How are people still using Postman? You can vibecode Postman in like 30 minutes.
Do you even need it at all now? You can just ask the AI to write you a test suite in 5 minutes which calls all your endpoints with all the parameters and assertions you could possibly want. It's way more flexible than Postman and it's just a text file/script; you can share with any team member.
The median is actually surprisingly high. How did someone who is in their early 30s and has been in the workforce for only about 10 years and presumably has university debt, manage to accumulate $68k?
That's $7k per year, which they have to save from the surplus after paying their rents, groceries, healthcare, university debts and everything else.
The median wage for an adult 24-35 who has a college degree is $84k-91k [1] and around 40% of 30 year old have college degrees. If your making 90k you can even save 7k a year in HCOL places like NYC and Boston if you live well below your means. I.e. lots of people would just use that disposable income on traveling/ eating out/ concerts etc but if your a homebody and live with an SO or don't mind commuting and cooking most of your food 90k goes quite far with no kids.
if you grind... live well below... not below, not without extravagancies... well below..., don't travel, don't eat, no avocado toasts, have two works, no wife, no kids... burn the eff out....
THEN it will go quite far
quite far to teach you you have been played out of your youth and now you are poor
I don’t personally live like this to be clear! Just that it’s quite achievable on a normal non tech/ finance W2 salary.
One of the best aspects of “youth” is your health to be fair which can often be enjoyed cheaply - I.e. gyms/ hiking / healthy food doesn’t require a ton of lifestyle creep.
It's not $7k per year, because that's not how investing works. Even given that, for young people who don't have a lot of fixed expenses besides student loans it's not hard at all for people with a professional salary to save that much per year.
The US Census Bureau says 49.2% of adults 30-34 are homeowners in the US, so clearly many people are figuring out how to save and invest.
Based on what? The fact that you live in Brooklyn and know 5 other people who also don't know how to move, and have never even considered that most of the country lives in other places?? These are such absurd takes, I'm not clear how you people come up with them. Turn off TikTok before it does further damage.
That's quite lucky. A lot of people lost money on Bitcoin.
I got pretty lucky with one of the (EdTech) startups I was early employee at giving me shares and it grew from nothing to over 1 million active paid subscriptions. Also, I joined a crypto project which rose to $4 billion valuation (joined at like $300 million valuation) but I was only able to get about $30k out of that in spite of hard hustling and leading one of the most important teams. Literally I put pressure on them to get a raise for 1 year and eventually had to quit to show I was serious.
I self-taught myself coding at 14 and have been working non-stop including nights and weekends and saving everything I could.
My net worth now is only $80k liquid at 36 years old. $130k if you include my illiquid retirement fund. So to me, $70k at 33 on a median income looks incredible. I'm not based in the US though. Maybe it's easier over there.
I found sad, that someone on their early 30, on the pinacle of their capabilities and the pinacle of their "I'll grind until I get <insert capitalism goal here>" and then burnout have "only" $68k to know figure out what to do... in the usa... if you don't have a place to live but you have a car you can still do things, the other way around you can't, 95% of the time you need a car... and if you have a health issue you will start bleeding money really fast... there is no safety net...
And I say only because it's a lot of money, and it's not a lot of money... if you have to pay rent, or mortgage payments, or car payments... car will be reposesed, credit score will go south really fast, and everything is tied to the credit score, so they know how low they can drop the ball and you will still accept because you are in need.
I want you to remember, the american dream... one person working as a mail man can bring food to the table, pay the mortgage while the wife raise the kids and kids go to school, you retire 40 years later with social security giving you enough for the basics...
Then this is for someone with university debt... so this is the case for someone with a title... what's the situation for the other unlucky 95% of america?
The situation is super good, objectively. Much better than most of Western Europe except a few outliers like Switzerland maybe. And infinitely better than Eastern Europe and the even poorer countries. You have no idea how good you have it. Maybe not as good as some fake idealized back in the day, but very good. It's just that reality can't keep up with growing expectations. Okay there was like a brief window after ww2 when the US did exceptionally well because it was shielded from the war by two oceans while the rest of the developed world was in rubbles. But that state of things couldn't last.
I doubt most of Western Europe would agree with you. They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier. They have better social mobility, and less household debt.
I don't think the problem is growing expectations. Being able to own a home and affordably raise a family are extremely old expectations. If anything, people seem to be forced into compromising more and more.
I lived in 3 EU countries (The Netherlands, Germany and Malta) .
