When I ask my cousins and siblings why they don't want to have the kids the opinions range from too much of a restriction to my freedoms, too expensive, too much work, it'll ruin my body.
These area all valid reasons and in fact it was a tough sell for my wife and I to convince ourselves whether even we should have children. I'm glad I did, but I had no idea how much work it takes and I honestly would not judge anyone who opts-out of having them - but...it does mean we face demographic collapse and free child care is just not enough.
Give young families cheaper homes, cheaper college education and have a cultural shift which values having a child as much as a career if not more so and maybe we'll start to see things change.
It's not just in the hardware sector, it's across the board.
My (American) wife moved to London years ago and was a manager in a prestigious London museum overseeing 60 people.
She has over 20 years experience in some of our top museums and her salary in 2023 was a paltry £30k.
We just moved to the US and within a couple of months she has a job in museums here but now paying 2.3x the salary (converted back to £) and only managing a team of 20 people.
Less stress, more resources for uniforms and initiatives and annual salary increases here way above inflation.
As a Londoner I feel quite aggrieved by the situation. It's one thing to increase your salary 50% as a lot of engineers do moving to the US. But to 230% increase your salary is just nuts.
Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.
The culture sector in London is notoriously badly paid. Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.
Even similar sized public sector organisations (thinking education) pay far better. A senior headteacher with 50 or 100 staff will do a lot better than a cultural manager.
> Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.
Oh so true. Which helps to explain the number of levels of management in UK cultural institutions, because in London there are enough of these people who want a (poorly paid) role that it's better to have 3 layers of management when 1 would do.
The UK pays terribly in a lot of areas when compared to the US, Canada and Australia. In software, the only way to keep up is contracting, preferably in London, preferably in finance.
But my partner also pretty much doubled her pay in retail management when we moved to Australia.
The London financial sector may be losing talent to Europe, but from what I can tell European pay in fintech is not comparable.
Museum jobs are hideously badly paid. In many cases the real work is done for free by "volunteers" (really poor saps on a 2-5 year job interview) before finding out the actual job went to a buddy of the museum director who doesn't even need to show up most of the time.
Software engineers can usually expect to at least 2x their earnings, the median in the uk is £50k and in the US it is £100k, and that is not acounting for the significantly lower tax burden. (That pay excludes medical benefits, if you include the dollar value of that and bonuses and equity the difference rises).
>> Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.
Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.
What do you expect the Lord Mayor to say? "Yes we think Brexit was great and that the government is going a good job." They're a lobby, they want to lobby for more concessions.
Feels the same. Moved to UK a couple of years ago, can’t find a £25k job. Found some outsourced work at American companies and now suddenly I’m going to hit the higher tax bracket
If your wife used to manage 60 people and now manages a third of that, it seems like her talent is being wasted NOW, not when she was in the UK.
I'll add that 70K is nothing to write home about in the US, especially if you're not in a low COL state.
The article is about people not going in the field that they're talented at, because it's low paid. Clearly it doesn't apply to your wife which is talented and went in the low paid field.
As a jaded 40+ year old developer this got me choked up.
I remember that optimistic view we all had of technology in our youth.
For me the optimism was a little earlier than 2012 so maybe it goes hand in hand with being young and less experienced (jaded?).
I agree with some of the other commenters that a corporate structure makes altruistic goals like these impossible.
Only Wikipedia and The Internet Archive for me carry that feeling of goodwill still. I think OpenAI going from non-profit to profit will similarly erode the product as market incentives push it further away from what benefits the user most.
Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit.
Counterpoints are useful to help negate echo chambers where we end up clicking on the articles which validate our world view.
In addition the most upvoted comments (at least on the Financial Times website) are sometimes more informed and nuanced than the articles themselves. The article often gets the debate rolling - come for the articles, stay for the comments (so to speak).
In the comments section of news websites, it wasn't counterpoints. It was just aggression, lies, toxicity, etc.
The Financial Times is pretty rarefied air. Everyone must be subscribed, so no anonymity (I would guesss). How much does a subscription cost? $300+ per year?
Illegal immigration? Yes - they are upset by people whose first act on entering a country is to break the law.
I say that as a legal immigrant to the US whose parents were legal immigrants to the UK. It took me over 18 months to get my green card approved and years for my parents to obtain a British ancestry visa so they could enter and work.
As far as hate towards transgender people, it takes energy to hate. Most people (who don't have trans loved ones) simply don't care and are upset that they are compelled to care.
> It was at this time that my then boyfriend's father heavily questioned if I had the ability to support his son, since I asked him right around the time OG2 was released."
I appreciate women bear the brunt of child rearing but I find this patriarchal attitude a bit of an anachronism too.
Anecdata but our design agency decided to branch out beyond fully local Wordpress sites to something more cutting edge using Prisma + React.
