I’m not sure that works. There were 20 shillings to the pound.
So £0.75 a week.
This inflation calculator:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
£75 in 1843 is equivalent to £8,310.96
So 15s then is equivalent to £83.11 a week, £4321.72 a year.
40 hour week (which is implied to be too low). ~£2.08 an hour
So if he worked over 40 hours you’re talking a sub £2/hour wage. Around $2.70 in US money.
I suspect the stat relies on converting to dollars before applying inflation as GBP to USD was about 1 to 5 then instead of about 1 to 1.33
It’s fun but I wouldn’t want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.
While the idea behind AI was that it would automate manual tasks and help workers focus on more value-added activities, some workers fear it will outright replace them — and that’s already happening
Yeah, it already happened to the journalist that would have written this article. I find it a bit funny that the picture caption is just the prompt they used to generate it
oh no, that em dash…
Maybe if people hadn’t pushed everyone in the entire fucking world into my field we wouldn’t have this problem
Do you mean to tell me it wasn’t a quick get-rich scheme and people who aren’t interested in the field will have issues after doing math puzzles 8 hours a day in front of a monitor before going home to do more on github?
But the rich non-programmer guy told me so!
Yea bro that’s what they do. See you making a living wage, then flood the labor pool. Welcome back to the barrel Mon crab
If your job can be automated. Your job will be automated. Even if the work it produces is hot runny shit.
They would rather pump out pure garbage than pay an honest wage for honest work. It doesn’t even have to work. They’ll just put an arbitration clause in the EULA. Then sit back and count their money.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)
Does anyone from Europe recognize this? Because it isn’t what I’m seeing.
This is because there isn’t a job shortage. It’s offshoring. The company I (thankfully willingly) left 2 years ago has shifted all of their software hiring to Europe. And since I left has had multiple US focused layoffs. All while the Euro listings keep popping up. And I get it, the cost of living is much lower and the skill set is equivalent. So yea, get your bank. But, this is companies exploiting Europe/Asia, rather than it being something Europe/Asia is immune to.
Europe has a much more stable job market, stricter rules for hiring / firing.
Of course it is. Your employer will replace you with an immigrant or AI as soon as they can, that’s how capitalism works.
No, but yes too.
Says / asks an article
in a media spin-off created by a big fintech company, which has been funded by, among others, Peter Thielby a big digital finance publisher / SaaS and advertising company with a history of not disclosing their investors, probably laying off people and heavily investing in AI themselves.Yes, the tech sector is in a harsh condition, but we will go on. Don’t let the AI hype / lay off waves for an overhired tech workforce from covid break your minds. There will be a need for smart people building and maintaining ecosystems, as long as a rising tech oligarchy won’t gatekeep us all out, which should be the headline here.
Edit: I can’t find a link between the fintech wise and the publisher wise. I still don’t like this type of sensationalist headlines as all technology gets allegedly obsoleted every other year.
Hey look, it’s the late 90’ and early 2000’s again.
Same crap that was talked about after the .com bust.
This was the start of my career. Then 2008. Then now. There’s never been a good time.
Ultimately the problem is an over saturated market and universities letting their programs grow too large.
No, the problem is greedy corporations.
There is an active need for many developers, think of every time you’ve used terrible software, every time a program crashed or you found yourself manually doing something and thought “there should be a tool for this”, every bad search and broken social media site.
Hell, we’re supposed to be in the middle of an “AI boom” and someone has to actually implement all those pie in the sky “automate away everyone’s jobs”. While AI can, debatably, write the code for that, it still takes a person to design, architect, implement, test and validate those systems.
No. The entire technical foundation on which “computer science” is built is crumbling due to lack of maintenance and funding and desperately needs people to fix it, however corporations are doing their what they do best; devaluing, destroying, and parasitizing their surroundings.
The ultimate problem is greed and an uncontrolled lust for power.
That depends. Do people still want to use technology? If that’s the case, then 6 figure tech careers aren’t over
The guy says he couldn’t get a job at McDonalds due to lack of exerience.
Thats your problem dude. I can’t imagine a company hiring someone for a six figure job who has zero work exerience.
Get a helpdesk job for little while while you keep applying.
I’m sorry no software engineer right out of college should be getting paid 100k plus. You have <1 yr of professional experience. Okay I’ll give your inter/“extern”-ship and land you a whopping 50k - 60k… it is and was overly inflated wages…
If their work brings in > 100k in revenue then they should.
you’re ignoring the $2,000,000 in training costs from sr devs and mistakes.
if you want to get serious about cost effectiveness, Jr devs should pay to work at a job.
keep in mind, you fuck up a steak at a cooking job you’re out the cost of the meal + time.
you fuck up a DB after a schema change you’re out thousands if not millions of dollars in outages, SLAs, and sales.
still want to use revenue as a compensation performance metric?
To be fair, if a jr dev has enough acesss to screw a prod db from a schena update, then the issue is with the seniors and managers who did not set up the appropriate guard rails to prevent that.
you understand how that proves my point, right?
Idk, I’ve worked with recent grads where their work likely did bring in > $100k in a year. Maybe only took a month to get up to speed. Commits from all devs should be reviewed, and all code should be tested before pushing to prod, so those catastrophic costs should rarely be a problem. We had a good relationship with professors at a local university, and they’d send us their top students. The students would work with us for a while before usually getting picked up by big tech.
Pretty sure my work right out of college brought the company around $300k the first year (wrote the firmware for an electronic control board mostly by myself, which allowed the company to secure a large contract).
you’re almost there…
Cool story grandpa. Or maybe you’re just underpaid? Try adjusting for inflation. $50k doesn’t cut it for starting salaries anymore, and a chocolate bar now costs more than a quarter.
Okay I should’ve added regional based, like major cities should add above, and against inflation. Like obviously after the first year you can make more dependent on ones performance, bonus etc… I’m just saying like you enter with a lesser salary, and get more. Or you just hop around till you get a better salary with more experience