> They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier.
On average I would agree. I didn't see extreme poverty like I saw in the US and cost of living is a lot better when you consider that quality of everything is higher; especially in terms of food.
> They have better social mobility,
My experience is that this is not the case. Germany had almost no mobility at all. Even startups are structured in such a way that you can barely even see the CEO, let alone talk to them and society is structured to protect incumbents through regulations and bureaucracy. The only people who get rich in such system (like in Crypto sector) are extremely crony. Feels like they have some really weird agenda. The whole country feels like a giant money laundering scheme.
As for France; the salaries for software engineers were really low last time I checked. Might as well drive an Uber.
If you change the threshold to $4.20 per day or less, US poverty is relatively high by European standards, but not a dramatic outlier (less than 2x that of Sweden). Almost 99% of the US population is still above this threshold.
My theory is that poverty in the US tends to be more urbanized, so people see it more. Wealthy Europeans live in the city center; wealthy Americans tend to move to the suburbs.
Also, a lot of people from Hacker News will visit San Francisco, which is basically considered to be a joke by the rest of the country.
USAFacts says 0.22% of the US population is homeless:
I hypothesize that it matters a lot for visibility where the homeless people are residing.
My opinion as an American is that excessive complaining is one of our country's biggest problems. Generally speaking, things are going fine in this country, except the bit where we're developing AI that's gonna kill everybody.
"Super good" is overstating the situation. The US trails most of Western Europe in average lifespan. Obviously the US is a great place to be rich (maybe the best place in the world?), but most of us aren't rich.
It's true that being very poor or uneducated is harder in the US. If you're an educated professional, the US is way ahead in terms of opportunity, savings etc. over the rest of the world. Yes, you have college debt, but the salaries are much much higher than places like Germany or France, so even with paying that, you're way ahead. How many people move to the US from Europe and how many vice versa? Sure you find the odd example but it's not a real trend.
This is a crazy big number. I think the problem for them now is how people are going to be able to afford to keep buying their products in the age of AI job replacement? They'll have to massively increase their prices and become more of a luxury product and manufacture fewer units with bigger margins.
It's always been easier for Apple to grow down market than it is for its competitors to grow up market. Apple is also quite happy to cannibalize its sales as long as it's the one doing it. See the MacBook Neo as an example.
It wasn't changing sociopolitics that got them laid off though, it was changing technology. And the technology can indeed bite the other way too. Maybe it won't solve deeper issues on its own, but I see no reason to not bite back.
IMO, the real reason they were laid off is because our economic system is broken. It's wealth concentration for those in the center of the scheme and deprivation for those in the periphery.
Rapid technological improvement is just a convenient justification for letting people go. It sounds a lot better than the real explanation "The system is broken and we need to keep optimizing money flows to sustain the scheme to control inflation." The system destroys value faster than technology can create it; which is quite an impressive feat because technology opens up massive capabilities; but look at reality; AI is being massively misallocated. People are just following the incentives.
Mark my words; the business model for AI, if the current trends continue, isn't going to be about "robots making everyone's lives better"; it's going to be about "AI agents which patch vulnerabilities that AI agents themselves created."
This is the reality we're heading into. No amount of amazing technology is going to solve that problem if it follows the incentives and rules of the current economic system.
If the government paid people to dig holes and fill them up again over and over, we'd probably have super-intelligent tractors and excavators by now.
Specifically, they pay for the cronyism aspect of the service. They pay because they're friends with the founder (or the decision-maker expects kickbacks now or in the future or at the very least; they share the same VC and are doing someone a favor), not because they need the features of the software. The features are only there to provide narrative support (I.e. justification for the money being paid). You can see that this is the case when the software gets really bad and there exist free open source solutions, the company has self-hosting capacity, but the company keeps using the expensive, clunky SaaS solution founded by their buddies... Then sometimes they jump ships to their buddy's SaaS company and get a nice fat salary as a reward for having helped to create the parasitic dependency.
The OccupySaaS people are delusional thinking that the system works well enough and is honest enough that a solution exists within the confines of that system. Same delusion the Occupy Wall Street folks had. Didn't work out for David Graeber, did it? The tech sector is fully and thoroughly owned. We're not heading towards feudalism. It's already tech feudalism. The tech landscape has been fully monopolized. You can't do any business in tech without the approval of a tech overlord.
There is 'how the situation looks' and then there is reality which is 100 times worse.
