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.
It’s fun but I wouldn’t want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.
I think they’re actually making the opposite claim- American wages are just that fucked, rather than Dickens being wrong
I think who you’re responding to knows that and is saying while doing the math wrong makes their point better it does Dickens wrong.
I think
Unfortunately you aren’t
That was from December of '21. It would be $15.69 now.
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
First it was funny, then sad…
oh no, that em dash…
I use the em dash constantly, and have done for years, so finding out it’s a big “this was written by AI” indicator makes me sad — I’m not an AI user, I just like the way it looks!
Same. I use it very occasionally for parenthetical phrases because I just think it’s the most appealing way to do so.
If it’s any consolation, it’s heavily biased in the training data for a reason, you’re not alone
Two decades of “just learn to code bro”, will do that to a profession.
The industry has brought in a ton of soulless goons and uninterested/stupid workers for a decade and it’s destroyed the industry.
I’m not saying there aren’t good people, but I have interviewed hundreds of people over 10+ years for jobs in tech, and the quality bar dropped a lot.
This started well before AI. I met people from Apple/Amazon/Google/etc. who functionally could not do their job, contributed nothing to projects, and were highly paid. Only a few big companies were the exception.
I’ve met a ton of people with phds and advanced degrees from prestigious schools that were total crap too.
We shovelled so many people into the system because the jobs sounded amazing and they’d pay stupid prices for a degree. We fully industrialized low performance hiring, so yeah, no surprise packages are dropping.
Plus, I used to get time to teach interns and new grads too. The staff we taught grew into way better workers than the job hoppers with 6 jobs at fancy companies over 3 years who had never completed a real project beyond the shiny prototype.
The last 3-4 years I had been constantly threatened about looming layoffs, and that we needed to meet targets at all costs. I’ve been perennially told “if we’re just heads down and all out until [6 months from now/project completion] it’ll all be good again”. Only for the cycle to repeat again and again and again.
The big tech machine destroyed my mental health and I’m out, and I’m much much happier and healthier. I still work in tech, but I’m incredibly selective about the jobs I take, and I’ll never work in corporate tech again.
Biotech is also awful rn
6 figure jobs are still common, but not at the entry level. The companies that used to offer such thing are taking that money and investing in AI, thinking that they won’t need new blood.
They’re wrong, but that’s what’s happening.
This is bang on.
Yup. We pay six figs (not high six figs, but still double the local median wage) for decent talent. We don’t pay top salaries for our area, but we are about median for a comparable role. The problem is people seem to expect the top roles straight out of college, when they’re really junior level, if they’re competent at all.
Do you hire remotely too or only in-office? Even low six figures is high for me and I have 6 YoE. Joy of living in Europe.
Local, but we might consider remote of the right senior candidate comes along. We have 3 remote devs in a team of 20-ish.
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!
Maybe if the field hadn’t pushed everyone else out of business…
Skill issue /s
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
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
i would argue that it’s not so much the rich that are at fault here, but the politicians who are unwilling to implement taxes on the rich.
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.
That’s not how companies work. The CEO has a fiduciary duty to maximize company gains, so they have to invest in AI, because it’s more profitable. They don’t even have a choice, if they want to keep their job.
The current crisis has nothing to do with the individual decisions of a single CEO. It’s a legal issue, i.e. CEOs could only act differently if there was a significant and serious change in the way that the law requires them to operate. Which, all things considered, is unreasonable in this case.
They wouldn’t act differently. Watch 1 hour of CNBC. Those people only technically qualify as human.
Tech is much more than programming / software
What matters isn’t whether you think that AI can replace you. What matters is whether the CEO thinks that AI can replace you.
Its sort of funny that the IT industry is investing their whole effort into a program that will… …destroy the IT industry ?
Tbf, it’s not really the IT grunts pouring their heart and soul into this trend. It’s more the top-level execs seeing more $$ in their pockets at EOQ/EOY bonus time by hiring fewer 6-figure employees and relying more on
AIhallucinogenic LLMs, while the gruntsdabble with itfight with the stupid piece of shit just so they cansay “Yeah sure I used X AI program to help speed this up”appease these idiots who believe it’s their saving grace.Source: Am dev/grunt dealing with said idiots. Opinion likely biased, take with grain of salt.
Does anyone from Europe recognize this? Because it isn’t what I’m seeing.
It took one year to find a replacement for a colleague who left the company. He was a senior in his field.
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.
Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)
No, but yes too.
Of course it is. Your employer will replace you with an immigrant or AI as soon as they can, that’s how capitalism works.
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.
I graduated in 2002, just as the dot com bubble burst. Similar scary headlines abounded then. I’m not employed in it, but I don’t recall the tech sector disappearing and us all going to live in caves. Maybe I missed it?
Same, 2001 comp sci grad, and these are the same things I heard back then, still in tech and honestly theres been many boom and bust cycles I’ve lived through in this industry.
Tech and software aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon but there will be a salary correction just like back then.
I graduated in 2001 in a tech-adjacent field, and my first job was as a security guard making barely over minimum wage. Things get bad. Things get better.
