Sure that’s possible for older GenX.
Xennials like myself had barely a few years (in my case months) before the dotcom bubble ruined our one generational leg up.
If I had been smart and dumped IT and went back to school for writing, I’d probably have a house, but stupid autistic me wanted to fucking be a computer person…
Tech pays just fine. Maybe not as much as being a lawyer, but there are people who make £50-100k per year working in tech as programmers, engineers, or professors. That’s a reasonable salary for most of the country. I know there are people in America making way more, though that does have to cover health care.
Not if you were caught in the middle of Florida when IBM and everyone else pulled out from the dotcom crash, flooding the entire state with thousands of career IT people WITH FUCKING IBM ON THEIR RESUMES and you are a naive little autist with literally zero support fresh out of college.
Sure there are parts of the world my experience would have landed me a living wage.
Not in florida in the 90s. I never broke the equivalent of £30k till I crawled out of that humid hellhole.
I never recovered and people never seem to tire of dismissing it all as my fault.
You’re talking about things that happened in the 90s. If you are still struggling now 3 decades later because of that then I have to question if you are the problem. I know people about my age (I was born in 2001) getting mortgages working in tech without even a proper computer science degree, just doing desktop servicing and repair. There have been some rough times recently with people getting fired after the pandemic ended and with the AI boom. However there have also been new opportunities thanks to AI. I am getting funded to do a 3 year PhD with a 19K a year bursary thanks to AI hype. If there is an AI bust that just means more jobs for regular programmers as companies realize that replacing them with LLMs wasn’t a good idea. If not then anyone who can make or work with AI models is quids in.
I have never worked in or been to America so I have no idea what has or hasn’t happened in Florida before I was born, nor do I care. Given that was three decades ago you shouldn’t really care either. If it’s that big of problem can’t you “move state” since America is supposed to be so big and diverse? For me to leave the UK which is much smaller I would need to go through immigration. There are booms and busts in all markets and always will be until we can overthrow capitalism.
I was in the same place experiencing the same thing, hell we probably ended up working together doing trivial jobs surrounded by people grossly overqualified. Things did end up better eventually for me, sorry to hear it didn’t for you. We got the short end of the stick there for sure.
