Over the last 10-15 years, competition among cash rich FAANG companies soaked up every person who could learn to write a for loop and read an API document and drove (American) software engineer compensation into the range of doctors and lawyers.
That’s not sustainable. There’s not enough useful engineering work to go around, and certainly not for that value. It just happened that money was cheap for a long while and those firms were using some of theirs to make sure nobody else had access to good talent.
Between money getting more expensive and LLM’s readily eating up the “for loops and API docs” class of work, the reckoning seems to be coming.
There will still be plenty of tech industry and software engineering work for talented, interested people and it will still probably pay a decent middle+ class salary. If that suits you, stick with it. That’s what a lot of us have already been a part of for decades. It’s not bad work. We’ll probably be using AI tools as part of it moving forward and working on some pretty cool projects because of that.
But if you struggle with the field and were hoping for an easy $$$$ lifestyle, you might want to look at a different career options. The landscape won’t be like you saw when you were in high school.