His wife never worked. I remember my aunt telling us that we shouldn’t get him books for Christmas presents because he couldn’t read very well.
Now to do this you need both parents working. They both need degrees that need paying off, and they need to live in a major metro area, because they both need to have good paying, specialized jobs. In the old days you might move to some little town so the dad could work at some factory, but now the mom has to also find a job in her specialty, so you need to be in a big city to find jobs for both of them within commuting distance.
In this context, everyone is bombarded with social media telling them that they should have fancy cars and houses and vacation in Bali, and they’re stretched to the breaking point and can’t have any kids.
I remember as a degreed electrical engineer making $35k when the average auto worker was making almost $80k. That's an aberration and could never have continued.
I had a family friend that was a union boss and after high school he got his son into GM. The family friend though wasn't going to get me in.
It was huge money at the time but it is also why GM stopped being competitive. I think the union boss friend retired at 45 or something completely ridiculous.
Of course he also had the nicest sports car, a huge boat, a huge house for the time.
Not sure that is a heightened expectation, you're just out of luck if you don't already have a house. And people in their twenties just have it even worse.
Anyways, I dunno how things work in other nations, and real estate is so different that it can be difficult to compare. For example, there are ways to "rent" a home in Korea for an absolutely massive one-time deposit that you eventually get back. England has 14 trillion box homes slammed together with a quarter inch strip of land in the back yard. Japan has people knocking down their home every single time they buy a new property.
I'm not far out of my 20s, and really, all I did on a SINGLE income was (like I said) scrimp and save. We lived in a cheapo apartment until we could save up for a down payment on a condo. That appreciated (as homes do), and now I have enough for a sizeable down payment on a house.
I also didn't take any special routes of privilege, really. I joined the military as a college dropout, served for 6 years, got experience in a career, then left and got a job in the real world. Much of my saving was done while in the military, because especially when you're new, you pay for nothing. Not food, not housing, not work clothing, not healthcare, etc.
Plus, when compared with median salaries, US housing is shockingly affordable.
But let me talk about my parents. As a baby, my dad lived in a tent. (I believe it was brick walls with a tent roof, but I'm not certain of that.) They moved to an actual house, with an outhouse. (While he was still a child, they got indoor plumbing.)
My parents had their first child when my mom was 30. Before that, they both worked - both of them in tech, too! They rented until they were 39 and 36, when they bought their first house.
We look at the baby boomers and think that where we are now is abnormal. I wonder if instead, where we are now is normal, and the baby boomers were a temporary bit of extraordinarily good times.
And the world churns.
Someone has to be the janitor, the checkout clerk, the garbage collector, the factory worker, etc. etc. etc.
Yes
> for them and give them more respect socially
How? You can't dictate social behavior.
Imagine if we teach from primary school student to clean their own classroom and bathroom so that everyone must do at least once every x days/week, it think it would help reconsider how we view this jobs. This is just an example, but I think there are plenty of ways for a government to incentivize desirable behavior (even social).
The number of college graduates who will willingly work in housekeeping or dusty construction sites even for 100K USD a year will be next to zero.
People will not downgrade their quality of life compared to what they grew up with. And you're lying to yourself if you think a construction site is as comfy as the Meta HQ.
“Whither are the manly vigour and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt…”
Letter in Town and Country magazine republished in Paris Fashion: A Cultural History 1771
Obvious selection bias… me and most of my peers had homes, spouses (though not necessarily married), and decent cars by our late 20s or early 30s (in the early 00s). Various white collar careers outside DC. It often did take two incomes to make it work, where my parents generation was largely single income.
It feels like that’s less common now.
So made or suffered about three “blunders” or catastrophes that’d make life extremely hard now… and his was on easy mode anyway. Five total kids, divorce and tons of expenses, not getting into his career until his 30s, no degree.
We still took a two-week driving or sometimes flying vacation every summer. By the time he was 45 or so our houses were huge and nice. He spent many thousands (when $1,000 was still a lot of money, and not two costco trips…) a year on hobbies.
Retired with more than a million liquid. Despite all that. And a million was still a lot around the year 2000.
It really was different for them. Way, way, way easier.
[edit] oh and my mom quit her federal government job after they got married and never worked a paying job again. That was on one fucking income. A guy with no degree or connections or family money working on the railroad.
The reason I think is we outsourced our manufacturing and society simply needs fewer people to produce the output consumers demand.
Also culturally we have given up on employers investing in people for the long term.
Help is not needed and if it is it is not valued because everything is replaceable and successful career people job hop anyway.
The other things (home, family, decent job) certainly don't seem unreasonable if we weren't living in a late stage capitalism dystopia.
The person in the article is most likely talking about a Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volvo, Acura, or Infinity.
No it isn't, this used to be the norm.
Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one.
Most people say 'have a house' in the sense of having owner's title of one, not of having their mortgage fully paid off. You're being ridiculously pedantic while ignoring the fact that it used to be massively easier for people to get socially established on a median kind of salary.