Hmmm, no. I mean, yes that happens, but I'm pretty sure you've also paid for software in which you don't have buddies at that company.
I pay for Fastmail and I don't know anybody there. Same with Microsoft 365. I wish I was friends with the Roshal brothers!
What you mention, is a case of private sector corruption and I've seen it first hand, but I wouldn't say it's normal or even discuss it as regular practice.
In my B2B days I definitely saw deals made among friends like that, but I mostly saw salespeople inviting potential customers to expensive dinners that did not end in a sale. Failed cronyism then?
Yeah well we're just the plebs and we use whatever big tech forces us to use and whatever they allow us to discover through their discovery platforms and recommendation engines. About your Fastmail example specifically; All non-approved email services are blocked; if you try to set up your own service, all your outbound emails on behalf of your customers are marked as spam by big tech. Seriously, try to setup your own SMTP email service.
Every service has a moat; sometimes a technical one (I.e. block competitors as spammers), sometimes the moat is regulations (Are you SOC2 compliant?); other times it's just a business contract between people who belong to the same club.
You are right on all accounts. You might even be right these folks are naive and even delusional. That doesn't make it impossible to turn out great though. Let's wait and see.
Richard Stallman must have looked almost as delusional when he started a free compiler and an OS in the 80s.
Yes you're right. I get triggered by that type of thinking because I've been struggling against the hurdle of attention monopolization for almost a decade. So when I encounter developers who don't even know this barrier exists, it's very frustrating.
Worst part is when they used to leave their cushy big tech job and then the algorithms helped them drive traffic to their new startups. It's like people get a special flag on their projects when they are ex-FAANG which helps them get discovered. I don't know if this still happens now though.
It makes sense to me and I'm saying this as a strong believer in AI and its ability to add value.
The system itself doesn't reward value creation. I've been saying this for years. I've seen many smart people waste their time on bureaucracy; their intelligence was being wasted; so I'm not surprised at all that now that we have AI, that its intelligence is being wasted as well.
The bottleneck is an allocation issue, not a capability issue.
The current reality is that a lot of very bright people are currently working for big tech in bureaucratic roles and not allowed to focus their attention on 'risky' problems which would deliver real value if resolved.
The current system prioritizes monopolization and is designed to try to ensure that all innovation happens within big tech. It is sacrificing potential innovation which could have occurred much faster outside of big tech in order to ensure that any gains are captured by big tech... But it's sacrificing an enormous about of efficiency.
I hope big AI companies can use their political leverage to try to open up opportunities for people who want to innovate outside of big tech. That's aligned with their long term interests.
I think AI companies are convenient structures which could allow big funds to benefit from decentralized innovation. Could create real win-win scenarios. But those AI companies have to stop pursuing the corporate and government money and prioritize small customers and support small tool makers (or at least lobby the government to stop hindering them with regulations). Also, bootstrapping should be prioritized because VC money mostly creates moats.
Reminds me of a comment I wrote a few weeks ago where I said that North Korea would become a rich country soon and developers would start moving there to live to avoid prosecution.
Yes and anyway, open source is immoral now because your free work will be absorbed by corporations using AI and weaponized to suppress fellow independent software developers who have to compete against the AI and the corporate-controlled 'open' project; driving down the value of human labor in the process and further entrenching monopolies.
You're not helping fellow developers by giving them tools to 'make their lives easier' anymore; now you're helping people who don't care about software at all and just want to make a quick buck to monopolize the industry using your free labor.
And anyway, the whole market is monopolized at the attention layer now. The only people whose software is going to make any money are suits with business connections; not independent folks. Literally the people who contributed the least to the open source movement will make the most money.
It is the greatest theft of intellectual labor in the history of mankind. It steals not only from the contributors who are conned into working for free, but from their peers through centralization and deprivation of opportunities.
Where do you see the industry getting monopolized? GitHub is getting overloaded because there are too many new projects. That's the opposite of a monopoly and most of them are from independent developers. No corporate control in sight.
I don't have a problem with me or anyone else giving away our labor for free. It's not like strike breaking in a unionized industry. This is only taking money from companies like Adobe that get their expensive tools replaced, and giving some of it to AI providers.
Do you even need it at all now? You can just ask the AI to write you a test suite in 5 minutes which calls all your endpoints with all the parameters and assertions you could possibly want. It's way more flexible than Postman and it's just a text file/script; you can share with any team member.
reply