It had a great developer experience but was slow and had poor pagespeed and usability scores compared to the standard Wordpress sites they were providing clients. Their next site was a bog standard all local Wordpress job although they've since moved onto React/Gatsby.
What types of sites are these? I’d say React and co should be kept for webapps, not websites. If it’s just static content or a simple shopping site, Wordpress is going to beat any client-side system hands down
There's a whole ecosystem around using React for static site development now, this is exactly what Gatsby is if I'm not mistaken. Use React as a more powerful templating system for authoring content, but generate most of it out as static HTML/CSS, while still having the capability for individual components to have interactivity / data fetching post load.
Also, I think this is what's going on with NextJS and React's server-side-components stuff. Having solved client-side webapps, the world has now turned to reinventing Cold Fusion...
Recently I've been interviewing and assessing technical tests regularly.
We have this one technical coding challenge. Most of the submissions are 1000+ LOC and quite heavily engineered. One submission though was 300 LOC, runs 3x as quick as everyone elses and is the only one to get 100% in our acceptance tests. The author was very self-deprecating about it - describing it as a quickly cobbled together submission.
I'm nearly 40 and find I over analyze the design of everything. Which is great when I'm architecting a high level software feature, but when I get to coding I'm almost at analysis paralysis over every, damn detail. I miss that sense of flow.
You're correct, Cameron did miscalculate but to blame him entirely forgets the mood of the country and the political parties in 2010. There was a lot of talk about leaving the EU in the run up to the 2010 election from of course the usual suspects like Farage but also from Cable and Clegg (leaders of the lib dems).
According to the source below:
> To the best of our knowledge, the Liberal Democrats were the first of the three major UK parties, including Labour and the Conservatives, to campaign for a referendum on EU membership.
Only party which didn't push for an EU referendum in the 2010 run-up was Labour.
Also 38, also married, also two daughters, also have depression.
I can't tell you what works or not for you but I can say what helped me go from suicidal over a failing business to functional enough to interview at 20+ tech companies and land a job I like.
I firstly spoke with someone. Dealing with depression totally alone is not easy. I don't know your wife (ofc) but if someone married you they (probably?) care enough to hear more than just good news from you. If you really can't afford to share with your wife then damn, that's rough, but do share with someone who knows your situation and can advise your doctor, a therapist, a parent, someone.
Deleting contacts on social is a symptom of depression. I did it and my counsellor raised it. Ask yourself if you'd notice if someone unfriended you first? It's not like FB notifies you. Your friends and family care, they do, but they also have their own lives and also let's be honest, a lot of people hardly check FB in depth these days anyways. No one is going to notice their friend list drop down by 1.
> I eat the cheapest fast food lunch alone
I'm gonna be dictatorial on this one and just say 'stop'. Don't do it. Junk food is a treat, like ice cream. You wouldn't incorporate ice cream as a regular part
of your nutrition.
> then it gets late and I have no more energy to do anything useful
That's true for any parent, especially those dealing with stress and depression. You're not alone on this one. I get done with the day after tucking my kids in and I literally have like 1-2 hours to maybe learn something tech related to advance my career or veg out with my wife and enjoy a TV show. It sucks, but that's life, no parent I've spoken with differs in this regard.
> I have no idea how to spend my free time.
Another symptom of depression. Loss of interest in things we used to enjoy doing or withdrawing from hobbies. So what if you have 1000 games, they're there to give you joy not anxiety. You might have 9000 grains of rice in a 1lb bag in your cupboard but you don't worry about when you'll eat each individual one. Let them be, not playing them is as valid an option as playing them. Probably more so if you're time poor.
> Every time I'm asked to give an estimate for something I feel like I'm pulling a random number out of my ass.
I think software has this problem regardless, some of us are better at estimating some less so. I wouldn't worry about that. Unless you're repeating a development task you've done before many times (write a new rest controller, develop a CRUD web app) it's heard to give an estimate on something you haven't done before.
Pick a language you like and which advances the career you want and just start reading, hacking, messing around with it. Python's a great one for work and play tbh, but the important thing is to start. Most of the great coders I've worked with just get stuck into something new, they don't seem to care too much whether what they're learning will be obsolete or is non-optimal. I myself struggle with this one which is probably why I only know Java :)
When I ask my cousins and siblings why they don't want to have the kids the opinions range from too much of a restriction to my freedoms, too expensive, too much work, it'll ruin my body.
These area all valid reasons and in fact it was a tough sell for my wife and I to convince ourselves whether even we should have children. I'm glad I did, but I had no idea how much work it takes and I honestly would not judge anyone who opts-out of having them - but...it does mean we face demographic collapse and free child care is just not enough.
Give young families cheaper homes, cheaper college education and have a cultural shift which values having a child as much as a career if not more so and maybe we'll start to see things change.