I still can't afford a luxury car. I guess I could finance one but that seems like a serious waste of money. We've got this funny blind spot around cars in general as a status symbol. You can get a fun to drive, older, sports car. If you do a lot of long trips then a larger vehicle might be more comfortable than a luxury model. Not saying anything against them but don't aspire to owning something unless you actually want to be sitting in it.
I make many times the median income, I’m married to a doctor, I live in a low cost of living area, and I’ve never owned a luxury car, nor do I intend to.
This is really like people looking back on the 2020s and saying "It was normal back that to make $250k out of college."
In 1956 you could build a decent house for the price of a year's income. Not that it was paid off in a year. But now to build a house may be 2-3+ years income depending on the size.
What you call unrealistic by definition is realistically necessary in all but the little luxury car part, and its assumed you don't have a fully paid off mortgage either. The fact that its not should scare everyone because what that means is the resources required to produce children aren't available anymore, and that is just another sequential pipeline failure whose results will become evident with time and hysteresis with no solution due to mathematical chaos (non-determinism).
The primary issue is communication is jammed. AI imposes costs on the job seeker as much as the employer that requires labor to the point where matches aren't happening and the Shannon limit has likely been reached resulting in similar system behavior we typically attribute to the label RNA Interference (in cellular networks), but in communication networks.
If you can't notice there is a problem, how can you ever take any action to fix a problem you can't see. This is really disingenuous of the reality.
Career Development is another pipeline, if the first rung is gone, how do you get reinforcements that are competent? You've got a narrow lag period of time before the only candidates left are burnouts and those aging out, and eventually lost knowledge with no one able to do the job.
Nothing into a pipeline, nothing out.
As an aside, I personally noticed the market pick up hard in the last few weeks. I work in a niche industry, but get ads for software dev jobs regularly and they’ve really surged lately. The past year truly was a difficult time to find a job.
And the running discussion over there is that Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics so they expect all their jobs to be replaced by either AI or Robots in the coming years.
In fact, the parents often actively enable and support this strategy. Unthinkable in the West.
This is nothing like "I sent 300 resumes to every place in the country and can't get a job". Of course, such people do exist, but those are in majors/fields in which it was already near-impossible 10 years ago to get a job in most of the world. If everyone in Denmark would go "Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Carlsberg or bust", you'd see the exact same.
Honestly, your story indicates that your sister-in-law and her friends are likely at least middle class. Those who simply can't afford to sit around for 2 years (lower class) do just get a job straight away.
But really, being deeply ingrained into society and having personally worked at such places here in Korea is worth more than flawed statistics, which really all statistics are when it comes to these topics. I've literally personally interviewed the very few applicants we got as a small company outside of Seoul. They didn't know the difference between a GET and a POST; these were people applying as a backend API developers. We had to train people from absolute zero. And this was at a "modern" workplace ran by young leadership, which should theoretically be much more attractive - one of the, if not the number 1 most commonly named reason for not wanting to work for smaller companies (and even moreso outside of Seoul) is "old(-school) working culture".
https://www.segye.com/newsView/20250327517804
These companies aren't like Silicon Valley startups abusing H1Bs, hiring foreigners because they're cheaper, Koreans genuinely aren't applying.
Go ask her and her friends how many 중소 outside of 수도권 they've applied to. Again, if they've studied something like German language or archaeology then sure, but people aren't getting jobs in those fields in Sweden (to name a completely random high HDI country) either.
I will say, her friend group is my only sample, but my general understanding is that it's even hard to get a job at olive young these days, maybe they're misleading us and are lazy tho, that could be true.
- graduated summa cum laude
- from a top university (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Cornell, Berkeley)
- lives and breathes tech, writes code for fun in his personal time, iron-clad determination to succeed
- has strong personal projects that show off his top-notch technical skills
he should seriously consider doing something else. The tech field is pretty much over for new grads and it's going to get harder and harder.
Most all of my unemployed friends post-graduation, those C’s get degrees kids, those who just couldn’t find an internship, that’s where they ended up, working for Booz Allen Hamilton or CACI or SRC.
Is he going to start working FAANG making $300k? It'd be nice if he does, but it's best to keep expectations in check.
I have about 10 yrs experience, and just conducted my first job hunt in 5 years (I was with one company for a long time, then took a sabbatical for half a year after our dev team was off-shored). I was pretty concerned that it could take 6 months or more to find a gig. But I found myself interviewing with 6 or 7 companies within two weeks, and had 2 offers by the end of week 3 (I'm starting the new gig tomorrow). I consider myself a pretty average full-stack rails/react dev. I don't even bother applying to FANG (or whatever the acronym is now) jobs. So... I don't know if I just got lucky, but the job market felt pretty good when looking for senior roles. My interviews were a mix of referrals from previous coworkers, a couple recruiters reaching out, and (the job I accepted) from reaching out on LinkedIn to hiring managers posting jobs.
It feels like the AI wave is killing junior jobs, but driving demand for experienced developers to harness it, even if just harnessing it as a tool to speed up coding.
I fumbled a bit early in my career and burned some bridges, but luckily, I smartened up after the first 2ish years.
I figured if I have 10+ years of experience and do not have at least 5-10 people I can call up to ask for a job who've worked with me in the past, I've screwed up. Investing in relationships has been the key job security hack for me (also a completely average React dev who happens to know an above-average amount about video and webrtc).
But yeah, tough out there to land your first job right now.
> Investing in relationships has been the key job security hack for me
Connections frequently take precedence over skill! It's hard to determine skill through a piece of paper and some coding exercises under pressure. But a connection give a good signal on that and truth is almost no job requires maximizing skills (exception is at the bleeding edge and even there not always). It's also a signal about soft skills, trusting the connection isn't going to suggest someone that's difficult to work with.
I think it's easy to miss because we're often so data focused and because we want meritocracy. But the truth is you can't measure everything and not everything that's measurable is easy to measure. It takes more work to determine if some junior from a no name school is better than someone from a prestigious school. By connections make that easier to determine just like the prestige of the school serves as a signal, even if noisy. I think it's important to remember how this compounds too. Like your first year undergrad at Stanford is probably at a very similar experience level to a first year at a community college. But that gap widens and the gap isn't only due to coursework and lecturers.
I see people refer to AI as "training wheels" but even training wheels force you to learn balance while riding a bike. They just give you more flexibility in how much you can lean. But AI, it is easy to just accept the answers and treat it like a black box. There is no need to practice the actual skills of a developer: designing algorithms, analyzing, testing (designing tests!), reading code deep with a code base and learning how it connects, interpreting asks and determining appropriate ways to solve those problems (a big part of experience is having fewer unknown unknowns. Known unknowns are incredibly valuable)
While all that is possible with AI, I don't see it happen often in practice due to other pressures. And with AI it seems there's just become increasing pressures to get more done faster. But a junior still needs time to learn. We all do, but juniors need more and have less experience and ability to find this time
About the AI thing, based on my readings, I feel that more and more dev and companies are realizing the true utility value of AI programming tools after the hype, i.e. it's useful but not going to replace programmers completely.
The signal did took sometime to get transmitted to the company's leadership, but a year is enough time for most smart companies to hear it loud and clear.
Last I checked a year has 12 months so that should easily work no?
Checking my local area, you'd be able to afford 0.5% of the current listings with that income. I'm certain that most of those units are low income housing with special application processes and eligibility criteria though.
58 (pay) - 21 (tax) - 13 (rent) -13 (transit) leaves $900/month or $30/day.
Full time grads are around $20k higher….so roughly triple the amount left over.
Or you commute further. I’m mid career and commuted more than hour most of my career because it let me get a better/cheaper apartment while affording a used car.
Most everyone I know, at all skill levels, go hundreds of applications deep before finally landing a real interview let alone a job these days (in far more than just tech, too). Their unemployment runs out and they can't even get in as a bartender or at a gas station. I used to love helping people find jobs they want, my own way of paying it forward from the people who did that for me, now nothing seems to work.
I interview extremely well, until 2022 I typically got the job I wanted on the first try, they used to find me! Now direct referrals to CEOs or founders from investors or employees result in them ghosting. I've also paradoxically been told that I'm overqualified and should be applying for eng lead/principal/cto positions... and that I don't have enough experience to apply for those roles when I do.
I've just been stringing together small bullshit contracts to pay for vices in the meantime, halfway coasting off passive income. Vaguely it feels like something shitty is coming and it's being drawn out in an attempt to lessen the impact but it's being fucked up by everything else. Reminds me of shortly before 2008, when a lot of the people who knew they'd be getting laid off found out.
I really do not think it's offshoring, either. The crews I have contracted work out to in the past (Eastern Europe, South Korea, Japan) are asking me if I've got anything for them, they've never done that before.
The economies of entire developed world have been edging since 2020 and every attempt to release was terminated with another violent punch. One pattern within Europe is noticeable though. Countries one by one are overtaken by mafia with legal immunity, and every cash is allocated into luxury cars and real estate.
Typical startup play but in massive scale. Junior jobs might come back but not in bulk, still selective, very slowly.
techpineapple•6mo ago
AI engineers aren’t in a slump I assume, nurses are classically understaffed right?
fennec-posix•6mo ago
la64710•6mo ago
cherryteastain•6mo ago
It's in a slump if you are a junior. You see these stories about experienced guys getting ridiculous comp packages, but if you are fresh out of undergrad getting especially a researcher position at a top outfit is very difficult.
herval•6mo ago
an0malous•6mo ago
sarchertech•6mo ago